Blaine Larsen Inc.—one of the largest potato growers in the country—must pay hundreds of farmworkers more than $1.3 million in back wages, after a Department of Labor investigation found it had systematically underpaid employees. It is at least the third time the DOL has investigated the company for labor violations in as many years.
“These actions will not be tolerated, and the agency will use all available tools to hold the employer accountable,” said Jessica Looman, DOL’s acting wage and hour administrator, in a press release.
Blaine Larsen owns potato farms throughout the West, and the investigation centered on one of its operations in the Texas panhandle. Investigators found that Larsen Farms failed to pay its warehouse workers time-and-a-half when they worked more than 40 hours a week. Nearly 500 workers were affected, including many on H-2A visas. According to investigators, the farm also issued H-2A workers incomplete pay statements and allowed drivers without the proper license to transport them to work. Perhaps most significantly, the Department of Labor also found that Larsen had failed to properly report an outbreak of Covid-19 on the farm.
Investigators determined that Larsen Farms had violated the Fair Labor Standards Act, H-2A provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s temporary labor camp standard. The agency recovered $1,345,960 in unpaid wages for warehouse workers and fined the parent company $10,000.
This is not the first time Larsen Farms has been accused of labor abuses. In 2020, the farm was the focus of a racketeering and fraud investigation, which the Department of Labor conducted in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security. In a criminal complaint filed by the DOL Inspector General’s Office of Labor Racketeering and Fraud Investigations, officials accused a farm manager of forcing H-2A workers from Mexico to pay as much as $1,500 each to get work visas.
The same year, a Texas Observer investigation, produced in partnership with FERN, found that Marco Antonio Galvan Gomez, an H-2A worker at Larsen Farms, was pressured to keep working in 101-degree heat while he was sick with Covid-19. When he asked for permission to return home, his supervisor allegedly told him that “no one had permission to leave.” Galvan was not taken to the hospital when he became severely short of breath and died on July 20, 2020.
OSHA launched an investigation into Galvan’s death, but only after it was contacted by a reporter from the Observer. According to the Department of Labor’s recent press release, OSHA investigated two additional Texas farms operated by Blaine Larsen Inc. in 2020 after two farmworkers died of Covid-19, and federal workplace safety requirements were allegedly ignored.