HUDDLED MASSES DEPARTMENT: The Haitian migrants stoop, the growers conquer.

...Because they must send money home to families who are as desperate as they, the Haitians have no options...

...and for the crew leaders, who, according to Carr (who has reviewed their financial statements) averaged between $200,000 and $300,000 in 1979...

...George Carr, an attorney with the Legal Aid office in Salisbury, insists there are always too many pickers for too little work...

...Somehow they must find their way back to Florida, since the citrus and sugar cane season will begin soon...

...He might also have mentioned the filth, the toilets that didn't work (forcing the men to use the bushes), or the extra $5 for the cot, a fortune when the total weekly wage is $16...

...According to Legal Aid's George Carr, "The Haitians know how much they should get for each box they pick, but they don't know they are supposed to earn the minimum wage or what it is...

...It happens to Legal Aid lawyers all the time," says Carr...

...Chris Burn, one of the NAFO workers who lost his job, notes that the enfeebled advocacy groups often voice the only complaints when attempts are made in Congress to weaken existing rules or pass new laws which would give the growers even greater latitude to take advantage of migrants...

...According to Elwyn Deal, assistant director of the Maryland Cooperative Extension Service, yields for vegetables and field crops were generally "good, if not better than normal" late last summer and fall...

...Georges asks softly...

...He will assign them the worst spot in the field, one that has already been picked, so their income will be cut even further...

...This past summer, for example, a group of Haitian immigrants was beaten and kept in virtual bondage in North Carolina, forbidden to leave their camp...

...According to one Labor Department staff member, few will actively pursue reports of poor working conditions and housing violations on the part of growers...

...Carr claims that grower thinking has even ensnared and compromised some of the helpers...

...In all the cases I've investigated," the lawyer insists, "I've never found that these taxes were sent to the Government...

...They are quiet and shy in the presence of a reporter...

...Carr says one of the critical elements is the link between the growers and crew leaders...

...In the mid-1970s, when the Internal Revenue Service set out to collect unpaid taxes from independent contractors, including crew leaders, the American Farm Bureau Federation and other status quo groups lobbied fiercely against the IRS dragnet program...

...He adds that the migrants' average life expectancy is forty-nine years, that farm work is the third most dangerous occupation in the country, that mortality on the job is four times the average in the American economy...

...Gordon Clarity, a supervisor in the Department of Labor, acknowledges that communication is a problem but claims the Department reaches the workers nevertheless...

...While it involves a mesh of individuals and institutions—Federal, state, and local laws and enforcement agencies, crew leaders and advocate groups—it is the grower who has the power to control the housing and work conditions, set the rates the crew leaders will pay, shape the laws and determine the boundaries in which the enforcement and helping agencies will maneuver...

...No one knows for sure and very few care...

...Gordon Clarity admits that routine investigations and responses to complaints are down by about 20 per cent since 1979...

...So if you want to get promoted, the rule is do nothing...

...Worse still, the regulators are hopelessly understaffed: the Department of Labor division that enforces the farm labor law has a total of twenty inspectors (down from twenty-three, two years ago) to cover farm workers across the country...

...What is also secure is the system, which is tightly stacked against them, against those they've replaced and those who will follow...

...With an average crew of 40 migrant workers earning, say, $35 a week, the crew leader can pocket $1,776 over the twelve-week season...

...But where could I go...

...Their activities, which included informing farm workers about the effects of pesticides and offering immediate aid through a toll-free hot line, have ground to a halt...

...The law requires we hold only one per region...

...Was it, as a Labor Department official explains, accidental, a combination of a bad season and too many crew leaders unwittingly assembling too many workers...

...Rodolphe recalls that "the day after we arrived, Bud took us to the office in Salisbury to apply for the stamps...

...While there have always been poor people to pick the crops—whether whites, blacks, or Chicanos—fewer and fewer Americans will work for the migrants' average annual $2,300 income, since welfare payments, while well below the official poverty line, are still higher...

...Similarly Rural America, which ran a large housing program for migrants, lost two-thirds of its staff...

...But maybe there were more...

...Why were the farmers so concerned...

...Now they have no rights, no Social Security, no unemployment," says Bob Frishman, Chisholm's legislative assistant...

...And while the numbers ensure the migrants' poverty, they also ensure the growers' and crew leaders' profits...

...All had fled the repression and poverty in Haiti...

...Nevertheless, the health officer issued a permit, allowing it to open...

...In 1974, when Congress enacted the Farm Labor Contractor Registration Act (FLCRA), supposedly the Government's most powerful tool to attack migrant exploitation, the growers lobbied vigorously to ensure that responsibility was placed squarely on crew leaders...

...The Washington-based National Farm Workers Organization (NAFO) and kindred organizations have met a fate similar to Legal Aid's...

...As Bud's wife Sally put it, "The Haitians work hard and don't complain...

...But of course, this would be Utopia...

...They also don't know that the Social Security and unemployment compensation taxes the crew leader routinely deducts from their pay often wind up in the crew leader's pockets...

...Once aboard, they move with the season, up the coast: to Georgia in the spring to pick watermelons, then on to the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, for peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, and beans, and finally to New York and New Jersey in the fall, for apples...

...Previously, surplus workers meant the growers could lower the price per box of vegetables picked from what they originally offered...

...If they learn about Legal Aid and come to us when they've been fired, it can take three years for a judgment if we file a suit...

...Once they arrived at the migrant camp in, Wicomico County, Maryland, the script changed...

...now the LSC can represent only permanent resident aliens or citizens, which eliminates the Haitians in a stroke, since they are classified as refugees...

...To begin with, they must go to remote places and spend a long time looking into cases...

...Even with the pressure from the growers, the structure of the enforcement system—which involves several divisions in the Department of Labor (including the currently embattled Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and local health departments—is a maze of fragmented, overlapping functions which almost guarantees that responsibility will be assumed by none...

...Also they amount to hefty bonuses for crew leaders who can save more than 12 per cent of the payroll...

...For various reasons, the Haitians are particularly vulnerable and therefore particularly attractive to growers...

...Thus when a crew leader from Maryland, Bud Luther, offered three months' work, the men grabbed at the chance...

...With its Federal grant cut, the staff of twenty-five was slashed to five and those remaining exist on private donations...

...Occasionally I hear some ask, 'What should we do if a migrant worker says he doesn't want to go back to the migrant camp?' They dismiss the obvious, which is that he has a right to work anywhere he wants...

...Further, there is a growing unwillingness to endure the abuses that have been common in farm work...

...When Luther recruited him and the others, it all sounded wonderful...

...In fact, Social Security taxes are one of the easiest items for the Government to monitor...

...Or if we get them reinstated right away, reaching an agreement out of court, they still have to work under the same crew leader who makes their lives miserable...

...So nothing is left to chance...

...Moreover, the extra workers translate into steady rental income for the crew leaders and growers who collect the same $10 for the dilapidated quarters whether migrants work or not...

...Although these restrictions made it nearly impossible to find the growers guilty of any infractions of the Act, by 1978 several charges had successfully been pressed against them, largely on the strength of the incidental basis provision...

...Rodolphe Francois, Civil Leones, and the cousins Yves and Georges Lilly sit around a table in a small room on Maryland's Eastern Shore where, through an interpreter, they agree to talk...

...To make matters worse, the farm worker advocacy groups are disappearing...

...With very little union organizing going on and the helping agencies gutted, it is clear that the ball is more than ever in the growers' court...

...By mid-August, the four were making $16 to $35 a week...

...They Barbara Koeppel, a contributing editor of The Progressive, wrote about undocumented workers in "The New Sweatshops," November 1978 issue...

...While it is feasible for local health officers to inspect each camp at least once a season, it is politically impossible...

...The growers are the backbone of the rural economy and therefore the major political force...

...By law, information on wages and conditions and complaint channels is supposed to be posted in the camps and farms in languages the workers can read...

...Even if the migrants were aware of their rights, there is little practical recourse open to them...

...all had searched in vain for work in Miami's Little Haiti...

...But even then, there were deductions: $3 each for every ride to Salisbury for food stamps and provisions, fifty cents for cokes and seventy-five cents or a dollar for beer sold in the fields and $10 a week for a cot (though Bud had said $5 in Florida) in the fly-infested barracks...

...Because they are black, the scope of possibilities is narrowed further...

...In its last session, Congress cut the Legal Services Corporation budget by a third and attached new limitations to legal service activities...

...Of the 1,577 crew leaders and their assistants found guilty of violations in 1980, only 373 were fined, for a total of $848,000—about $2,300 per crew leader, or the equivalent of a half week's income...

...Frishman says the bill would rely on the conscience of shoppers to check produce for the stamp, and on the growers to respond to the concern underlying the bill...

...But in Somerset County, the commissioner is Dennett Butler, himself a member of the Somerset County Growers Association...

...When I complained about the lack of work, Bud yelled he'd spent $2,000 on gas to bring us here and I could leave if I liked...

...And they are exhausted...

...Predictably, the American Farm Bureau Federation supported the restrictions, which just as predictably passed both houses of Congress...

...So surplus workers are carted in because fewer hands spell a slower harvest and that means reduced profits...

...If the crop was bad, he said we would be paid anyway...

...Poor and typically unskilled, they find job opportunities rare, especially in Florida, where there is already a native army of workers with few skills...

...Instead, Georges talks only of the work, because he and the others are willing to endure the rest...

...for the growers, who have one of the richest, most powerful lobbies in the country...

...Most important, by bringing in a large destitute population, the growers can be sure there will be no complaints, since the migrants are trapped by the oversupply of willing hands...

...What is certain is that they add only a new face to an old system whose ultimate irony is its supreme success for all but those who labor within it...

...The workers who produce the food, on the other hand, line up for food stamps...

...They have adopted the farmers' position, that the migrants must stick with the growers, like indentured servants, because the crop must be picked...

...As a result, the tax relief act of 1978 was passed, exonerating everyone who had been under scrutiny...

...George Carr insists it really doesn't matter how many investigations are made or violations cited...

...Under the Chisholm bill, growers certified as having complied with its provisions could label their produce accordingly...

...The obliging Senators then contacted Labor Secretary Ray Marshall, who promptly narrowed "incidental" to mean "any full-time employe of a farmer, processor, etc., who does not spend more than 20 per cent of his time in farm labor contracting activities...

...We each made about $110 that week, but that was the last time...

...We worked two hours the first day and nine hours a day without stopping for the next four...

...What matters is what happens afterwards, if back wages are paid and fines levied...

...As one Labor Department observer noted, "We should be able to fine the farmers, or attach their farms where the abuses are horrendous...

...One or two days' growth [past the optimal time] can cost the grower $1,000 to $2,000," says Carr...

...Says Carr, "It is like the fox appointing the dog to watch the hen house...

...More often than not, however, they stay fired," Pont du Jour explains...

...Why was work so scarce...

...A captive labor force must work or they won't eat," Carr adds...

...Without them, we would have starved...

...Though this can still happen, the large numbers are crucial for the farmers in other ways...

...At the local level, the abuses are most blatant...

...And most Americans don't really care, being only concerned about the best buy in the supermarket...

...Because few speak or understand English, they cannot look for work on their own, or deal in any way with those around them...

...But nothing could be further from the truth...

...Clarity explains that "Congress, in its wisdom—and I think wisely—intended the statute to provide relief from the crew leaders because it thought that growers and processors were more reliable...

...Other days we never even left the camp," Rodolphe recalls...

...Once the tomatoes or cucumbers are the precise size that brings the highest price, the hands must be there to pick...

...all were graduates of Krome, the barbed-wire-enclosed detention camp hard by the Florida Everglades...

...It's just assumed they are poor and will qualify...

...But such signs are few, and never printed in French, which most of the Haitians can't read anyway, since illiteracy is the rule in their country...

...The growers spread the notion that if there are abuses, the crew leaders are to blame...

...Last fall, Representative Shirley Chisholm, Democrat of New York, introduced a migrants' bill of rights...

...Says Yves Pont du Jour, "They must do everything the crew leader asks or he will fire them on the spot and they will be out on the road without jobs, 1,000 miles from anywhere they know in the middle of a population that can't even speak to them...

...But critics argue the growers will denounce the Chisholm scheme, claiming it would increase labor costs...

...On the other hand, when Federal investigators come down on the growers, the associations complain to the local members of Congress about "harassment...

...The four were brought by bus from Florida in June, along with eleven others...

...After that, some days we would go to the field and wait hours, working maybe only two...

...Once again, they gathered their strength and found themselves fifty-two friends in the Senate...

...asks Yves Pont du Jour, a Haitian assistant in the Salisbury Legal Aid office...

...The workers are like night watchmen, sitting and waiting for the crop to ripen...

...How many meetings were held this past summer...

...What's more, he notes, "the migrants have no constituency...

...All we wanted was work," says Georges...

...No one sees them or even connects them with the food they eat...

...The unpaid taxes amount to bonuses for the growers because the lax collection procedures naturally allow them to pay the crew leaders less for each bin filled by the workers...

...At the Westovercamp, where more than 1,000 migrants lived last summer, families of five and six were packed into one-room accommodations, and unsanitary conditions led to a Congressional investigation...

...Most local bureaucrats owe them their jobs and they are certainly not going to rock the boat...

...We hold open meetings in the farm areas, advising the workers of their rights...

...At one camp, where more than 1,000 migrants lived last year, whole families were packed into one-room accommodations In fact, law enforcers suspected of zealotry may find themselves out of business altogether...

...What this did," says Carr, "is tell the growers exactly what [crew leader] hours to show on their records...

...others guess 15,000 to 20,000 pick crops up and down the East Coast...

...But if you go out and do nothing, the only ones who will complain are the advocates, who have no power...

...Some say there are 10,000 of them...

...What about the Federal investigators...

...until now, however, the Department of Labor has never investigated taxing violations in the migratory farm work economy...

...The price of compliance would then be passed on to consumers and the ensuing uproar could spark a cutback in conscience...

...Pending the millennium, the thousands of Haitians and others joining the migrant stream can expect more of the same...

...Thus their silence is secured...

...In Maryland, for example, the county commissioner appoints the local health officer who in turn is supposed to inspect the migrant camps and issue permits, certifying camps as habitable...

...He said we would pick from June through September, make $2,500, even $3,000 for the three months if we worked hard...

...Carr adds that migrants are always eligible...

...How could they know about their rights...

...Three months later, the four are as poor as when they arrived...

...In a November 1979 letter, Marshall assured the Senators that with the new definition of incidental, "we believe that in the great majority of cases, neither the corporate employer nor any of its employes will be required to register as a farm labor contractor...

...As a result, no matter how flagrant the abuse, under FLCRA provisions the growers are liable only if they "personally" recruit the workers for "others," or if their full-time employes do the recruiting on "more than an incidental basis...

...But regardless of the locale, the migrants are locked into a system that robs them of their health, a minimum wage, and decent work and living conditions...

...for Americans, who reap a bounty of food at prices cheaper than almost anywhere in the world...

...I don't know," he admits...

...made the 1,000-mile trek up the coast, joining the swarm of migrants who harvest food for America's tables...