MINNEAPOLIS (The Minnesota Reformer) – Three South African farm workers have filed a lawsuit against a western Minnesota manure management company Friday, alleging wage theft, substandard living conditions, violations of visa rules and retaliation.
Boehnke Waste Handling of Marietta is a company that pumps, transports and spreads manure from livestock operations to crop fields, where it is used as fertilizer. Since 2021, the company has employed more than a dozen foreign workers through the federal H-2A visa program — a temporary visa for agricultural work that requires employers to offer habitable housing, safe working conditions, travel reimbursement and minimum wage.
The employees worked up to 100 hours per week with no overtime or hazard pay, the workers’ lawyers said.
Manure handling is among the most dangerous farm jobs. Manure lagoons — large pits that store the millions of gallons of waste produced per year on livestock operations — trap gasses toxic enough to kill. Purdue University researchers documented eight deaths related to manure storage and handling in 2022, most of which occurred when a person was repairing manure handling equipment.
The former Boehnke Waste Handling employees say they lived in windowless rooms inside a machine shop, where the smell of manure, exhaust, oil and other chemicals filled the space. They were frequently required to travel offsite, sometimes overnight. The workers were not paid for time spent traveling, and were made to pay for their own motels, according to the complaint.
Other employees lived in houses that had not been certified for occupancy by state regulators, as is required by the federal rules for the visa program.
Chad Boehnke, the company’s owner, did not respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit is another example of the poor working conditions often faced by farm workers. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sued a central Minnesota dairy in January for wage theft, and court documents revealed squalid living conditions. A ProPublica series on working conditions on dairy farms found that the often-undocumented employees face dangerous conditions, substandard housing and a lack of legal protections.
Two of the three employees named in the lawsuit allege Boehnke fired them because they raised concerns about unsafe working and housing conditions, improper pay and other violations of the law.
According to the complaint, regulators have also raised concerns about the facilities and work practices to Boehnke in recent years.
When state officials inspected the rooms inside the workshop, some were not certified for occupancy because of the lack of ventilation — but Boehnke assigned workers to live in those rooms regardless.
Federal labor authorities notified Boehnke’s H-2A agent — a North Carolina company called USA Farm Labor, a middleman between visa workers and employers — that there was a problem with Boehnke’s 2021 visa application. The work described in the job description — including repair and maintenance of machinery — did not qualify as agricultural work.
Boehnke’s agent argued that the machine work would be done “by a farmer on a farm” — therefore, it would qualify as “agricultural work” under the visa laws. The agent’s argument was inaccurate, according to the complaint, because the visa workers were frequently sent off-site to operate and repair heavy machinery, and didn’t engage in any traditional farming activities, like caring for livestock or harvesting crops.
While Boehnke’s pay rates mostly reflected the minimum wage for agricultural visa workers — $15.37 per hour in 2022 and $17.34 in 2023 — the employees were not allowed to clock in while transporting equipment to and from worksites, some of them several hours away. In at least one employee’s case, Boehnke paid less than the 2023 minimum wage.
State law requires agricultural employers to pay 1.5 times the workers’ hourly rate for all hours worked beyond the first 48 in a week, but Boehnke paid two employees the minimum agricultural wage for overtime hours.
Federal records show Boehnke Waste Handling received more than $700,000 in pandemic payroll assistance in 2020 and 2021.
One employee planned to travel home to South Africa to care for a family member in late 2022 after working for Boehnke for around six months. When the employee met with Boehnke to discuss his final paycheck and travel arrangements, Boehnke “coerced [the employee] into signing a termination letter and demanded that [he] immediately vacate his quarters,” the complaint states.
Boehnke withheld the full amount of the worker’s final paycheck in order to pay for the flight, then charged the employee $100 for transportation to the airport, abandoning him there overnight to wait for the flight, the complaint alleges.
Boehnke did not hire back that employee in 2023 as promised, and told other visa employers not to hire him either, according to the complaint.
A second employee presented a written note to Boehnke in February 2023, documenting issues including rodent infestations, lack of heat and chemical fumes in the housing. The worker also complained about the lack of pay for travel time, and the lack of reimbursement for expenses like travel meals and fuel for Boehnke’s vehicles.
Boehnke fired and yelled at the worker, who felt so unsafe that he called local law enforcement, according to the complaint. He stayed in motels until he was able to secure another job — for significantly less money — at a farm in Arkansas.
The workers are represented by attorneys at the Agricultural Worker Project of Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services, a legal aid organization.
Boehnke Waste Handling is currently recruiting 17 visa workers to work “on a farm for a farmer” performing removal, pumping, application and treatment of manure, as well as equipment maintenance and repairs, according to a job description posted on the Department of Labor’s website in January.
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