THE EXCLUDED
WILLIAMS, SENATOR HARRISON A.
THE EXCLUDED by SENATOR HARRISON A. WILLIAMS EVEN AS LATE as 1939, when Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., investigated farm labor conditions in California, many Americans still cherished the...
...f There is no Federal minimum wage for the agricultural worker and no minimum age for his child's labor outside school hours...
...Often forced by bad weather to move on or to stand idle, he worked an average of only 119 days in 1959...
...Where there are schools, classes are usually hopelessly overcrowded...
...f Often at the mercy of labor contractors who act as middlemen between farmer and worker, the migrant is protected by contractor registration laws in fewer than a dozen states...
...These are some of the provisions of that program: % To help migrants make a decent living wage, we are asking for a seventyfive-cent minimum which would be raised in four annual stages until it reached the industrial minimum level...
...and his children receive less education than anyone else in the nation...
...They are citizens, wanderers in their own country: southern Negroes, TexasMexicans, some white workers, and Puerto Ricans...
...The hours pass...
...But what about education for the adults, too...
...they have been shut out of practically every great social reform that other Americans take for granted...
...As many as two million Americans —the workers, their wives, and their youngsters—live this kind of life in the United States today...
...At a California camp, the Subcommittee saw children jumping up and down inside the only play facility in sight: an abandoned, battered automobile...
...We have also offered a program to improve recruitment, transportation, and distribution of domestic agricultural workers (a program similar to that already in operation for braceros and other imported workers...
...Early this year, the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor began its consideration of an eleven-point legislative program to attack specific and general problems affecting the migrant...
...f Children suffer most of all in the migratory way of life...
...5[ Federal grants would help develop local health programs and daycare centers for migratory children...
...There was some danger that the hospital would be unable to meet its deficit...
...They could say, too, that church groups and private organizations are often effective during the growing season and during emergencies, such as the freeze that left thousands of migrants jobless and hungry in Florida last year...
...The big question is, what can be done to overcome this national problem...
...No matter what has already been accomplished, however, the fact remains that, in states where the greatest progress has been made, officials and responsible citizens were the first to tell the Subcommittee that much more must yet be done...
...Why such deprivation...
...As one reporter wrote about the migrants after covering two days of Subcommittee hearings, "You name it, and they don't have it...
...This count, of course, does not include the foreign workers —the third of a million Mexican braceros, for instance...
...These braceros—more than 300,000 last year—work for fifty cents an hour or less, and the effect of the program is to depress sharply the wages of American migrants, adding greatly to their misery...
...This package of bills was the result of more than eighteen months of travel, study, drafting, and redrafting...
...Women come to use sewing machines...
...There have been reports of children locked in cars or cabins during work hours, and there have been other reports of untended children who perished in drainage ditches or on highways near the fields where their parents worked...
...About one-third of all counties in the nation—943 out of about 3,000— have 100 or more domestic agricultural migrants at one time or another every year...
...we are still taking them...
...The Childen's Bureau of the Federal Social Security Administration explains: "While services under the maternal and child health, and crippled children's programs are for the most part available to migrant families, a number of obstacles limit their use—such as language, barriers, distances to clinics, insufficient health department staffs to meet the many problems of a large temporary population...
...We would give Federal grants to states and municipalities to help them meet seasonal demands on schools and staff members...
...Playtime can be perilous for the migrant boy or girl...
...There, at a twenty-year-old camp, entire families live in oneroom huts, but they feel they are fortunate...
...A supervisor for migrant education for the Florida Christian Ministry for Migrants seemed to sum it all up one hot day last year when the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor stopped at Belle Glade, Florida...
...We citizens who join the lobby for the excluded recognize that all is not affluence in the United States, and that the migratory worker needs more than eloquent commiseration...
...Efforts are being made to amend the law in ways that would set stricter limits on the importation of braceros and gradually raise wages to the prevailing state or national level...
...Many growers told the Subcommittee that the migrants had no idea at all of what to do with showers, toilets, screen doors, and other facilities found in some camps...
...She has even found homes where parents refused to send their children to school because they didn't have the necessary clothing...
...Broken glass littered the floor...
...f However brief their stay might be, the domestic workers leave their mark on communities and entire counties...
...three states absorb 40,000 or more...
...Our bill, when revisions are completed, will probably also restrict dangerous work for those under eighteen years of age...
...For a national program is needed— one that will work with the states, the counties, the municipalities, the individuals already at work...
...All was not changed, however, by tractors, automatic seeders, weeders, and harvesters...
...f His diet is poor...
...The reason," she told us, "is that they have lost out along the road...
...Even in the nine states that have minimum wages for child labor outside of school hours, officials often do not have the supervisors they need for adequate inspection...
...On tobacco fields, workers stoop to thin plants...
...We had taken many suggestions from witnesses at hearings...
...Where there are no schools, children stay home during the day or work out in the fields...
...These workers help produce and process crops worth billions of dollars yearly (a single county, Fresno in California, boasts $1 million reaped daily from farm production...
...ANOTHER STRUGGLE Another issue of crucial importance to migrant farm workers is now before the Senate— the extension of Public Law 78, which provides for the importation of Mexican farm laborers under international agreement...
...f Without fixed residence, few migrants can meet local requirements for welfare, maternity, and other benefits, though they need these services more than anyone else...
...Slow-moving machines, big and black on the horizon, appeared to be masters of the soil and its products...
...f We had the farmer in mind, too, when we offered a new draft of a bill to give low-cost loans for construction of better housing...
...This hardly seems an excessive amount for a nation in which two and one-half times as much was appropriated during the last fiscal year for the care, protection, and habitat improvement of migratory birds...
...Though he has no real certainty of income in his old age, the migrant receives only spotty social security coverage...
...For many fruits and vegetables, there was no substitute for human judgment or human hands...
...Occasionally there are reports of workers who make $200 a week or thereabouts on highly specialized work—as sorters in packing sheds, for example...
...Vineyards and orchards must have specialists who know how to prune and pick...
...The youngsters' feet were bare...
...They are more liable, therefore, to need hospital services, even if they don't have the money to pay for them...
...But these "highs" are considered in the overall average...
...he and his family endure more disease and ill health than any other Americans...
...Those youngsters, said the supervisor, lag years behind their non-migrant fellows in schools...
...It is imperative that their wretched existence be understood by the other millions of citizens who do not have to face want or despair...
...As they travel north from Florida as far as New England, or from Texas to groves and fields near the Great Lakes, or from Southern California to Oregon and Washington, the migrants stop off at forty-seven states some time every year...
...A witness in Wisconsin told us that "most families do not have more than $500 left after their nine months of work...
...Much more could be said about present inequities...
...For instance: % The migrant earned an annual average of $710 from farm work in 1959, plus another $201 for non-farm labor...
...This is a "good" camp...
...THE EXCLUDED by SENATOR HARRISON A. WILLIAMS EVEN AS LATE as 1939, when Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., investigated farm labor conditions in California, many Americans still cherished the belief that small, independent farmers gave us most of the food and fiber we needed for ourselves and for foreign trade...
...Sometimes the average is even lower...
...Some migrants end the season in debt to the labor contractor...
...They are the migratory farm workers of the United States...
...The ironic fact is that these imported wage earners, who work under separate international agreements, often have more security and certainty of employment than our domestic workers...
...To work these and other crops, great numbers of laborers are needed, but usually for only a few weeks or so at a time...
...There are many more migrants on the road than most people realize...
...Many growers had told us that they could not afford to pay for good housing that would be used for only a few weeks at a time...
...If we are to succeed in taking effective action against this national disgrace, Americans everywhere will have to take a part in ending it...
...Much has already been said in television documentaries and in newspaper or magazine articles...
...They have lost out...
...Twenty-eight states have 5,000 or more at peak...
...Youngsters play hide-andseek on the bare wooden floor...
...If Federal help could be given, however, they might find it possible to build decent quarters...
...For every peak wage, there is a "low...
...Perhaps an even more compelling question is: when will we do it...
...This "lobby"—which would simply be an informed American public determined to put overdue laws on our Federal books—would speak for the poorest Americans in the nation— Americans who for forty years have been politically powerless to help themselves...
...In some of those states the employer may elect to—or not to —let them sign up for it...
...To "chop" cotton, for instance, the most efficient device seems to be a worker who can weed out surplus plants with a hoe...
...Even where they may be legally qualified, difficulties arise...
...Infant mortality is higher and sickness more common among the migrants than among other citizens...
...They have been called "the excluded," "the forgotten," "the voiceless...
...And so we offered a bill to give practical training to those who want to learn how to live better lives...
...Though the migrants work in the nation's third most dangerous industry (only mining and construction trades cause more mishaps than agriculture), they have the protection of workmen's compensation in only seventeen states...
...This amounted to fifty-one per cent ef medical bills owed by the migrants in that period...
...Though automation enabled the farmer to plant and harvest on a scale impossible on the small family farm, the grower discovered that machines could not do every job...
...We have added up the cost of this program: it would require $6.8 million annually in Federal funds...
...On many a farm today, there is still no substitute...
...But LaFollette helped dramatize the fact that "factories in the field" were very much at work, not only in grain country, but in truck farm regions, too...
...1} We are seeking a practical minimum age for agricultural child labor...
...Not only do they lack what other citizens call the necessities of life...
...A Minnesota clergyman told us that a small community hospital there had to write off $3,554 as bad debts in two summers...
...And yet, though the migrants have helped to create much wealth, they have not shared in it...
...Under the summer or early autumn sun, other workers help grow or harvest berries, nuts, celery, lettuce— the produce we later see so neatly packaged in plastic bags at supermarkets...
...As crops mature, these workers travel in their buses, trucks, or automobiles south to north across the slopes, valleys, and plains of our nation...
...We need a lobby to speak for the excluded...
...Two other bills were offered, one to apply collective bargaining rights to agriculture, and another to establish a National Citizens Council to keep the public and President informed and concerned about the migratory worker...
...Since August, 1959, the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, on our travels through the nation, has found out how poor the migrant really is, how desperate his life has become...
...One of the reasons it is good is the Ministry's recreation center, a homely, barnlike structure where a worker can go at nightfall instead of staying in his hut...
...Opponents of even this modest program may claim that individual states have already taken steps against some of the worst conditions endured by the migratory worker...
Vol. 25 • September 1961 • No. 9
