Chapter 10. The NC Growers Association
All about the nation’s largest H-2A employer
One day while chatting with workers at their camp, one of them left the room and returned with a stack of papers. It was his tax return from the previous year. I soon learned each guy there had paid $100, or nearly a day’s pay, to a tax preparer in a nearby town. The worker whose tax return was spread in front of me asked: Did I know anyone who might do their taxes for less? I said I’d look into it.
Realizing these guys worked for a member of the North Carolina Growers Association, I figured someone there might help. I shot off an email. The next day, Jay Hill, executive director of the NCGA, replied personally. After noting the NCGA does not specialize in taxes, Jay summarized what he knew and sent me some helpful links. I followed these to learn some basics: H-2A workers are exempt from income tax withholding, but they do need to file an annual return and could ultimately owe taxes due to their individual situations. That’s rarely the case, I would eventually gather, but they are required to file. They are exempt from Social Security and Medicare taxes. I shared all this with the workers who had asked me about taxes. I also gave them some leads to potential lower-cost or even free ways of filing their taxes.
That satisfied my curiosity about H-2A farmworkers and taxes, but not about the NCGA. Fortunately, Jay was happy to continue our email exchange, answering more questions and ultimately inviting me to see their operations center for myself, and to meet him and NCGA deputy director Lee Wicker. On a hot Friday morning in June, I met with both at their operations center in Vass. Buses had just rolled in following a thirty-hour ride from Monterrey, each carrying men who would work in fields across the state this year. I scribbled notes as Lee and Jay answered my questions about how this all works.
Located in the small town of Vass, a short ride to world-famous golf courses in nearby Pinehurst, the NCGA is not unlike a temporary staffing agency—think Kelly Services or Robert Half for administrative workers—with some important differences. It places only H-2A farmworkers for North Carolina growers; it acts as a joint employer with its clients; virtually all the workers it places are citizens of Mexico authorized to work in the United States in accordance with the H-2A visa program; and over 90 percent of these return to the same growers year after year.
The NCGA has been doing all this since 1990 when it placed four hundred workers, mostly at tobacco farms. Now, it routinely places nearly ten thousand workers each year at farms of all kinds across the state. Their intricate logistical operation, honed over the years, is impressive.
Preparation for a growing season begins the winter before. That’s when the association mails nearly a thousand stacks of papers, each about half an inch thick, to each of their member growers. The packets include all the latest information growers need to know about the H-2A program and an application for next year’s season. This will tell the NCGA how many workers a grower needs and when. Growers pay $200 each year to belong to the NCGA and $925 per worker. Much of that goes to the workers themselves, reimbursing them for their personal travel and visa expenses as required by law. The rest pays for the recruiting, charter buses, and other overhead expenses to make this operation happen.
As applications come in, the NCGA gets to work, aggregating requirements into consolidated job orders they submit to the US Department of Labor. If ten growers all need workers from mid-June through early November, for example, those might be grouped into one job order. This pooling is one of the keys things the NCGA does. It greatly reduces the number of job orders the DOL would otherwise have to process, and also permits growers to share workers, as the NCGA can move workers from one farm to another as needs change due to fluctuating conditions inevitable in agriculture.
Growers also provide the NCGA with a Preferred Worker List each year, indicating which individual workers they hope to see back. The NCGA includes this in their annual request to CSI Visa Processing, the recruitment firm NCGA pays to sign up workers. (In accordance with US law, the workers themselves pay no fee for the opportunity to fill an NCGA H-2A contract.) The NCGA also makes arrangements with charter bus companies for hundreds of trips each year between Monterrey, where the largest US Consulate is located in Mexico, and the NCGA orientation center in Vass. The association doesn’t get involved in payroll or housing—those remain the responsibility of the grower—but it does assist growers with regulatory compliance by reminding them to do things such as arrange their annual housing inspection with the Agricultural Safety and Health bureau at the state Department of Labor.
Buses pull into the NCGA operations center weekly, typically on Fridays starting in February and extending into October. After worker orientation and issuance of travel expense reimbursements, a chartered bus takes workers from Vass to a regional pickup site where their grower is waiting. As work finishes at the end of a season, the NCGA does much of the same process in reverse, sending home those workers who choose to take an NCGA bus back to Mexico. Some workers choose to make their own travel arrangements home.
All of that is just the routine stuff. During a growing season, the NCGA might deal with any number of labor management issues. The most common of these is when a grower doesn’t have enough work to keep everyone busy because of adverse weather or other factors out of their control. H-2A rules require that a grower guarantee a minimum of 75 percent of the job period specified on the job order, but in agriculture, there are inevitable slow time. Workers frequently call to inquire about the availability of work on other NCGA farms. The NCGA can’t honor every such request, but it does what it can. It also makes a point during orientation of informing workers of this possibility, encouraging them to not send all their earnings back home, keeping some on hand to cover such slow periods.
The NCGA gets other requests too. A worker may not be getting along with his coworkers; maybe he drinks more than the others or stays up too late. Can the NCGA swap him with another worker, and send him to a camp where he might fit in better? Perhaps the US Department of Labor is auditing a grower’s compliance with regulations. Can the NCGA help? NCGA workers are entitled to benefits of the FLOC, a union that represents them, so some phone calls or emails to Vass come from FLOC, asking a question or reporting a grievance on behalf of a worker. One might challenge a travel reimbursement or complain about a missing W-2, disputing how much they are paid, and so on.
Inevitably, some H-2A farmworkers are injured at work or fall ill while they are here. Some die. The NCGA is involved with nearly every health-related case involving one of their workers: providing emergency medical reimbursements from a benevolent fund, directing growers and workers to hospitals, and occasionally making arrangements to send a deceased worker’s remains back home. From 2020 through 2022, twelve NCGA workers died. Around half were due to Covid, the other half to illness and injury.
The matter of H-2A farmworker health was all-consuming during the pandemic, starting with the 2020 growing season. Farmers here can’t grow labor-intensive crops without H-2A farmworkers, so the NCGA was under intense pressure to do whatever they could to help both growers and workers. The timing could not have been worse. Workers were scheduled to arrive just as lockdowns were going into effect across the country.
Partnering with the NC Farmworker Health Program, a division of the state’s Office of Rural Health, and other organizations, the NCGA made swift changes to its orientation procedure such as scheduling only two buses to arrive at a time and unloading only one of those at a time. It also made arrangements with vaccine and testing providers once those were available—all to keep farmers farming and workers working.
Jay Hill grew up on a North Carolina farm—his father grew tobacco and sweet potatoes. Early in his career, Jay worked at Cates & Sons, a pickle producer in Faison, North Carolina, where he got his start in farm labor procurement. Dean Foods bought Cates in 1989. He also worked in the rural manpower division of the North Carolina Employment Security Commission, then for the Carolina Employment Association, which merged into the NCGA in 1993.
Lee Wicker was born in 1971 in Sanford, North Carolina. His mom was a librarian. His dad worked his way through college and graduate school, earning a master’s degree in social work at UNC Chapel Hill before serving three years in the army and, ultimately, becoming regional director for the State Commission of the Blind. Lee would get his own college degree in political science, also at UNC Chapel Hill.[1]
Taking notes isn’t easy when Lee is talking about his work. A sentence might start at one topic before leaping to another and might visit even another and another after that before coming back to the first one. He’s as sharp as a tack, and I imagine he has considered everything there is to consider when it comes to H-2A farmworkers in the state.
I asked Lee about the concern that workers might let their H-2A visas expire and remain in the United States without work authorization, something the association would not notice as workers are not required to take an NCGA bus back home. Do some H-2A farmworkers overstay their visas to enter the United States without authorization?
“There can’t be too many,” Lee assured me, referring to workers who finish their H-2A work. “We see nearly every one of them step off our bus here the next spring.”
Lee speaks with equal compassion about the North Carolina growers who desperately need workers and the Mexican workers who desperately need jobs. During our first meeting, he jabbed a finger toward the receiving area where new arrivals were at that moment signing contracts and lining up for reimbursement checks.
“These guys leave their families for the better part of a year,” he said, stressing the last word to be sure I got the point, “just to provide for those families.”
Lee clearly loves his job. He speaks of it as a privilege, something he’s especially grateful for, because in 2015, he came close to losing it.
“You know I’ve been to prison, right?” he asked.
I had not. I did know the NCGA had faced some serious legal issues in its early days but had either missed or forgotten Lee’s role. His frank comment sent me back to look at court documents and published accounts of that era in NCGA history.
According to a 2015 article on BuzzFeed News, Craig Stanford Eury Jr., whom people call Stan, founded the NCGA in 1989. This was not long after being arrested for growing marijuana and losing his job as a rural manpower representative at the state Employment Security Commission. Two of his colleagues there, Lee Wicker and Mike Bell, would leave their jobs to join him. Mr. Eury’s longtime friend Ken White would round out the early leadership of the NCGA. The 1990s were growth years for the association. Growers needed workers, and the NCGA could navigate the thicket of government regulations for securing them through the H-2A visa program.
One of the key steps in the H-2A process is the recruitment of individual workers to fill jobs authorized under the H-2A program. In the early 2000s, the Mexican company CSI recruited such workers. According to court documents:
[1] Lee’s alma mater came as no surprise to me, based on the Carolina athletic gear he wore during our first meeting. And the second. And the third.
Prior to January 2009, Consular Solutions, Inc., (“CSI”) a worker processing company in Mexico controlled by Eury, Kenneth White and Harry Lee Wicker, and acting at their direction, required foreign workers to pay a fee as a condition of their offer of H-2A and H-2B employment in the United States. A large portion of this fee was then transferred by CSI to accounts in the United States controlled by Eury, Wicker, and White for their personal use and benefit.
In 2009, the US Department of Labor made it illegal to ask workers to pay a recruiting fee for an H-2A job. Again, from court documents:
To avoid losing their per-worker fee due to the promulgation of new regulations barring the charging of worker fees as a condition of H-2A and H-2B employment, Eury, Wicker and White formed a corporation known as Application Services and Administrative Programs, LLC (“ASAP”) to collect a fee from the employer clients of ILMC and a second immigration company controlled by Eury, Wicker and White known as The Labor Company (“TLC”). Eury, Wicker and White caused employer clients to be informed that the fee was for recruiting services in Mexico. In fact, the $99.00 fee charged by ASAP included a mark-up for the benefit of Eury, Wicker and White.
According to the indictment, this funneling of a per-worker fee constituted an illegal kickback scheme. For this and other offenses for which he was indicted, Stan Eury would ultimately plead guilty to two of sixty-seven charges, forfeit $615,000, and be sentenced to spend thirteen months in federal prison. He is no longer an employee of the NCGA. Mr. Eury would also give up his ownership interest in CSI, which continues to recruit H-2A farmworkers to this day.
Lee Wicker was indicted for his alleged role in the kickback scheme in September 2014 and pleaded guilty in April 2015. He forfeited $200,000, paid a $20,000 penalty, and spent two months in prison, reporting to the Federal Correctional Institute in Williamsburg, South Carolina, one week before Christmas. He was released in mid-February 2016.
“I am embarrassed and ashamed,” Lee told me. “What I did was wrong. I own it.”
He went on to share one of his biggest fears during the ordeal, that he would not be able to continue his work at the NCGA. He was deeply grateful the sentencing judge did not disbar him from this work. Lee may not be so fortunate on another front. He lamented he won’t likely have another opportunity to formally testify on behalf of farmers in front of Congress, as he’s done in the past, which would be too bad for farmers. The NCGA is more than a staffing agency. They are a trade association, seeing themselves as advocates for farmers, workers, families, and indeed the American consumer.
“We can’t undo the history,” Lee told me, sounding exhausted after recounting for me all that had happened. “But the NCGA is a different place now.”