Farm workers Don't Have to be Poor
Rosenberg, Tina
Farm workers Don't Have to be Poor The bosses say higher wages would mean fewer jobs. Don't believe, them by Tina Rosenberg Sometimes the news from south Texas seems like news from the Third...
...It is already completely light and the remaining bus in the parking lot is filling up fast...
...Mendoza died in the hospital...
...The crew leaders call me 'el peor guy,'—the worst guy," he says...
...Those not so lucky come to the bridge, hoping to find a good day's picking or better, a good trip, with lots of 10-hour workdays and a piece rate that averages $7 an hour...
...It's still dark...
...I didn't shoot at them," he later corrected a television reporter...
...When the workday was finished, the crew leader drove the crew back to the International Bridge and then called an ambulance...
...That includes the funds they should spend on more decent wages...
...Probably not...
...Workers' compensation, which was passed on a state-by-state basis, excluded farm workers everywhere but in Ohio and New Jersey...
...There was neither garbage collection nor a paved road...
...He comes to the bridge every day, he says, and last week and this week he hasn't worked at all...
...It came about because in the 1930s and 1940s, when all that labor legislation was written, farmers were a powerful lobby...
...Despite the promise of 8- or 10-hour workdays seven days a week, there was work only two or three hours a day...
...Progress, Texas style Most people's awareness of farm workers came and went during the late 1960s and early 1970s when the United Farm Workers (UFW) ran the grape and lettuce boycotts that eventually led to collective bargaining contracts with California growers...
...As a result, farm workers were at the outset excluded from laws guaranteeing a minimum wage, Social Security, unemployment insurance, management recognition of labor unions, health and safety standards, and protection against child labor...
...Between the Safeway and the farm there are so many profits taken that it's estimated that if consumers paid an extra nickel for lettuce, the farmer would get only two-thirds of a penny more...
...One jumped in the river and was drowned...
...and in the mid-1980s, the Texas legislature brought their work under the state's workmen's compensation plan...
...It's harassment from the Wage and Hour people," he says defensively...
...Her National Honor Society silver plaque is prominently displayed in the Trevinos' house...
...Don't believe, them by Tina Rosenberg Sometimes the news from south Texas seems like news from the Third World...
...Unlike his father, Chet Miller was convicted...
...Growers contract a crew leader, usually a Hispanic ex-farm worker who owns a bus...
...There were so many people here looking for farm work legally even before the liberalized immigration laws," reports Linder, "that if there weren't a minimum wage, people would probably take jobs at about $2 an hour...
...She's telling a joke...
...The law says that if a worker is making an overnight trip, the crew leader must show the worker in writing what kind of work it will be, his hours, pay, and the ownership of the field...
...Nor did they do so in California following the wage increases won there by the UFW...
...Los loopholes The residents of La Frontera are among the valley's 200,000 migrant farm workers and their families, who spend the winter months weeding, thinning, and picking valley produce and in the spring or summer pile into old cars and follow ap pies or beets north to Minnesota and New York...
...or who pay by-the-bucket rates that don't add up to the minimum wage...
...Now I knew why...
...They are the secondpoorest occupational group in the country, ahead only of domestics...
...But the good trips are rare...
...One summer, he says, he was recruited to go to Pecos and harvest melons...
...who house workers in buildings with no water, heat, or blankets...
...Rios filed a suit through Texas Rural Legal Aid...
...Blanca, a high-school junior, is in a college-prep program and hopes to go to the University of Texas...
...Harlingen, Texas, one of the main immigrant thoroughfares in the Rio Grande Valley, was quickly overwhelmed with several thousand Central Americans forced to loiter in buildings and sleep in the streets...
...This accounts for much of the workers' predicament...
...Texas's unions, by contrast, are weak...
...The living room couch sat on a floor made of boards and sawdust...
...The average per capita income of farm workers in San Juan, Texas is around $1,400—less than the average income in Mexico...
...street...
...The Texas Rangers brutally broke up the state's first farm-labor strike in 1966...
...These people are already U.S...
...Ruben Saenz, the head of the valley's crew leader organization, says that some crew leaders make $250,000 a year...
...Nothing happened, but Rios feels the crew leaders blacklisted him for it...
...Yet these gains mean little in the face of the valley's current economic slump brought on by Mexico's own financial crisis...
...They still stream across at Hidalgo and the other border towns...
...In addition, most farm and domestic workers were black...
...But she wasn't telling a joke...
...Many workers and their unions and lawyers told me of crew leaders who don't provide water or toilets...
...citizens or at least hold the legal status Harlingen's minions were clamoring for...
...But the futility of the law is apparent after a few minutes at the bridge...
...Over the years Texas farm workers have received—at a shockingly leisurely pace—some of the legal protections they were originally denied...
...There is no collective bargaining agreement between Texas farm workers and growers...
...And some lawsuits have forced growers to make small changes...
...During my stay in the valley, I heard dozens of horror stories about crew leaders...
...Ten years later almost to the day and almost in the same spot, Miller's son Chet shot at four Mexicans who had crossed the river onto the property...
...After they take out their profits, farmers tend to turn as much money as they can back into the land in order to catch that big harvest...
...Just go ask in any of the schools" "That's a joke," said another farmer uneasily...
...Additionally, some of the county commissioners have been filing injunctions to insure that new neighborhoods where farm workers locate have water and roads...
...who withhold and then illegally pocket Social Security...
...In his early forties, he is the head of Helle Farms, which he owns with his father and two younger brothers...
...she asked me with alarm...
...Luis Trevino was born in Mexico, but Oralia and the children, like most people in La Frontera, were born in the United States...
...Tommy Helle's family has been farming in the Rio Grande valley since the 1920s...
...Farmers pay workers poorly not because they have to, but because they can...
...During a demonstration on his ranch on Memorial Day 1975, a farmer named C.K...
...Helle Farms grows about 4,000 acres of vegetables and melons, and Helle Tomato is the largest tomato producer in the valley...
...While this seems distressing, there are other folks in Texas who endure much worse—working below minimum wage for years at a time, suffering Third World-caliber filth and disease, and dying 20 years before their time...
...Another hopeful sign is that more MexicanAmericans are winning political office in the state, although, as the majority of Hispanic crew leaders illustrates, this is no guarantee of sensitivity to workers' problems...
...The system most farmers use is to have a huge crop in the field the year gold is struck, which can make up for four or five bad years...
...I always wondered why so many farm workers I spoke with told me they had filed suits...
...Miller shot 11 people with a 12-gauge shotgun...
...One son wants to become an airplane mechanic, the other a welder...
...Most farm workers would never go up to a crew leader to ask what he was paying...
...But these extra rights haven't made much difference...
...Indeed, even with all the substandard and unsupervised conditions, the biggest complaint of workers and union organizers is not low pay but too little work...
...In effect, the workers are themselves subsidizing their new benefits ." Such abuses are at bottom made possible by the tremendous labor pool...
...So, the farmers reason that they couldn't give workers any kind of a real raise without pricing themselves right out of the market...
...After two weeks of making barely enough to buy groceries, he wanted...
...The onion harvest is coming," he says, eyes brightening...
...He could choose from dozens of silent, hoping people...
...The price shippers offer to farmers depends on the supply not just in Texas but also elsewhere...
...I'd say a hundred percent," he replies...
...At 5:30 on a typical morning, a crowd of men has already started to gather under the overhang of a nearby shopping-center roof...
...But his crew leader refused to give him his pay early so he could leave...
...A morning at the bridge Without exception, the farmers I spoke with said that the way farm workers live now is right and natural...
...Then they need so many people that I bring my relatives...
...Vegetable farming is like high-stakes gambling...
...The image of the farmer is of someone who oppresses labor and tries to get it for nothing," Helle says...
...And La Frontera had no fresh water...
...Chavez's principal weapon was the boycott, not the strike, and he succeeded only by focusing all his resources on California, a state with liberal union laws, a highly boycottable, specific-to-California product like grapes, and a liberal legislature and a pro-farm workers governor, Jerry Brown...
...The luckier migrants, like the Trevinos, have regular, good summer work and a car...
...their infant mortality rate, 25 percent higher...
...During the onion harvest in March and April, there are 1,000 people here, but it's February now and there are only 200 workers waiting at the bridge...
...than they did in Mexico but, due to the overflow of labor, usually end up working fewer hours...
...Margarito Rios certainly has been having trouble drawing any...
...I ask how many of his crew leaders were harassed that way...
...Margarito Rios, "el peor guy," was not chosen to work this day...
...So price finally depends most of all on the weather...
...The crew leader makes 90 cents for each bushel of spinach, for example, and then pays his field hands 50 cents per bushel...
...I shot them ." Despite dozens of witnesses, a grand jury did not indict him...
...who expose them to deadly pesticides...
...Hispanics now hold three of the valley's four seats in the state legislature, and not coincidentally, in just this past year, Texas passed a right-to-know pesticide law and extended unemployment compensation privileges to farm workers...
...Is this true...
...When I visited La Frontera, Texas it resembled a Central American town, filled with the sounds of roosters crowing and mothers yelling in Spanish, the cries of children playing in old tires in front of small wooden houses, and the scent of smoke from burning trash...
...There is no minimum wage on very small farms, and even at the biggest ones workers are often cheated out of the $3.35 minimum...
...Farm workers in Texas do not receive overtime and are virtually uncovered by labor-relations or safety laws...
...Supply is what's decisive...
...This time there was some progress, Texas-style...
...Last year he made about $800...
...why pick someone who asks questions...
...Do you know how many of them there are...
...In fact, the valley's production is up...
...But inside, the Trevinos' family pictures— Louis and Oralia have four children—were tacked up against a few planks that only suggested walls...
...In 1950, they were brought into Social Security...
...average...
...Despite hard times, vegetable farmers have not mechanized, moved their operations to Mexico, changed crops, or shut down on any significant scale...
...About a hundred feet away a line of lights from the border patrol booths stretches across the haze...
...After waiting around for another hour, Rios goes home...
...That this is the fundamental truth can be seen every morning at the International Bridge at Hidalgo...
...If you think you'd never do anything to support exploitation like this, maybe you should stop eating that salad...
...Driving around his farms in his white suburban van with two cellular phones, Helle says that if his regular employees need money for food or medicine to tide them over when there is no work, he lends it to them, taking it out of their paychecks when work starts again...
...Farm work runs like Kelly Girl office help...
...But a look at the economics of vegetable fanning shows that the trade-off does not work as neatly as farmers claim and workers fear...
...The crew leaders now have to pay Social Security, federal and state unemployment insurance, workmen's compensation, etc.," explains Marc Linder, an attorney with Texas Rural Legal Aid, a tax-supported organization that handles farm workers' civil claims against farmers and crew leaders, "so they just take it out of what they used to pay the workers...
...Well, with such a large labor pool available, the farmers don't have to find out...
...The ones who complain are the ones who take chances, and talking to me was taking a chance...
...Even though workers may end up poorer in south Texas than in northern Mexico, they still want to come to the U.S...
...The local unemployment rate is about four times the U.S...
...And this tight-fisted approach is exacerbated by the cuts taken by distributors and other middlemen...
...And they're already all on welfare...
...Just as the available supply of produce dwarfs all other price considerations, the available supply of labor makes all other wage considerations unimportant...
...They are looking at the televisions in a duty-free shop window as they wait for crew leaders to pull up in their school buses...
...Helle, whose family has owned his farm for four generations, once told me in all seriousness, "The workers may not have anything, but I didn't either when I was 17...
...Saenz's membership files contain lists of violations of even the few legal protections afforded Texas farm workers—failure to pay wages when due, failure to keep records, unsafe transport, hiring illegal aliens...
...Helle's office in the town of Mission is decorated with paintings and sculptures of tomatos and wall hangings from Texas A&M, where he earned a degree in agricultural economics...
...Cesar Chavez began organizing in California in 1962 and won the contracts 13 years later...
...There are plenty of workers in south Texas who will take the wages just where they are...
...Part of the problem is certainly that farm workers were specifically exempted from every major piece of social legislation of the New Deal—the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Social Security Act, the Occupational Health and Safety Act, and the National Labor Relations Act...
...Overall, this complete abdication of responsibility reminds me of Latin America (where I've worked as a reporter for the past several years...
...The farmers' case does not hold up, because farmers do not behave the way they talk...
...to work or live here legally...
...Excluding the two largest categories of black labor was a price President Franklin Roosevelt paid to win support for the New Deal from southern congressmen...
...who drive workers in unsafe trucks...
...Their position is that higher salaries or better working conditions would force them to cut back on jobs...
...This meticulous set of exceptions didn't happen because there was something intrinsically different about agricultural labor...
...Oralia is very proud that her children have missed only one day of school due to the family's summer trips north...
...But even when the laws have favored workers, often law enforcement has not...
...The workers make higher hourly wages in the U.S...
...But in Latin America, the roots of this powerlessness are centuries old...
...From the outside, Luis and Oralia Trevino's home in La Frontera, with its clean white paint and red roof, looked like it belonged on any prim Main Tina Rosenberg is a writer based in Chile...
...The son of Cirilo Mendoza filed a union complaint alleging that a crew leader told his father to wait in the bus all day after his father complained of chest pains...
...Especially when you don't pay for all those extras, crew leader can be a lucrative profession...
...At lunch one'day, a farm manager abruptly ended a conversation about wages to tell me that the new immigration bill would allow the Mexicans to retake Texas...
...In 1974, the Supreme Court admonished the Rangers for acting as the personal police force of the growers...
...in ,1966, many categories of them were guaranteed the federal minimum wage...
...Hourly wage rates in Mexico are currently less than a tenth of those in Texas, certainly a big enough difference to have already pulled farming out of Texas if that were the decisive consideration...
...Things got so bad that the cops finally shut down the town's INS office...
...But he wants to set me straight: "On my farm, everyone makes minimum wage...
...In Texas it was achieved by design...
...Supposedly coming out of the other 40 cents is Social Security, a safe bus for workers, toilets, fresh drinking water, and unemployment and workers' compensation insurance...
...He in turn hires the farm workers...
...to go home...
...I approach Rios after two full buses have already gone...
...Farmers say that their animosity towards the unions does not stem from self-interest...
...What the farmers' behavior shows is that while labor costs are one factor in their business decisions, they are not the only one...
...If they stay in Mexico," Newt Dyer, another vegetable farmer, told me, "they'll do nothing but carry tortillas on their heads" The Trevinos provide at least one counterexample to these Texas truisms...
...Farm workers' life expectancy is about 25 percent shorter than the national average...
...Worse still, in the Rio Grande Valley farmers could cut wages in half and still have fields full of pickers...
...Like when the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) recently adopted a new policy of requiring immigrant aliens to remain at their point of entry into the country pending the lengthy processing period...
Vol. 21 • April 1989 • No. 3
