More than 1,600 foreign-born sheepherders in the western U.S. are finally getting a pay raise, says High Country News. Brought to the U.S. under the H-2A visa program, the workers are allowed in the country for three years at a time. Until recently, they only made $750 a month—just $100 more than they earned in 1965 under the H-2A program. But after a lawsuit late last year by activists in Colorado and Utah, the Department of Labor upped their wages to $1,200 per month, with a promise of reaching $1,500 by 2018.
The government started the H-2A program in 1952, when ranchers and farmers suddenly found it hard to attract American labor after World War II. Sheep and goat herders, though, never enjoyed the same protections as workers in other agriculture sectors, like an hourly wage or guaranteed access to a toilet and running water. Even though sheepherders only tend their animals a couple times a day, they’re technically on call round-the-clock and usually live alone, far from town, in order to keep an eye on the herd. But ranchers argue that paying for all that down time would mean tripling wages, which they can’t afford.
Some activists say the new pay continues to sell sheepherders short, since they will still be making $3-an-hour less than the average H-2A worker and won’t have overtime or benefits. The original lawsuit called for increasing their pay to $2,400 a month, but ranchers said that kind of hike would force them to stop hiring H-2A workers altogether.