Small Farmers Search for Migrant Labor
KWITNY, JONATHAN
NATIONAL REPORTS Small Farmers Search for Migrant Labor By Jonathan Kwitny Holmdel, New Jersey Under the winter frost, unpicked tomatoes are decaying in a field alongside Route 35 in central...
...Perno complain bitterly about the Puerto Ricans who run out on their contracts, "They get too much is the whole problem," says Mrs...
...Both Allocpo and Mrs...
...Work on the farms might preclude any chance to look for better jobs in the city, and many of them came North specifically to leave farming jobs as sharecroppers in the South...
...We had two good men early this year...
...Traveling by chartered or commercial airliner, they arrive at Philadelphia, Newark or Kennedy airports, where they are met by one of the Association's buses and brought to its receiving center in Holmdel...
...If a doctor certifies that a man is too sick to work, the Association will pay his way back to Puerto Rico, even though his contract has not expired...
...Frank AUocpo, who runs the Farmers and Gardeners Association of New Jersey, the organization that contracts with the Puerto Rican government for rights to bring in the laborers, feels the men are good workers and present less of a discipline problem than the average citizen...
...The idea of using West Indians in place of the Puerto Ricans has been explored by Allocpo...
...What else would they know to do...
...But fewer people need that kind of work now...
...Perno that fewer pickers are coming in, and that it is hard to hold them to their farm contracts when easier, higher-paying jobs beckon from nearby New York...
...A way of life is decaying with them...
...I'm going to do what I can with high school boys from now on...
...You won't be able to go down to Mrs...
...Allocpo, on the other hand, speaks approvingly of the men he supplies...
...Stanley Hused, chairman of the Governor's Task Force on Migrant Labor in New Jersey, has studied the workers' conditions and sums up his findings: "Which is the worst of the two, having them not work in Puerto Rico or having them work here, especially since most of them are doing what they know well...
...To defray transportation costs, the farmers pay the Association eight cents per worker per hour...
...If I don't like a quart, they'll have to pick better ones next time, and they know it...
...I was happy, the kids were happy...
...You sit and wait three days and don't know whether you're going to get anybody or not...
...We lost $3,400 in transport last year...
...He says 11 New Jersey residents were hired as farm laborers this year, but only one lasted through the summer...
...Puerto Ricans with enough ambition to bend and stoop in the broiling sun as long as 14 hours a day, six and a half days a week, frequently can find other jobs that offer more money simply for standing behind a counter in an air-conditioned store...
...I don't think the employment picture is tight," Allocpo says, "people just don't want to work on farms anymore...
...Perno looks across at $2,000 worth of rotted tomatoes and peppers in her fields and wonders how long she can stay in business...
...The most common reason was a lack of proof of potable water...
...If you had only big farmers with hundreds of acres, there might be only 10 farmers in the state setting prices on food in cooperation with the big chain stores...
...Perno plants 50-75 acres a year, and she needs three or four men to pick them...
...Some Puerto Ricans come up and their attitude is fine," Allocpo explains...
...They are free to move...
...Some of them are the nicest guys you'd ever want to meet...
...Present requirements are 30 square feet per man...
...Perno's suggestion that they be shuttled to New Jersey farms as pickers...
...And while the suburbs are entitled to keep their heavy property levies, the poor cities have diminishing means of supporting needed urban and rural programs...
...Murphy's and pick up a basket of tomatoes for 35 cents...
...Hot and cold running water in kitchens will be required, along with a minimum number of flush toilets, showers and laundry tubs...
...The Farmers and Gardeners Association runs an office on the island, where Puerto Ricans, often referred there by their own government, sign to work 28 weeks on an American farm...
...Sometimes they are in the fields within 48 hours...
...We were in trouble in the '40s...
...Now it's all turned around...
...But many of the jobless blacks of Newark and of Union County probably would not take kindly to Mrs...
...But as soon as they got $400 each, they quit and went to New York...
...This kind of labor, he insists, "is not an item to be unionized, not when it gets down to the produce itself...
...We'll never get to that point," Allocpo concedes...
...Strawberries, tomatoes, apples—as each crop ripened, the pickers would go into the fields and bring back bushels of food for markets and roadside stands...
...Farmers had to plow their crops right up...
...It costs us $62.50 air fare and an $8 fee to our recruiter in Puerto Rico just to bring them up...
...The least little thing that goes wrong, and the farmer gets fined...
...Then we discovered the Puerto Ricans...
...She complains that Puerto Ricans are lazy and inefficient, and that too many of them are loafing on welfare rolls...
...In this way the government—local, state and Federal?would subsidize the small farmer and keep him in business...
...They're good boys...
...The Puerto Rican government has negotiated more than a 50 per cent raise in wages for the laborers over the past five years, from 95 cents to $1.45 an hour, with a guaranteed minimum of 160 hours' work a month...
...She now declares she is through with them: "When I went out to pick tomatoes this year, I picked ten baskets an hour...
...Many of her crops this past season died, unpicked...
...New Jersey farmers were really given the red carpet treatment...
...The Puerto Rican Department of Labor, however, says the farmers are getting just what they pay for and have no reason to complain...
...It's a good idea for the Puerto Rican side," Mrs...
...You don't have to go out and worry about them...
...If you take the small farmers off, food is going to be more expensive...
...According to Charles Yersak, chief of the New Jersey Migrant Labor Bureau, which enforces the law, 85 per cent of the farmers who applied in 1968 for state certification of the living quarters they provided were initially turned down...
...Meanwhile, Mrs...
...These people generally have not been trained except in argricultural work...
...Perno came up here the first of October and said, 'Frank, these are good boys, they done their work like I told them to, I think you should pay their way home to see their wife and family,' I'd do it...
...Unable to find laborers who satisfy her, she shares Jonathan Kwitny is a reporter for the Perth Amboy Evening News...
...If workers are paid and are attracted to a job, they'll come to work...
...The rest of the men are assigned to a single farmer for the entire summer, or as long as the farmer needs them...
...Allocpo says that good performance is also rewarded...
...Of the 1,003 men flown in from Puerto Rico between April and September 1968, only about 200 were still working in October...
...You cut them [small produce stands] out and the people will have to go to the supermarket, and they'll take a drubbing...
...Under the law, farmers have to supply resident workers with certified potable water, inspected and certified quarters, at least one electric light, and at least one outlet...
...They want to make a dollar and send it home to their families, and those are the good guys...
...She says when the strawberry season comes this June, she may let her customers go into the fields and pick their own berries for 25 cents a quart...
...He notes that 300 of them "come back year after year...
...Facilities include four toilets, four showerheads, and three washbasins...
...But some others come up for the ride and take off without even working...
...Yersak says 12-14 "gave up the ghost" when they saw what it would cost to make the necessary improvements...
...Puerto Ricans or anybody else...
...They'll drink until they go down on their feet...
...Perno, who housed three or four men in the single room of a one-story cinder-block building during the spring and summer...
...I sent two Puerto Ricans out, and they picked for four hours and got 23 baskets of tomatoes...
...Perno about $2.50 an hour...
...But he agrees with Mrs...
...the plight of other small farmers not only in this state but across the country...
...For years Mrs...
...They'll get three tomatoes for 29 cents...
...Although machines can harvest tomatoes (and within the next two decades mechanical equipment may take over most of the nation's harvesting chores), they require many hundreds of acres to work economically...
...They live in the barest conditions and work as much as 14 hours a day, with a half day off on Sundays, earning $1.45 an hour...
...NATIONAL REPORTS Small Farmers Search for Migrant Labor By Jonathan Kwitny Holmdel, New Jersey Under the winter frost, unpicked tomatoes are decaying in a field alongside Route 35 in central New Jersey...
...But discipline is no big problem...
...They would see such work as a step backward, not forward, in their efforts to join the rest of the country economically...
...The Puerto Ricans mashed more than they picked...
...Beginning in April and continuing as long as orders from farmers come in to the Association's offices in Holmdel and Glassboro, some 1,200 or more men a year make the trip...
...Lacking American citizenship, the West Indians could not move off the job freely...
...Some of them will really booze it up...
...But according to New Jersey law the supply of laborers in American territory must be exhausted before any hiring can be done elsewhere...
...If another state offers $1.60 an hour, you can imagine which job the worker is going to take...
...New Jersey's Seasonal Farm Labor Act of 1967 also has brought improvement to the laborers' lot...
...With travel, turnover, medical insurance, and housing, Puerto Rican laborers cost Mrs...
...But if they find work that pays more, they're going to grab it...
...Allocpo was trying to contract for more, even if they would agree to come for only eight weeks...
...And three baskets were rotten ones...
...This amounts to an overall increase of 300 per cent in the past 15 years...
...Perno says of the new law, "but the farmer bears the brunt of it...
...While most of the applicants eventually were certified, about 120 ended up not operating their labor camps at all...
...They should be forced to go out into the fields and pick crops, she says, with welfare continuing to pay at least half their salaries...
...New Jersey has especially serious welfare problems, because too much of the revenue for government services comes from municipal taxes, and too little from state taxes...
...You went down there, and they had Cadillacs waiting for you...
...Family and friendship are the big things with these guys...
...They are driven each morning to farms throughout North Jersey with short picking seasons and no living accommodations for laborers, and are returned to the receiving center at night...
...It denies a worker shortage as well, and insists it has found men to fill every order by New Jersey farmers...
...Most of them must leave wives and families behind...
...Jerry Perno, like nearly a thousand other New Jersey farmers, has contracted every summer for the mass immigration of cheap farm labor from Puerto Rico...
...And he cannot use migrant Mexican-Americans, who travel with their families, because the farmers in the Association have only dormitory-style housing...
...I had them in here strawberry season and paid them 10 cents a quart...
...They did it to Campbell's [the soup company in southern New Jersey], they did it in Ohio...
...Beginning in 1970, 70 square feet of living and sleeping space must be provided for the first laborer, and 50 square feet for each additional one...
...If Mrs...
...It would kill the small farmer...
...Unionism is another thing that disturbs Allocpo...
...Also beginning in 1970, quarters must be in one-story buildings with eight-inch masonry walls, and have separate kitchen and dining faculties of no less than 60 square feet for the first two men, plus another 20 square feet for each additional man...
...Adding to his difficulties, Allocpo declares, is the current attitude of the Puerto Rican government...
...About 60 men usually stay at the barracks, working "day haul...
...The barracks here, set on spacious, well maintained lawns, house up to 120 men...
...Tony Vega, director of the New York office of Puerto Rico's farm labor program, defends the migrant pickers: "They're American free workers, and that's the risk of hiring them...
...The current wage is five cents above New Jersey's $1.40 minimum, but in today's economy it seems a questionable attraction...
Vol. 52 • February 1969 • No. 2
