The 13 Black farm workers who sued two Delta Farms — accusing the farm operators of racists hiring practices and paying white visa workers from South Africa more per hour — have reached a settlement outside of court, their attorneys announced this week.
The terms of the agreement forbid the parties from disclosing the settlements’ dollar amounts.
“But it was a significant amount of money,” said Mississippi Center for Justice Attorney Rob McDuff, who represented the workers. “I think the settlements demonstrate it’s far better for these companies and these farms to pay people properly than to ignore the law.”
Both Sunflower County farms — Pitts Farms and Harris Russell Farms — were featured in a Mississippi Today investigation that found a pattern of misuse of the H-2A visa program in the Delta.
Pitts, a soybean, corn, and cotton farm, and Harris Russell, a catfish farm, brought in white South Africans through the visa program, which is intended to only be used when farms cannot find enough local workers.
The program requires farm owners to pay both local workers and foreign workers the same wage, but years of paystubs obtained by Mississippi Today showed Black workers made mostly the federal minimum wage of $7.25 while getting fewer and fewer hours each season. The H-2A workers took home upwards of $11 an hour.
Eventually, the local workers said they were told they no longer had jobs, according to the lawsuits and...
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