In recent years, the agriculture, meat, poultry, dairy, and fish processing industries have sounded alarms over labor shortages—echoing regimes of scapegoating that deny the persistent reliance on migrant labor. On factory floors and in the slaughterhouses alike, processing line speeds have raced ahead, outpacing humanity. Amid these shifts, some politicians and industry lobbyists call for replacing migrant labor with native-born workers as a form of patriotic resilience. But this rhetoric masks the structural dependencies on migrants and the economic precarity of frontline workers. When migrant paths close or are criminalized, frontline processing jobs—wage‑hungry, highly mechanized, physically punishing—don’t vanish. Instead, they are absorbed unevenly by native labor or abandoned, disrupting supply chains and worsening working conditions.

A chilling historical parallel arises from the forgotten “A‑Team” of 1965. Following the end of the Bracero Program in 1964—a guest‑worker initiative that had imported hundreds of thousands of Mexican harvesters—U.S. Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz launched an emergency program aimed at recruiting high school students to labor in the fields. His rationale: a patriotic, domestically‑mobilized high school workforce could patch over the yawning gap left behind. But this top‑down experiment ignored the economic and social foundations of actual migrant labor. When thousands of 17‑year‑olds were hired to haul produce in Texas and California, the pushback was swift and predictable. Half‑hearted incentives, poor housing, heat‑drained conditions—these teenage volunteers quickly bolted, some striking before quitting altogether. By summer’s end, the “A‑Team” fizzled: the fields lay unpicked, and the program terminated.

Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California’s Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. “We worked three days and all of us are broke,” the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

In many ways, the failure of the A‑Team speaks volumes about the current attempts to erase migrant labor from ag encampments and processing lines. Migrants, often from Mexico and Central America, undertake backbreaking harvest work under oppressive timelines, while processing-plant laborers—many women and people of color—face high‑speed slaughter lines with brutal quotas. Both labor groups are de‑skilled, exploited, and criminalized. Native-born workers, whether high‑schoolers in 1965 or today’s unemployed, cannot be slotted in seamlessly. The structural conditions remain unchanged: global food firms pushing volume over workers’ rights—and all the while scapegoating “foreign” labor instead of fixing wages, issuing visas or investing in humane technology.

In a recent cascade of political spectacle masquerading as policy, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins—a former Trump advisor and former CEO of the America First Policy Institute—made a disturbing proposal that Medicaid recipients be required to work in America’s agricultural fields as a condition of receiving benefits. Rollins, without irony, advanced this position as a pragmatic solution to the so-called migrant labor crisis, suggesting that low-income Americans be conscripted into labor traditionally performed by exploited undocumented workers. Her comments, which received little mainstream scrutiny, have sent shockwaves through the underbelly of the mortgage field services industry, where similar logics of coerced labor, economic desperation, and dehumanization already dominate. What Rollins proposes is not policy innovation—it is neo-feudalism in real time, a rebranding of modern-day slavery under the banner of “self-reliance.”

To understand the full depravity of Rollins’ proposal, one must place it within the broader American tradition of weaponizing poverty. Historically, the Southern plantation economy was built on the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans. Post-emancipation, that labor was repackaged through sharecropping and later chain gangs. In each case, the state or powerful private entities criminalized poverty and then “solved” it through forced labor. Rollins’ rhetoric resurrects that lineage with chilling precision: if you’re poor, your existence is conditional upon laboring in the hot sun for agribusiness conglomerates. The only update is that she swaps the whip for bureaucratic compulsion—lose your Medicaid, lose your medicine, or pick lettuce until you pass out.

We see this pattern replay in poultry and meatpacking plants. Following the pandemic, the USDA and industry groups floated incentives to attract non‑migrant workers into line jobs that pay low wages but demand fast, dangerous work. The result? Plants groaned under mass resignations; lines slowed; products rotted. Some rural towns promoted meat‑processing jobs as heroic “Made in America” opportunities, yet failed to address transportation barriers, healthcare deserts, and language isolation that migrant labor had long bridged. The 1965 A‑Team taught a lesson then—and it reverberates now: labor must be enticed, organized, respected. Without addressing root wages, housing, and rights, sacrifices will fall on those with the least bargaining power.

Legally, efforts to dismantle migrant labor risk constitutional and treaty entanglements. The Bracero Program ended amid revelations of wage theft, discrimination, and flagrant rights violations. Critics like Cesar Chavez condemned it for undercutting U.S. farmworkers and legitimizing exploitation. The A‑Team, unregulated and ad hoc, was a blunt substitute for nuanced migrant labor agreements. Today, proposals to curtail H‑2A, H‑2B, or undocumented pathways steer us into legal incoherence: processing plants lose workers, federal subsidies vanish, lawsuits mount. Meanwhile, unscrupulous employers pivot into jaw‑dropping work‑arounds: off‑the‑book labor, shelters with no ventilation, child labor loopholes, mass fines, and prosecutions.

While Secretary Rollins is gung ho about removing all traces of foreign based agribusiness labor, her refusal to charge and convict the owners of the very businesses that hire the migrant labor is non-existent. Clear the rapist of all charges while convicting the victim is how some folks are framing it.

Economically, removing migrant labor isn’t a stop‑gap—it’s a time bomb. Farms just north of the U.S.‑Mexico border illustrate this clearly. After visa curtailments in 2020‑2021, several harvest seasons suffered historic loss rates: tomatoes rotted, dairy output shrank, poultry plants shuttered midday due to lack of butchers. Costs to consumers spiked; corporate earnings fell; limited automation failed to scale fast enough. The myth that automation solves labor gaps ignores the fragility of meat, poultry, and fish sectors: skilled meat cutters can’t be replaced with machines overnight. Instead, processing lines will slow, workers will endure more grueling shifts, injuries will spike and injuries be under‑reported.

The story of the A‑Team also underscores a generational disparity. Wirtz tapped American high schoolers at a time of higher civic trust and manual education. Their withdrawal from the project reflected more than a labor economy—they were unwilling to submit their summers to heat exhaustion and broken pay. Today’s high school and college students are even less likely to accept that bargain. Generation Z demands agency, flexibility, and ethical employment. Yet industry continues to pitch low‑ball wages in brutal work climates. Migrant labor enters precisely because these jobs are structured to deter all but those desperate—an exploitative recipe that authorities then blame migrants for sustaining.

The timing of Rollins’ statement is not incidental. It arrives at the crossroads of crumbling immigration policy and a post-pandemic labor market in chaos. Food processing plants and agricultural operations, which have long relied on undocumented and migrant labor, now face tightening labor pipelines due to political crackdowns, border militarization, and punitive visa restrictions. Rather than improve wages, housing, or working conditions, conservative operatives like Rollins propose digging deeper into America’s underclass for bodies—coerced, desperate, and disposable. Medicaid recipients are merely the latest target in a long history of shifting the burdens of food production onto the powerless.

At its core, Rollins’ vision mirrors the economic architecture of modern-day slavery. She does not propose voluntary employment or union-backed labor. She proposes workfare—a system by which essential health care is conditioned upon submission to grueling physical labor. What happens when a Medicaid recipient with back problems or diabetes can’t meet field quotas? Are they cut off from insulin and left to die? When a woman with three children refuses to relocate for harvest season, will her benefits be revoked? In these scenarios, work is no longer labor—it is ransom for the right to exist. Such a policy strips away the concept of choice and replaces it with an economic gun to the head.

The ethical dimensions of this proposal are profoundly disturbing. Under Rollins’ framework, Medicaid recipients—by definition some of the poorest and most medically vulnerable individuals in the country—would be tasked with one of the most dangerous jobs in America. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, agriculture ranks among the top sectors for workplace injury and death. Exposure to pesticides, repetitive stress injuries, heat stroke, and wage theft are rampant. If the field conditions are unfit for migrant workers—many of whom flee such conditions after injury or abuse—then what moral calculus justifies putting elderly or disabled Medicaid recipients in their place?

In parallel, the mortgage field services industry provides a grim mirror of this exploitation dynamic. Field Service Technicians, often classified as independent contractors, receive poverty wages for dangerous property preservation work. These workers—disproportionately from underserved and economically abandoned regions—are similarly trapped in cycles of dependency and coercion. They work without benefits, without legal protections, and under the ever-present threat of chargebacks or blacklisting from national management firms. It is not a stretch to see Rollins’ Medicaid workfare concept as an extension of this same devaluation of labor—where survival depends on obedience, and dignity is a luxury none can afford.

What Rollins fails to understand—or perhaps does, but finds politically convenient to ignore—is that there is no labor shortage in America. There is a wage shortage. If agricultural and meatpacking companies paid fair wages, offered decent housing, and respected worker rights, they would find no shortage of willing hands. But the neoliberal consensus dictates that profit must be protected, and if that means shifting labor from one marginalized group to another—migrants, Medicaid recipients, gig workers—then so be it. This is the ethos of the plantation reimagined for the 21st century, where bodies are rotated through systems of economic violence until they break.

Legally, Rollins’ proposal may collide with federal statutes designed to protect civil rights. The Americans with Disabilities Act would undoubtedly come into play, as would constitutional arguments surrounding involuntary servitude under the 13th Amendment. But legal obstacles aside, the proposal represents a terrifying normalization of forced labor discourse. When political elites speak casually about using the poorest citizens as tools for industry, it is not just policy—it is propaganda. It conditions the public to see poverty as a moral failure deserving of punishment, not a structural condition demanding justice.

Politically, this rhetoric is designed to divide. By pitting Medicaid recipients against migrant laborers, Rollins creates a false dichotomy where working-class people must fight over scraps, rather than unite against the corporate predators exploiting them both. This is the oldest trick in the American playbook. It is how plantation owners justified slavery, how robber barons broke strikes, and how today’s billionaires maintain their grip over industries that operate on razor-thin margins funded by blood and sweat.

Rollins may believe she’s offering a solution. In reality, she’s issuing a threat. A threat to labor. A threat to dignity. And a threat to the very idea that in this country, your worth is not determined by your ability to serve as fodder for corporate agriculture. If we do not stand now, the fields will stretch wider, the contracts will grow darker, and the chains will return—just under a different name.

At a time when national momentum is pushing toward the elimination of non-compete agreements as relics of industrial serfdom, Florida has taken a hard right turn. The passage of the “Florida Contracts Honoring Opportunity, Investment, Confidentiality, and Economic Growth (CHOICE)” Act—better known as the CHOICE Act—is nothing short of a legislative betrayal of the working class. Touted by proponents as a defense of free enterprise and contractual freedom, what the CHOICE Act really does is enshrine non-compete agreements into law, making it more difficult than ever for workers—especially those in the mortgage field services industry—to pursue better opportunities or negotiate fairer terms. Florida has now become the most hostile state in the nation for labor mobility, effectively transforming subcontracted laborers into economic hostages.

“The CHOICE Act would codify one of the most anti-innovation, anti-startup, and anti-worker policies to be found anywhere in the country,” John Lettieri, President and CEO of the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington D.C.-based public policy research and advocacy organization, said in May. “While dozens of other states are enacting limitations on the use of noncompete agreements, this legislation would take Florida in the opposite direction — locking in talent, stifling wage growth, and undermining efforts to build a cutting-edge startup ecosystem in the Sunshine State.”

Nowhere is the damage more visible than among Field Service Technicians. These are the workers responsible for securing vacant properties, mowing overgrown lawns, performing winterizations, and hauling out moldy debris from homes abandoned mid-foreclosure. They work in dangerous, unsanitary, and legally ambiguous environments. Yet many of these technicians already operate under oppressive subcontractor agreements that deny them benefits, withhold payments through chargebacks, and often demand 60- to 90-day payment windows — all include waiver of lien which is criminal, not civil, in Tennessee. Now, with the CHOICE Act in place, they are contractually prohibited from leaving one vendor to work for another, even when that new opportunity would offer better pay or working conditions. This isn’t competition; it’s legalized indenture.

Inspectors face an equally dire situation. Responsible for occupancy checks, property condition reports, and photographic documentation, Inspectors must frequently revisit the same properties as foreclosure timelines drag on. Many have built relationships with specific servicers or clients over time, based on consistency and reliability. Under normal circumstances, such relationships might yield better contract terms or leverage to negotiate fairer rates. But the CHOICE Act slams that door shut. Even if a national client wants to hire an Inspector directly—cutting out the middleman who’s skimming 40 percent off the top—non-compete enforcement now ensures that only the vendor, not the worker, controls that decision. The very possibility of labor negotiating upward mobility is stripped away by force of law.

Economically, this creates a devastating imbalance. In a labor market that should be rewarding experience, skill, and professionalism, the CHOICE Act hands permanent leverage to the middle-tier management companies—the Order Mills—who profit not from performance, but from hoarding access to labor pools. Without the ability to leave for greener pastures, technicians are forced to accept whatever rate is handed to them. If the vendor drops pricing, adds new unpaid compliance steps, or implements arbitrary chargebacks, the worker’s only recourse is to quit the industry entirely. The Act doesn’t just stifle competition; it sterilizes it.

The timing of this legislative shift could not be worse. States like California and Minnesota are banning or strictly limiting non-compete clauses, citing their impact on wage stagnation and economic inequality. The Federal Trade Commission is moving toward a nationwide ban that would apply to most private-sector workers. But in Florida, legislators have instead sent a clear message: the right of an employer to control a worker’s future outweighs the worker’s right to pursue it. In doing so, they’ve aligned with the worst instincts of industry giants who rely on a compliant, non-unionized, and immobile workforce to maximize margins and externalize risk.

From a legal standpoint, the CHOICE Act has emboldened vendors to expand the scope of their restrictive covenants. Where once a non-compete clause might last six months and cover a specific client, now some contracts in the field services industry are surfacing with 12- to 24-month non-compete terms and broad geographical coverage that spans entire regions of Florida. The effect is chilling: even if a technician is terminated or unpaid, they can be sued for working elsewhere. It is the height of absurdity—punishing workers not only for disloyalty but for survival.

Field reports already show signs of distress. Field Service Technicians who were previously bouncing between two or three vendors to patch together a living wage now find themselves stuck. As they become locked into one vendor’s terms, they lose the ability to price-shop for better fuel reimbursements or more reasonable turnaround expectations. At the same time, vendors are weaponizing these agreements as pre-litigation tools—threatening lawsuits if technicians are caught doing “unauthorized” work. Inspectors who once collaborated freely across multiple portfolios are now reduced to a single channel of income, often at the mercy of managers thousands of miles away who haven’t stepped foot in a distressed neighborhood in years.

Here is how a C Level staffer at a National Order Mill put it speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operations,

The ethical implications are profound. Non-competes in this industry aren’t protecting trade secrets or safeguarding proprietary methods—they’re protecting arbitrage. They allow vendors to sell $5 inspections and $35 lawn cuts for a 300% markup, simply because they know the person performing the work has nowhere else to go. And when quality issues arise? Vendors wash their hands, blaming the subcontractor for substandard results, even as they denied that worker the financial flexibility to invest in better equipment, training, or transportation.

Community impact is often overlooked, but it shouldn’t be. When labor is strangled, property conditions deteriorate. Board-ups are missed, grass grows knee-high, and squatters re-enter homes that were supposedly secured. All because the most qualified worker was under a non-compete with one vendor, and the job came through another. In places like Jacksonville, Tampa, and Orlando, where housing blight already compounds post-pandemic economic strain, this creates unnecessary risks for neighborhoods that can ill afford further instability.

Ultimately, the CHOICE Act does not create choice for Labor. It creates choice for Management—management that can now lock down skilled workers, deny them competition, and enforce monopolistic contracts with the full weight of Florida law behind them. It takes an already asymmetrical industry—rife with chargebacks, price fixing, and offloaded liability—and shifts even more power to the top, silencing any hope of grassroots mobility or local empowerment.

Unless overturned or superseded by federal legislation, the CHOICE Act will remain a blunt instrument wielded against the very people who hold this industry together. For Field Service Technicians and Inspectors, it is not a path to prosperity—it is a cage. And for Florida, a state with a long history of labor exploitation in agriculture, hospitality, and construction, the CHOICE Act now adds another ignoble chapter: one where the people preserving our homes and inspecting our neighborhoods are given no choice at all.

The mortgage field services industry, long battered by stagnant wages and unchecked exploitation, now faces yet another blow from the regulatory chambers of Washington. On June 27th, 2025, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) quietly issued a final rule in the Federal Register expanding the scope of steel derivative products subject to the 50% tariff under Section 232. While the mainstream media may glance over this as yet another bureaucratic maneuver in America’s trade policy arsenal, the real impact will be borne not by Fortune 500 contractors or the asset management firms insulated from price volatility, but by the men and women who labor in silence—Field Service Technicians and Inspectors struggling to maintain the nation’s distressed housing stock.

What we do not need are yet another set of articles, half backed by the Miller Regime at NAMFS, and re-published on the National Field Representative’s (NFR) website. Management has already had three huge pay hikes from HUD, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac without a single penny making it to Labor! What Labor needs are pay raises, a re-focus on the work as opposed to Management’s refactoring of the million photo race to the bottom, all achievable with One Vision, One Voice, and One Association — International Association of Field Service Technicians (IAFST).

The inclusion of steel derivative products, which now covers nails, fasteners, hinges, and lock mechanisms, introduces a new cost burden that is devastating for the property preservation labor force. These are the very products used daily by Field Service Technicians to secure vacant homes—whether boarding up windows, installing hasps, or changing locks per HUD and FHA servicing guidelines. Unlike general contractors in the construction trades who can revise estimates to reflect changing material costs, Field Service Technicians are handcuffed to pricing schedules dictated by national field service management companies such as NFR. These companies rarely, if ever, allow bottom-up pricing models. Instead, they enforce rigid pay structures established without regard to real-time fluctuations in supply chain or material costs.

Inspectors, though not as reliant on physical materials, are not spared from the fallout either. Their assessments are often used as justification for repairs and initial secure orders, yet they too operate under artificially fixed pricing models. Travel costs, insurance requirements, and administrative burdens continue to increase, while per-inspection fees remain largely static. With no mechanism for real cost recovery, the sector finds itself squeezed from both ends: material inflation and wage deflation.

What makes this situation especially egregious is that these tariffs were not implemented in a vacuum. They were made under the guise of national security, invoking Section 232, a rarely used provision that grants the executive branch broad discretion to enact trade barriers. But invoking national security in the name of economic patriotism while deliberately ignoring the downstream effects on domestic labor is a policy failure of ethical proportions. The reality is this: a set of multinational corporations were given more protection under this rule than the thousands of independent Field Service Technicians and Inspectors who provide the first line of defense against community blight and housing decay.

Even more galling is the inherent contradiction in the way pricing is administered across the industry. While the steel tariffs are expected to increase wholesale costs for basic locksets and fasteners by over 35%, many Management firms are unwilling to adjust their pay schedules or renegotiate contracts with their Clients. The increases have already begun at the largest distributor used by Labor, MFS Supply! Filed Service Technicians are now forced to absorb these costs out of pocket, driving many into financial insolvency. The top-down management structures that dominate the industry have created a Kafkaesque landscape where those doing the work have neither voice nor recourse. The result is a steady attrition of skilled laborers who can no longer afford to subsidize the operations of absentee corporations.

Some argue that these price increases are marginal and temporary, but this reflects a fundamental ignorance about how the mortgage field services ecosystem operates. Unlike traditional construction or maintenance industries where markups and change orders are common, most technicians are paid on a flat-fee basis with no opportunity for renegotiation. A lock change that once cost $12 in materials may now cost $38 or more—yet the Field Service Technician will still receive the same $18 service fee. Over the course of a week, these marginal increases add up to a material loss in net earnings, not to mention the indirect costs of fuel, compliance documentation, and administrative overhead. Make no mistake: There is no profit model based upon volume, only compounded losses!

Worse still, the Management firms that control work allocation and payment rarely make public the basis upon which their pricing is calculated. These opaque systems create an accountability vacuum where technicians are held responsible for meeting Service Level Agreements while being denied the tools and resources necessary to do so. It’s a rigged economy dressed up in the language of free enterprise. There is no meaningful arbitration, no cost-of-living escalator, and certainly no tariff surcharge allowance—only the silent expectation that those at the bottom will continue to bear the brunt.

Inspectors face their own set of challenges. Though their job may not involve direct procurement of steel-derived materials, their role is functionally tethered to the same economic currents. As contractors increasingly abandon low-paying preservation work, inspectors are called upon to verify job completion, document property condition, and monitor vacant assets across wider geographic areas. All the while, their pay per inspection remains flat or in many cases, has even declined. It’s a death spiral in which the core labor components of an already strained industry are being systematically hollowed out.

It is no exaggeration to say that this new rule by BIS threatens to become a final nail—ironically, now more expensive—in the coffin of sustainable labor in mortgage field services. Already reeling from three decades of wage stagnation, widespread misclassification, and unchecked chargebacks, the industry’s labor force is being asked to shoulder the cost of global trade wars while being denied basic economic agency. The absence of a responsive mechanism for price escalation or collective bargaining only serves to entrench the inequality.

What’s needed now is not another memorandum from a national servicing firm, nor another PDF full of compliance buzzwords. What’s needed is a fundamental reorientation of the industry’s pricing models to reflect real-time economic conditions, beginning with cost-sharing provisions for materials and a transparent bidding process. Field Service Technicians and Inspectors must be treated as stakeholders, not liabilities. Without this shift, the mortgage field services industry risks implosion—not because of market forces alone, but because of its own refusal to recognize the humanity of its labor.

Ultimately, the steel tariffs are just a symptom of a much larger disease: the commodification of labor without respect to its value. As long as Management continues to impose rigid, top-down mandates while shielding itself from cost volatility, the industry’s foundation will remain unstable. And when it collapses, it won’t be because technicians and inspectors failed the system—it will be because the system failed them.