By Mónica Cordero and Sky Chadde
“You earn money faster” in the U.S. than in Mexico, the man said in Spanish. But the deductions in every paycheck slowed his earnings, and he and his family needed every dollar. A few weeks working in Iowa corn fields, with a temporary labor visa, helped him cover his expenses back home. Still, “they discount us a lot,” he said.
One was a daily, and vexing, laundry fee. His employer distributed mesh bags for dirty clothes, pledging to clean — for a price — the belongings of the hundreds of visa workers it hired. But “the returned clothes are still dirty,” the man said. He’d handed over muddy pants before. When he got them back, the pair remained stained. Another worker said, despite the laundry promises, his clothes were so rank with sweat and dirty at the end of his time in America he just threw them away. The total fee amount equaled a couple weeks’ worth of groceries for a Mexican family.
The fee could be unlawful. Federal regulations require employers to let workers know of any payroll deductions in writing: “Deductions that are not disclosed in the contract are prohibited,” policy documents on the guest visa program state. But the fee is not included in a worker contract Investigate Midwest obtained. Under charges related to housing, which includes laundry, the contract reads, “no cost to worker.”
The employer, a labor contractor named T. Bell Detasseling, has longstanding business ties with the most dominant player in the U.S. corn industry, Corteva Agriscience. Corteva has said it takes labor abuses in its supply chain seriously. But, since it first hired T. Bell more than a decade ago, the contractor has repeatedly run afoul of federal labor laws. Since 2009, T. Bell has been investigated four times, revealing more than a thousand violations.
The relationship demonstrates how the massively profitable corn industry can rely on unscrupulous middlemen to staff their fields — at the expense of poorly paid workers.
By using labor contractors, Corteva and its industry peers can sidestep the legal obligation to ensure adequate worker wages, experts and advocates said. “The big picture is very few of these workers get paid what they’re owed,” said Greg Schell, a longtime farmworker advocate and attorney based in Florida. “It’s because the big seed companies refuse to take responsibility.”
Corteva declined an interview request and did not respond to detailed questions. In an environmental, social and governance, or ESG, document, which companies use to detail how they manage risks, Corteva said it had “zero tolerance” for human rights violations by its suppliers. It added, “While Corteva has an important role to play in these issues, risks may occur within the supply chain.”
In an email, T. Bell said it was company policy to “not discuss our customer relationships or any past or current investigations.” It originally said its role as a labor contractor could not be adequately captured in a news story.
After some pressing, the company argued it was allowed to charge for laundry “as long as we do not make a profit.” This echoed language a federal investigator told T. Bell’s lawyer following an investigation. The U.S. Department of Labor did not respond to a direct question about whether this is accurate. H-2A employers are allowed to make payroll deductions, if they are disclosed, but generally housing costs, which includes laundry, are supposed to be free to workers. In 2023, the labor department fined a California employer about $18,000 for laundry fees, which the agency termed “illegal deductions by law.”
Investigate Midwest presented T. Bell with redacted copies of the paystubs it obtained and a copy of the worker contract. T. Bell did not deny or challenge the records’ authenticity.
“Seasonal agricultural labor, the H-2A visa program and Department of Labor regulations are complex issues,” T. Bell said in its statement to Investigate Midwest. “We work very hard to make sure we are compliant with all industry guidelines and we always cooperate with any regulators. We take great pride in the work we do and the role we play in the ag economy, which is very important to Iowa.”
This story is based on thousands of pages of federal and state records, internal T. Bell documents and several interviews with two longtime T. Bell employees. Both requested anonymity to protect future employment possibilities. Visa workers who complain about one employer are often blacklisted and not hired or recruited by others.
Corteva is the former agriculture division of DowDuPont. In 2019, the chemical behemoth was divided into three separate companies. Instantly, Corteva controlled about 40% of the corn market, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture research. (Bayer, the German conglomerate, controls about 30%.) As 2023 ended, Corteva reported more than $3 billion in profit.
Corteva operates in several markets, but one of its main businesses is producing genetically modified, commercially successful varieties of corn seed. A staple in American diets and vehicles, corn is used to produce soft drinks, snacks and ethanol. First, though, Corteva needs workers to “detassel,” or remove the flowery tops of cornstalks. This prevents unwanted natural pollination. For the most part, detasseling — a repetitive process in which workers pull the tassel off many stalks of corn in a row — requires human hands. Enter labor contractors.
In a 2022 ESG report, Corteva said it chooses “to work with business partners who share our commitment to the highest ethical standards.” Contractors must comply with all “applicable laws regarding wages and benefits,” according to its Supplier Code of Conduct. If Corteva is made aware of a contractor falling short, the “business relationship will be terminated.” (Labor department investigations are publicly available.)
The corn industry used to rely on local contractors who hired teenagers to detassel. The labor was thought of as a rite of passage. But the industry has largely moved on to contractors like T. Bell that bring foreign workers to the Midwest. To ensure employers are not reflexively hiring visa workers, the federal agency requires employers to pay foreign workers much more than minimum wage. But employers save elsewhere: They don’t pay unemployment, Social Security or Medicare taxes. Visa workers are also often denied the full wages they’re promised, data shows.
T. Bell’s run-ins with the U.S. Department of Labor, which oversees the temporary visa program, involve, among other things, its hiring practices. Since 2005, T. Bell has had the third-most employment law violations among all farm labor contractors, according to federal data.
Most stemmed from a 2009 incident. By law, H-2A workers are guaranteed most of their wages. The labor department determined many T. Bell workers didn’t make the guaranteed amount. An investigator calculated a potential fine at more than $2 million, but, because it was the first offense and no “willful factors” could be substantiated, no fine was assessed.
In 2014, Corteva asked T. Bell to staff its corn fields in Michigan, and, the agency found, the contractor illegally hired foreigners over U.S. workers. T. Bell was not fined. In 2019, T. Bell’s owners used a female visa worker as a nanny for their grandchildren. She was not paid for all hours worked. For that and other violations, T. Bell was fined $4,400.
Despite the violations, Corteva continued to hire T. Bell.
A farmworker walks up the stairs of housing provided by T. Bell Detasseling in Conesville, Iowa in July 2022. The building, which can house hundreds of workers, used to be Conesville's high school in the 1950s. photo by Sky Chadde, Investigate Midwest How the industry pays contractors can affect workers’ wages. Detasseling season lasts about three summer weeks. To control pollination, a field must be more than 99% tassel-free. Contractors are paid a set amount per field but typically don’t receive the actual amount until a company representative signs off. Workers often go through the same field multiple times to meet the industry’s exacting standards. In a 2016 deposition, a Florida-based contractor for Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, said it created a “cash flow problem.”
Passing oversight of workers’ rights, including adequate wages, to smaller contractors with fewer resources is common in supply chains involving raw materials, said Dorothee Baumann-Pauly, a supply chain researcher at the Geneva Center for Business & Human Rights.
“The lead firms need to understand the specific vulnerabilities” of laborers, she said. “They cannot just outsource the responsibility for taking care of that to lower levels in the supply chain, which of course, have slimmer margins and even more price pressure.”
T. Bell’s workers saw little choice but to accept the laundry deductions. They knew, if they complained or didn’t work hard, they would not get invited back to Iowa the next summer. One worker said he’d recommend the visa program and the job to his son, but with a warning.
“You have to work from sunrise to sunset,” he said. "Sometimes the heat is very strong, and, if for whatever reason you can’t stand it anymore, you tell the driver who takes us to work that you can’t stand it anymore. At the moment, it’s like a kind of report against you. If they let you rest, there’s a risk the following year they won’t call you.”
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