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?
There are at least two sides to every contract, that's how contracts work. There are a lot of people lining up to defend the business owner, and I'm not finding a single word from any of the H-2A workers, who are uniquely powerless and in a class who has a well-documented history of being exploited.
Those workers 'quitting' was found to be constructive dismissal. They were coerced into quitting, that's the 'other side.' That meant they surrendered their transportation costs back home (which they would've been entitled to if they were fired), and arguably lost out on other work they could've done.
By contrast the workers themselves signed up for some of the most brutal/specialized farm work (which they may not have understood had they lied and never actually done it before - it's one of the highest paid crops for laborers), zero witnesses to their claims (and in fact they could only get 3 of the 17 workers to even claim that they were fired), and were able to carry out a freeroll for a crop year of salary by saying 'Yeah uh we were fired.' Anonymously. Through a translator. Provided by some NGO. Online. While in Mexico. At home.
In the end if one has to make a probability judgement, this is not even remotely close. And indeed this is why the farmers are cheering having their constitutional right to a fair trial granted - they're going to win this literally 100% of the time to the point that this is practically fit for summary judgement. Again the only thing particularly weird here are the government's actions.
