IV. Race to the Orchards
Growers who defend the importation ofJamaican apple pickers say the job requires special attributes--traits they would like to pass off as national characteristics. Veterans of the apple...
...Department of Labor brought together eastern apple growers and the Puerto Rican Migration Division to explore the possibilities of contracting apple pickers from Puerto Rico...
...There was no adjustment to their piece-rates when they were assigned-as frequently occured--to "clean" trees already spot-picked by West Indians...
...Following these concessions, the growers agreed to hire 1,000 Puerto Ricans in 1976...
...2. Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S...
...He feared that the growers "would place themselves in jeopardy [of criminal penalties] by hiring Puerto Ricans...
...To rely on governments that must reconcile labor to capital's demands is clearly not the solution...
...Within the week, the first of the season's more than 4,000 West Indians were beginning to fan through the southern reaches of apple country...
...Lee Harrison, "Apple Growers Fight Bureaucracy to get their Jamaican Pickers," Bennington Banner, September 17, 1977, 2. 12...
...The second strategy is to reject the false explanations for unemployment and exploitation and focus on the real ones...
...By the end of the season only 25% of the contracted Puerto Ricans remained...
...Rogers claimed that PL 87 effectively eliminated Puerto Rican workers from the domestic labor supply inasmuch as it would prevent them from accepting job offers on the same (minimum) terms and conditions as other domestic workers...
...Employment Service...
...Be careful not to bruise the apples, be careful not to break branches with the ladder, or pull off spurs (next year's crop setting) while picking...
...Most importantly, it demonstrates the undermining role that a contract system plays in the attempts of workers to improve their conditions of work...
...RACE TO THE ORCHARDS 1. Elton Orchards, Inc...
...In the end they accepted only 613 who, together with 3,400 West Indians and busloads of domestic day-haulers and migrant crews, began to pick the relatively poor crop...
...The playing out of the multi-purpose strategy of the apple growers is an eye-opener...
...F. Ray Marshall, et al., U.S...
...It shows the lengths that the growers, driven by their own needs to maximize profits, will go to obtain the cheapest, most productive and most controllable work force...
...We saw earlier that a wage minimum effectively becomes a wage ceiling when a labor force is introduced that cannot battle to raise that wage...
...I need real workers who, when I say go out and pick, they go out and pick until the job is done...
...Recio et al., U.S...
...In early 1975 the U.S...
...Although the growers had scored a stunning blow, the Department of Labor refused to call the fight and continued to withhold certification...
...Some growers never claimed their quotas, others refused to sign their contracts...
...It had brandished this weapon the previous year against the intransigent growers but was finally forced to back down...
...Negligence is also flirtation with dismissal...
...Unable to get compensation through the regular grievance procedures, they sued the growers...
...Since the 1975 meeting three harvests have passed...
...Sticking to the logic of their original proposal, the Department of Labor acceded to this request, thus allowing the importation of 4,800 Jamaicans...
...As long as conditions abroad deny workers the right to a livelihood, foreign workers will continue to cross the borders by any means possible...
...The Labor Department would not let the workers sign on under what they called "substandard" conditions, but courts in state after state upheld the growers' right not to pay...
...Round three to the growers...
...The grower gets 25%, then complains at the narrow profit margin...
...But even if the borders and airports could be closed to aliens, growers would turn to a legal system such as the one described in this Report to provide them with a labor force that is equally controllable, vulnerable and underpaid...
...In essence, the delaying tactics, the false representation, the cheating and manipulation only showed the pervasiveness of the obstinacy expressed by the chairperson of FLEC: "Over my dead body will there be any Puerto Rican workers picking apples in Wayne County...
...Their strategy was in part to make the Puerto Ricans look lazy, undisciplined and unwilling to stay on the job...
...12 Furthermore, by still refusing to pay transportation and by refusing to interview except in the orchards, the growers effectively eliminated the available Puerto Rican workers who, like their mainland counterparts, could not afford their own transportation under any circumstances, much less any as speculative as these...
...The growers agreed to be present at the meeting only because they had lost a legal fight to avoid hiring southern migrants the year before, and were under court order to actively recruit domestic workers...
...This solution is both politically untenable-since it denies the international character of the conditions that lead to labor's migration-and realistically infeasible...
...Recio et al., op...
...6 8 Meanwhile, the growers had from the beginning of 1977 forestalled any efforts on the part of the Puerto Rican Migration Division to negotiate on behalf of its workers...
...After the season was over FLEC complained that a full 70% of the Puerto Rican workforce provided "unsatisfactory" work quality and another 18% were only "marginally productive...
...Department of Labor, regarding the Proposed Regulations on the Certification and Use of Temporary Foreign Labor for Agricultural Employment, June 13, 1977, 10, and "Memorandum in Support of Plaintiffs Motion for a Preliminary Injunction," Flecha et al...
...No I Dc17NACLA Report When those Macs turn ripe - a Vermont apple grower expounded, waving his hand out over his orchards -I've got only ten days to get 'em off the trees...
...District Court, Western District of Virginia, Harrisonburg Division, civic action no...
...11 At this point the growers' response showed that they were ready to "go to the mat" to get foreign labor...
...As we have seen, the Puerto Rican workers had been edged out of other agricultural contracts and the Commonwealth government was looking for new areas of work for its unemployed labor force...
...Scapegoating is used as a diversionary tactic to explain the ills of the economy to the unemployed, the over-taxed and the underpaid...
...The Puerto Rican Department of Labor, which by that time had already recruited some 2,600 ready, willing and able workers for the orchards, refused to accept this artificial limit...
...5. Michael C. Harper and Mitchel Ostrer, "Aliens and the Apple Harvest: Squeezing out Americans," The New Leader, September 12, 1977, 8. 6. Statement of Carlos S. Quiros, Secretary of Labor, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, before Public Hearing of the U.S...
...1977 Department of Labor to the growers' needs and problems," 2 and to expedite the recruitment of harvest labor for its members...
...The six-week apple harvest in the United States offered a new possibility...
...Every year Puerto Rico's plans and their legal basis, PL 87, had been approved...
...The struggle that ensued is clearly illustrative of the points we have tried to make in this issue...
...FLEC had won round one...
...With only weeks to go before the harvest, U.S...
...In a broader context, the question of "illegal" immigration threatens to provoke an anti-immigrant backlash in the United States...
...3 The order was upheld by an appellate court, and after a few more days of foot dragging the Labor Department certified the full 5,134 foreign workers the growers had planned on from the start...
...If you can't ever get your head above water, why try...
...FLEC was established in 1974 by the International Apple Institute* to represent the growers in ten eastern states, from Virginia to Maine, many of whom were already familiar with the advantages of West Indian harvesters...
...In the end, the job rights and standards of all farmworkers, domestic and foreign alike, were further undermined...
...3. Quoted in a letter of Carlos S. Quiros, Secretary of Labor, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, to F. Ray Marshall, Secretary of Labor, U.S.A., June 7, 1977, 7. 4. Flecha et al...
...The growers had withdrawn formal negotiating power from FLEC, forcing Migration to deal individually with the growers or their associations.9 They had ignored mailed invitations to designate their individual representatives, or replied that there was no need to negotiate a special agreement covering Puerto Rican workers because they could apply as individuals just like any other domestic worker...
...Here we will see that the contract system as a whole effectively paralyzes the struggles of all farmworkers to demand better conditions...
...Declaring these workers illegal constitutes a mandate for repression...
...1977: DOWN FOR THE COUNT By 1977 the growers had refined their footwork and introduced a new tactic: they abandoned the practice of advancing transportation payments to recruited workers...
...In retrospect it becomes only too clear that the workers' benefits required by PL 87 were not the real reason the growers refused to hire Puerto Ricans...
...The fight over the law was only a maneuver to get the Puerto Rican and U.S...
...Everything that hinders the flow of motion is an expensive annoyance...
...For as long as foreign workers can be "breached" when they protest their conditions, and as long as growers and government are intent upon deporting those who refuse to play by the rules, workers will remain divided...
...FLEC called their bluff:' despite the evident abundance of "domestic workers," the growers requested that the U.S...
...Hence, in the last decade apple growers have increasingly turned to the Caribbean for their pickers...
...But Jamaicans-he paused to take a breath and change his tone -if you're going to write about Jamaicans, then only say good things, because they're the best pickers I've ever had...
...For the 1976 season they relieved the growers of the "onerous bttrden" of providing three hot meals a day, financing any of the workers' non-occupational group disability insurance or posting a bond to guarantee contract enforcement...
...I Dec...
...This season there were no Puerto Ricans among the contract workers who picked the trees clean from Appalachia to New England...
...I Dec...
...The Department of Labor was trying to fulfill one of its legislated mandates, that of finding jobs for domestic workers, in this case Puerto Ricans...
...6 News of this extortionary behavior by the Department of Labor spread rapidly through the island...
...They were placed in sections where deadly pesticide spraying had left everything covered with a 32Nov.I Dec.1977 33 white dust that caused their arms and faces to develop into a mass of itchy rashes...
...Department of Labor certify a shortage...
...The growers went back into the local courts region by region in the affected states, quickly obtained a temporary order from the U.S...
...s The angry workers returned to Puerto Rico...
...governments consistently compromise the interests of labor...
...Your legs struggle to make a hundred and more trips a day up and down a ladder four times your height...
...In attempting to carry out their plan and to make Puerto Rican workers acceptable to the apple growers, the Department of Labor abetted the undermining of special legislative protections guaranteed to the Puerto Rican contract workers under Commonwealth law (Public Law 87...
...76-1382, October 29, 1976...
...Impoverished agricultural migrants throughout the country were unable to pay their own way to the orchards, particularly since they were not assured of a job when they arrived...
...Early in the year many of the growers had negotiated an unusual agreement with the British West Indies Central Labor Organization well prior to filing job offers with the U.S...
...All they're after is a plane ticket to the U.S...
...District Judge in Virginia mandating the Secretary of Labor et al., to immediately certify the need for temporary foreign workers and undertake to process and issue the necessary visas...
...To this picture of the six-week apple harvest add the indiscriminate use of pesticides, substandard housing, lousy food and manipulated wages...
...cit., 8. 7. Migrant Legal Action Program, press release, August 19, 1977 (Washington, D.C...
...7 The Department of Labor immediately obtained a stay of Judge Toledo's order through an appellate court in Boston...
...1977 3334 NACLA Report Ricans "unavailable" for apple harvesting and would have to certify the need for temporary foreign labor...
...I They were still determined, however, to restore their unhampered access to foreign labor...
...Thus the Department of Labor deftly turned federal minimum standards into maximum requirements, sufficient to eliminate from the running Puerto Ricans covered by Commonwealth standards...
...1976: PUERTO RICANS HIRED BUT HARASSED During the 1976 season the growers delivered some low blows to the Puerto Rican pickers...
...Representatives of the Puerto Rican farmworkers appealed to U.S...
...In Virginia alone some ten million boxes of apples are harvested, reaping $25 million in sales...
...Significantly, as Caribbean Business later reported, "the Boston court did not rule on the merits of Toledo's order but simply allowed the Jamaicans into the country because time was running out for the harvest and the growers stood to lose millions of dollars with no one (sic) to pick their apples...
...It lets us see the unmitigated opposition between the agricultural branch of capital and labor, and the compromised role of the Department of Labor which tries to serve the interests of both...
...Even in 1975, when the growers launched their first assault on the statute, and in 1976, when the standards were undercut, funding for Puerto Rico's employment service plans had been approved by the Department of Labor...
...Veterans of the apple harvest, on the other hand, say all that's needed is a stomach for 12-hour days of brutal, boring labor and a piece rate system that never lets you rest...
...Suddenly in June 1977 Lawrence Rogers, Regional Administrator of the Employment and Training Administration, traveled to Puerto Rico with the news that funding of the island's employment service was in doubt...
...Photographs on pages 4, 7,10, 13, 14,16,35 were taken by Ron Smith, 0 1974 The Palm Beach Post...
...Round four: the workers are on their knees...
...Photographs on pages 28, 31, 32 were taken by Lee Harrison...
...Even though the Department of Labor located more than 2,500 workers in Florida, willing and able to harvest eastern apples, the growers steadfastly refused to pay their transportation charges...
...You ignore the metal rim of the bucket digging into your waist with the weight of 50 pounds of apples...
...1977 35 tation, workers who could not afford to say, "We refuse...
...In essence, they cannot be made to be sufficiently productive, cheap or reliable in comparison to the captive labor force of foreign contract workers...
...The Puerto Ricans' productivity was predictably lower than that of West Indian workers and under this pretext the growers arbitrarily fired many of them...
...It argued that it could not force growers to sign any contract, or to accept employment conditions that are more strict than those stipulated by federal regulations...
...Quote from S. Steven Karelakis, partner in the law firm of Wikinson, Cragun and Barker of New York City and Washington, D.C...
...Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr...
...Each of the three groups had their own goals...
...There are two possible strategies to combat this manipulation: first, to oppose the presence of foreign workers in the United States and demand that borders be sealed...
...I can't afford to mess around with local people who show up when they feel like it...
...77-0104(H...
...In apples, as in the rest of unmechanized agriculture, the drive is to keep the cost of labor at rock bottom...
...1975: ONLY JAMAICANS NEED APPLY Representing the interests of the major growers during this period was the Farm Labor Executive Committee (FLEC...
...Still trying to obtain apple picking jobs, the Puerto Rican government acceded to the new court-reinforced demands of FLEC to reduce the worker rights guaranteed under Commonwealth law...
...Carlos S. Quiros, "Answer to FLEC's Request for Investigation of 1976 Puerto Rican Program in the East Coast Apple Harvest,"June 7, 1977, 11 and Appendix J. 11...
...against both the Puerto Rican and the U.S...
...Others quit, complaining of inadequate meals, maltreatment, underpayment of wages, inadequate training, and generally intolerable conditions...
...Crew leaders notoriously attempt to control their workers by trapping them into debt bondage that may serve to keep them on a string, but stifles productivity...
...The growers struggled intensely and successfully to maintain and expand their access to West Indians and foreclose on the use of Puerto Ricans...
...Their lawyer pointed out that growers would not want to do anything illegal...
...The specific number of workers to be recruited had yet to be discussed...
...each bin holds fifteen to twenty bushels...
...3031 Nov...
...Within a week the Puerto Rican farmworkers, who were still embroiled in the class action suit from the 1976 harvest, filed to enjoin the Department of Labor and the INS from leapfrogging the available Puerto Rican workers in favor of foreign workers...
...Many thanks to Ron Smith, Melinda Meers and Lee Harrison for their help...
...They replied that the Puerto Rican Secretary of Labor did not have the authority to suspend PL 87...
...By the time a bushel of apples reaches the supermarket, the consumer will pay $22.50 for what a picker gets 30C to harvest...
...Since 1951 Puerto Rico had participated in the federally-funded employment system created by the Wagner-Peyser Act...
...Any later and I lose the whole thing...
...Departments of Labor, as well as the INS, challenging the original limitation on the recruitment of Puerto Rican workers...
...Total havoc characterized the management of the first - and perhaps last - Puerto Rican apple contract, and much of it appears to have been deliberate on the part of the growers...
...To obtain the job openings the Puerto Rican Department of Labor accepted these demands, effectively abandoning many of the worker protections it purported to defend...
...These changes included reducing subsistence pay due at the end of the contract, reducing the guaranteed number of work hours and taking the contract out of the jurisdiction of the Puerto Rican courts...
...In agriculture, documented and undocumented foreign workers are effectively being used by growers to keep their labor force divided and unorganized...
...Senate, "Statement of Fred W. Burrows, Executive Vice President, International Apple Institute," Immigration 1976, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, April 1, 1976 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976), 194...
...Throughout this Report, we have seen the West Indian, Puerto Rican and U.S...
...Combining intimidation, feints and stalling, the growers had out-endured their opponents, winning a technical knockout against all comers...
...What appeared to be at issue in the 1975 meetings and subsequent three-year struggle, were the provisions of the Puerto Rican contract program which in several specifics exceeded federal regulations...
...In its dealings with growers, the Department's weapon was its ability to grant or withhold certification for temporary foreign workers...
...The stay would buy time to convince Puerto Rico to abandon PL 87...
...By the middle of July the basic agreement between FLEC and the Puerto Rican Labor Department governing the 1975 apple harvest-eight weeks away -had been signed...
...5 For the first time the growers succeeded in requiring that the West Indian organization pick up the tab for advancing the cost of workers' transportation to the mainland orchards...
...This maneuver, confusing on the face of it, arose from the conviction on the part of the Labor Department that the growers would never agree to Toledo's conditions...
...to reinstate Judge Toledo's order, but he turned them down...
...This insidious tactic assured that domestic workers would be "unavailable...
...FLEC failed to specify how the Puerto Ricans would be geographically distributed, thus precluding effective oversight by Puerto Rican contract supervisors...
...Apples are big business throughout the East...
...AN IRREDEEMABLE SYSTEM The contract system has been a constant source of division among workers...
...In total, because the workers' disability insurance costs would now come out of their own pay, the Puerto Ricans would earn even less than the adverse effect wage rate...
...Brennan, 508 F. 2d 493 (1st Cir...
...To attain their goals, the growers went into strategic formation...
...FLEC next reminded the Puerto Rican government that this was only to be a "pilot project...
...One class action suit was filed (Flecha v. Recio et al...
...We already know the drawbacks of both day-haul and crew-led workers from the grower's point of view...
...The multitude of complaints became at least six court cases alleging numerous contract violations and arbitrary dismissals...
...It reveals the inherent contradictions of a government agency set up to protect workers in a capitalist economy...
...The Department of Labor had two defenses for its doublecross of the Puerto Rican workers...
...Once in the orchards, the Puerto Ricans found themselves particularly discriminated against...
...Every year Puerto Rico, like any other participating jurisdiction, had submitted an annual plan of operation for its services in order to obtain its share of federal funds...
...1974...
...8. "Agricultural Migrant Issue Growing," Caribbean Business, October 6, 1977, 6. 9. Harry Turner, "Dispute Threatens Catastrophe for Apple Growers," San Juan Star, August 23, 1977...
...Still others said that Jamaican workers were already occupying all available housing...
...The growers got what they had wanted all along: foreigners with no rights and no real represen34 NACLA ReportNov.I Dec...
...Thus, Rogers threatened, the Department of Labor would again have to consider unemployed Puerto Nov...
...Labor Departments off guard...
...They defended their interests unstintingly using political pressure at all levels, sympathetic local courts and weak farmworker protection laws...
...Frederick County Fruit Growers'Association, Inc., et al...
...The stated purpose of FLEC was to "educate the *The International Apple Institute, whose membership encompasses 13,000 commercial apple and winter pear growers nationwide and about 600 of the country's major shippers, processors, distributors and brokers, initiated the development of the Farm Labor Executive Committee (FLEC...
...BOTH SIDES AGAINST THE MIDDLE The only labor force still standing between the growers and the powerless West Indians were the Puerto Ricans, and the focus of the attack against their importation again became PL 87...
...Over time, students, families on the migrant stream, even German prisoners of war have been brought into the orchards...
...The growers demanded major modifications of the contract before they would hire any Puerto Ricans...
...Only by waging a common struggle can farmworkers oppose the growers' ability and determination to play one sector of the work force off against another...
...Thus no Puerto Rican workers were hired on the contract that season...
...Despite the concessions, however, the program still exceeded federal minimum standards, although barely...
...In this meeting it proposed a "pilot program" which would allow at least a token number of Puerto Rican workers to come to pick apples under the contract...
...District Judge Jose V. Toledo granted the farmworkers' request for an injunction declaring the "availability of Puerto Rican workers for the 1977 apple harvest with the full protections of PL 87," and thus precluded the certification of foreign workers...
...10 When Toledo's order was overturned, the Puerto RicanDepartment of Labor was forced to abandon all the protections of PL 87 in order to open up jobs for Puerto Ricans...
...Until farmworkers are in a position to determine the terms of their own employment, conditions in the fields and orchards will remain much as we have described them...
...With the new standard in hand the growers then opened up the bidding to domestic workers and did not offer to provide traveling expenses to domestic migrants...
...Round two: growers 2, workers 0.NACLA Report Each apple picking bucket holds a half bushel (about 50 pounds...
...In the course of this Report, we have seen workers in Texas fighting the importation of Mexicans, Florida farmworkers demanding the ouster of Jamaicans on contract in the cane fields, and Puerto Ricans and West Indians battling for jobs in the orchards...
...And I don't even want to hear about Puerto Ricans...
...Three years ago the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, edged out of other agricultural contracts, attempted to get a piece of the action...
...District Puerto Rico, No...
...When unemployed Puerto Rican and mainland farmworkers filed a class action suit against the Department of Labor and the INS, charging the unlawful certification of 5,000 foreign workers, the court upheld the view that Puerto Ricans could not be considered available because, the court said, their contract terms "were more extensive and onerous insofar as the employers were concerned," than federal regulations...
...You try to save time and energy by picking three apples at a time before dropping your hand into the canvas bucket hanging heavy from a shoulder harness...
...Before this second strategy can be viable, however, foreign and domestic workers must have equal rights...
...Lee Harrison, op cit...
...Even with the "improved" contract provisions, the growers would agree only to hire two to three hundred pickers...
...Domestic seasonal workers are recruited on a daily basis from nearby towns, or are brought from out of state by an independent crew leader...
Vol. 11 • November 1977 • No. 8
