Last year, after Hispanic farm workers fled the state because of a far-reaching anti-immigrant bill the Georgia legislature passed, Gov. Nathan Deal (R) suggested replacing them with inmates. The plan only had mixed success, with many inmates walking off the job early, and farmers still lost millions because of crops that rotted in the field before they could be harvested.

Ahead of this year’s Vidalia onion harvest, farmers are still seeing a shortage of workers a year later because of Georgia’s immigration law, so state officials are again sending inmates to help farmers despite the failure of last year’s plan:

The Corrections department has sent ten transitional inmates from Smith State Prison to work in a packing and grading facility run by an onion grower in Glennville, which is near Vidalia. Transitional inmates are in the process of completing their prison sentences.

Grower Wayne Durrance says he’s used transitional inmates, and says it’s been a success so far. Durrance says they’re motivated and work hard.

At best, however, this is a patch over a larger problem created by Georgia’s immigration law. State lawmakers approved a harmful immigration law that drove workers out of the state without having a plan in place to replace them. Now, as farmers report difficulties bringing in Hispanic workers through the guest worker visa program and other problems retaining workers, farmers are again on track to lose millions in unharvested crops because of the lawmakers’ failed policy.

As soon as Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) signed a harmful immigration bill into law last year, farmers saw an immediate exodus of thousands of skilled immigrant farm workers. Without enough workers, millions of dollars in crops rotted in the fields because there was no one to harvest them. Officials suggested that farmers could turn to the H2A guest worker program to hire temporary pickers, but that has not worked out for many farmers.

Now, as Vidalia onion farmers begin to harvest their crops, they face the same concerns again this year about not having enough workers to harvest their crops:

For years, Stanley had depended on mostly Hispanic migrant workers to harvest onions. Last year, Stanley says, many of those workers left Georgia following the state’s passage of a tough new immigration law. This is the first harvest since that law took effect.

This year, Stanley and other onion farmers began using a federal guest worker program called H2A. It basically imports workers from countries like Mexico, and then sends them back when the work is finished.

“I had ordered 60 people (via H2A) with the paperwork and everything,” Stanley said. But he said the government botched that request.

“And now I’ve only got 17 people when I’m supposed to have 60. The excuse they gave me was, they lost my paperwork,” Stanley said.

Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black (R) suggested the H2A program last year could be a way to replace lost workers, but told a congressional subcommittee that improving the program to reduce the red tape would help farmers. And the Georgia Senate unanimously passed a resolution asking Congress to expand the guest worker program so that farmers could hire more workers.

Reforming the guest worker program would not be an immediate panacea for the nation’s broken immigration system, but it could help offer farmers a stable, legal workforce while protecting these foreign workers from exploitation.

But if Deal and Georgia Republicans had stopped to consider how the state’s anti-immigrant law would affect workers and employers before they approved it, then the state could have avoided more than $800 million in estimated farm losses last year. So far, it looks as if Georgia’s farmers could lose just as much this year.

Our guest blogger is Sarah Bufkin, a former ThinkProgress intern.

Ignoring the vocal opposition of activists and labor organizers, the state senate passed an anti-protest, anti-union bill on March 7. If passed into law, the proposed measure would both make it more difficult for unions to collect dues and set exorbitant fines against many union protests against anti-worker businesses: up to $1,000 per day for those individuals charged with illegal picketing and up to $10,000 to those organizations involved with the illegal protesting.

Senate Bill 469—which GOP senators pushed onto the House’s agenda with a 34-18 vote—is sponsored by four senators who are also members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate front group that pushes “model” legislation to state lawmakers intended to push a right-wing agenda in the states. Although it’s not clear whether SB 469 is such a bill, there are reasons to fear that similar bills could make their way to other states through ALEC’s network of corporate-friendly lawmakers.

The four ALEC members behind SB 469 include Sen. Bill Cowsert (R), who works with ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force, and Sen. Bill Hamrick (R), who received campaign contributions from the ALEC during the 2010 election cycle even though he ran unopposed. Significantly, there are also striking similarities between sections of SB 469 and ALEC’s model Right to Work Act:

• SB 469: Section III of SB 469 states, “No employer shall deduct from the wages or other earnings of any employee any fee, assessment, or other sum of money whatsoever to be held for or to be paid over to a labor organization except on annual written authorization from the employee which shall not exceed a period greater than one year. Such authorization may be revoked at any time at the request of the employee.”
• ALEC: ALEC’s Right to Work model bill states, “It shall be unlawful to deduct from the wages, earnings, or compensation of an employee any union dues, fees, assessments, or other charges to be held for, transferred to, or paid over to a labor organization, unless the employee has first presented, and the employer has received, a signed written authorization of such deductions, which authorization may be revoked by the employee at any time by giving written notice.”

Although such a requirement may not seem particularly important, it moves more of the onus of dues collecting onto labor unions, thereby diverting more of their resources and time from pushing for greater benefits for their members.

Furthermore, the GA bill includes a section that threatens to charge protestors not only with criminal trespassing but also with conspiracy to commit criminal trespass—a highly irregular revision of the law that would label the conspiracy charge as a “misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature” and bring harsher legal penalties for those convicted.

The addition of the conspiracy to commit criminal trespass charge follows only eight days after 12 Occupy Atlanta supporters were arrested for criminal trespass after protesting outside AT&T’s Atlanta offices. Given that AT&T is currently one of the 23 corporations serving on ALEC’s Board of Directors, some speculate the timing is no coincidence.

But regardless of where the bill originated, the proposed legislation poses a grave threat to any activists looking to change the status quo through civil disobedience. As Martin Luther King III told a crowd at a March 1 rally, the fines and penalties proposed in SB 469 would have stymied the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We can only hope that the Georgia House of Representatives will listen to its constituents instead of its corporate backers when deliberating this piece of legislation in the weeks to come.