A Florida farm labor company owed $45,000 in pay. It’s banned from the H-2A visa program

Violations of pay and housing led to a Labelle company and the two men who run it being debarred from participating in the H-2A visa program for two years, the U.S. Department of Labor announced.

Flo-Ag and company principals Juan Flores and Jose Flores also got hit with a $17,939 civil penalty for their H-2A violations. The H-2A program allows companies to use non-immigrant foreign workers for temporary or seasonal jobs after failed in attempts to find U.S. workers for those jobs.

According to state records, Flo-Ag officially doesn’t exist in Florida after undergoing voluntary dissolution on June 25.

Flo-Ag provided H-2A workers for harvesting blueberries, watermelons, bell peppers and cucumbers at farms in Rochelle, Georgia and Trenton, Florida. But Labor said it’s what Flo-Ag didn’t provide that ran the program afoul of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division investigators.

▪ Not only did Wage and Hour find the Flores’ and Flo-Ag paid U.S. workers less than the H-2A workers doing the same work, but investigators found Flo-Ag sometimes paid the U.S. workers in cash and without a pay stub. They wound up owing $45,212 in back pay to 113 employees, $400.10 per person.

▪ U.S. workers didn’t get free housing, meals or kitchen facilities, Labor said, but guest workers did.

As for the guest worker lodgings, Labor said Flo-Ag “violated safety and health standards in the housing it provided to guest workers, and failed to reimburse them for expenses they incurred traveling to the facility from their home countries, as the law requires.”

Employers that find they’ve committed overtime or minimum wage violations can self-report through the Payroll Audit Independent Determination (PAID) program.

For online information on how to file a complaint, go to the Wage and Hour complaint section of the Department of Labor website. Miami’s Wage and Hour Division office can be reached at 305-598-6607.

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