The article uncritically printed this claim, however we have no reporting from the workers. For all we know they got off easy with the level of fines they received. The article is a press release.
So your entire criticism comes down to you thinking the article is simply lying about that and presumably everything. And what reason do you have to believe this? And would you make such claims if it were an article that confirmed your biases?
I didn’t say the article was lying, I said it uncritically reported only one side of the story.
This is an agribusiness news site. Do you think that they’re out here looking for an honest to god scoop about labor abuses? Do you think that if they found them, they’d make a front page story about it?
You're assuming there is another side, which there seems to be no reason whatsoever to assume. The facts, outside of the government's behavior, are extremely benign and supported by decades of precedent by the exact same people doing the exact same stuff in the exact same way. I'm certain the guys who quit, or even if they were fired, on the first day didn't expect to get a crop year's salary out of it. This makes the government's behavior all the more absurd. Yet the government's behavior is not in question, only the constitutionality of it. And indeed it turns out that it was unconstitutional.
