Slapping the hands that feed us

There’s
a beauty and grace to picking cabbage. On a Brockport farm on a sunny June
morning, men and machine move synchronously to harvest the crop.

            The pickers, three men ranging in
age from early 30s to mid-40s, are bent over, slowly walking backward as a
tractor continually pushes a large crate toward them. In unison, the men place
one hand on top of a cabbage while making a clean slice at its base with their
machetes. Without breaking stride or standing upright, they toss the cabbages
into the crate. This is repeated, without a break, until the crate is filled.

            It’s like a ballet. But it’s a
brutal ballet. Even on this relatively cool morning, the men are sweating
profusely.

            “Picking cabbage is the worst,” says
Juan Carlos, a migrant farmworker. “Out of five people, maybe one can do it.
It’s like having a nail in your back.”

            The tractor only stops when it’s
time to change crates. The men can then grab a minute or two to stretch, sip
some water, and sharpen their machetes. The blades must be kept sharp, so the
cabbage can be harvested quickly. “I have cut myself many times,” Juan says.
“If it’s not deep, I keep working. If it’s deep, I wait until it heals. Once I
had eight stitches and missed four days of work, no more. I needed the money.”

            By all accounts, farmwork is
demanding labor, requiring long hours in all kinds of weather. It also requires
special skills. “One of the myths in society is that these migrant workers are
unskilled workers,” says George Lamont, an apple farmer in Albion who owns
about 500 acres. “That is entirely wrong. These are highly skilled workers. It
takes two-to-three years to make a good apple-picker.”

            Yet the migrant workers who harvest
the bulk of our fruits and vegetables are among the lowest-paid laborers in the
US, averaging $10,000 a year. And in New York, the people who harvest our food
are subjected to further indignities due to the state’s “exclusion laws.”

            New York’s labor laws guarantee
nearly all workers the right to one day of rest each week, overtime pay, and
the right to bargain with employers as a collective unit. But under those laws,
farmworkers aren’t even defined as workers. “The term ’employee,'” the law
reads, “shall not include… individuals employed as farm laborers.” (The law
also excludes, among others, people employed in domestic service and those
employed by their parents or spouse.)

            A bill called the Farmworkers Fair
Labor Practices Act would remove these exclusions. In addition to granting farm
laborers collective bargaining rights, it would require employers to allow
their workers 24 consecutive hours of rest per week. It would also stipulate
that farm laborers receive the standard time-and-a-half overtime pay rate for
every hour over 120 hours worked during a two-week period.

            The bill has passed the Assembly
several times in the past few years, but has never made it to the floor of the
Senate for a vote.

            Farmworker advocates don’t mince
words about the exclusion laws. “It’s astounding that in the 21st
century, farmworkers are still fighting for rights that other workers have,”
says former Assemblyman Martin Luster, a Democrat from the southern tier who
co-sponsored the bill in the past. “The reforms are so common sense, there’s no
rational argument to justify the delay.”

            Rational or not, however, farmers
and lawmakers who oppose the bill have been arguing that its passage would
cripple the state’s agriculture industry, driving farmers out of business by
increasing labor costs, undercutting their competitiveness in the global
marketplace, and making them vulnerable to strikes that could leave their
harvests to rot and put them out of business.

            Those arguments have stalled the
bill in the legislative process, but the bill’s backers have reason for
optimism this year. Support continues to be strong in the Democrat-controlled
Assembly, but this year, several Republican Senators have taken up the cause. A
version of the act was introduced in the state Senate this year by Republican
Senator Olga Mendez of Harlem (locally, Republican Senator Joe Robach is a
co-sponsor). The legislation was referred to the Senate’s Labor Committee in
late April, but no further action has been taken on it thus far.

            At the time of its referral, sensing
that momentum may have shifted their way, farmworkers and their advocates
undertook a two-pronged march to Albany from Harlem and Seneca Falls, and
staged a rally at the capital urging passage of the act. The marchers covered
330 miles — a significant distance, but nothing compared to the journey
migrants make every year from impoverished, rural areas of Mexico to the green
fields of Upstate New York.

Most Americans
don’t realize that virtually all of our produce is still cultivated and
harvested by hand, mostly by migrant workers. There are about 60,000
farmworkers in New York, 40,000 of whom are migrant workers. Almost all
farmworkers in the state — migrant or otherwise — are Mexican or Mexican-American.

            In a small apartment just outside
Brockport, 12 men and one woman await the beginning of planting season. Five
dirty, old mattresses line the apartment’s dingy main room. Young men — some
as young as 14 — lounge on them watching a Spanish program on a small TV.

            The apartment has only one bathroom.
Its small bedroom is occupied by a young couple, the woman pregnant with the
couple’s first child. “She will work until she is ready to have the baby,” the
husband proudly says.

            The workers are initially reluctant
to talk about their experiences crossing the Mexican border (and many spoke on
condition of anonymity; all names of current workers have been changed to
protect their identity). The US restricts the number of immigrants allowed into
the country, and most of the people in this room are here illegally. If they
are discovered here, they will be sent back to Mexico.

            Because they can’t obtain permission
to enter the US legally, they undertake a dangerous, expensive journey across
the border. These border crossings are arranged and controlled by people known
as Coyotes.

            “The Coyotes are like a Mafia,” says
one former migrant worker. “An American and Mexican Mafia.”

            Pablo, the unofficial spokesman of
the group in the apartment, says the workers staying there are from different
areas in Mexico: Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guererro. This means some of them have
traveled 3,500 miles to harvest our produce.

            “It costs about $2,500 to get here,”
says Isidro, a young man sitting at the kitchen table in the Brockport
apartment. That includes the cost of crossing the border and traveling to New
York.

            Workers in the rural areas of
Mexico, where these people come from, earn about $4 a day, so it’s impossible
to save enough beforehand for the trip.

            “I had to borrow the money from a
rich man in my village to pay the Coyote,” says Salvador Solis, a former
migrant worker. Solis is now an organizer with CITA (Congreso Independentia
Trabajodores Agricolos, or the Congress of Independent Farmworkers, an advocacy
group). “Then I had to pay back the person I borrowed from. I borrowed $2,000
and I had to pay back $2,500 or $3,000, I don’t remember. It was interest.”

            Those who can’t borrow the money go
into debt either with the Coyotes or with contratistas,
the contractors or crew leaders who sometimes hire workers for farmers.

            It cost Victor $2,000 to cross the
border and an undetermined amount to travel from the border to Brockport. “I do
not know what it cost to get from the border to New York,” he says. “The contratista did not tell me. Each week I
pay $100, $150 to the contratista.
The rest of my money goes to Mexico. That is to pay back my passage across the
border, as well as for my family.”

            Farmwork tends to be sporadic. A
laborer may work 70 hours a week for several consecutive weeks, followed by
weeks with little or no work. When there’s no work, there’s no pay, so it may
take workers a year or more to repay their debt. And the high cost of the
journey is no guarantee of safety or fair treatment.

            It’s estimated that 400 people die
each year attempting to enter the US illegally from Mexico. The tragedy
discovered last month at a truck stop south of Victoria, Texas, in which 19
migrant workers died while being smuggled in a crowded, overheated tractor-trailer,
was remarkable (and deemed newsworthy worldwide) because so many people died in
the same horrific situation. But migrant workers die almost every day, alone or
in pairs or small bands, drowned in the Rio Grande River or dead from heat
exhaustion somewhere in the deserts of the southwest.

            Compounding the dangers, security at
the US-Mexican border has tightened since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, forcing
people to cross at more remote, and more treacherous, places.

            “It is dangerous,” says Daniel,
another worker in the apartment. “You can be assaulted by thieves. You cross
the desert, where you can die from the heat, from thirst.”

            Juan Carlos made it across the
border several years ago, and has remained in the US, working. “I went from
Chiapas to Florida,” he says. “It was six days without food, very little water.
I was in Phoenix for three days, living in the garage of the Coyote with 12
others. I was only given a little water. I did not know anything, anybody.”

            Mexicans make the journey, in spite
of the dangers, because the prospects for work here are better than what they
face at home. “The people we encounter are very, very poor,” says Donna Spence
of Migrant Education (an educational support program for children of migrants)
in Brockport. “I can’t imagine the conditions they’ve left to travel that far,
cross the border, and do the most difficult labor here.”

            It’s estimated by the Mexico
Solidarity Network that 80 percent of rural Mexicans live in poverty, 60
percent of them in “extreme poverty,” which is defined as earning, on average,
less than $2 a day.

            Raul is squatting under a tree
behind a small house, about 30 miles outside Brockport, that holds eight other
workers. He’s alone today. The rest have gone to “see someone who knows
someone” about getting a “mica”: forged papers.

            Raul’s story is similar to that of
millions of other Mexicans who enter the US illegally. “I came here because
there is no work in Mexico,” he says. “In Mexico, I worked bringing in
firewood, walking maybe three hours a day. I earn about 80 pesos (about $7) a
day. I have a wife and four children. My family does not have enough to eat. We
eat only a little, sometimes a little corn, some beans.”

New York
agriculture is big business, a $3 billion-a-year industry,
according to Julie Suarez of the New York State Farm Bureau. The Bureau one of
the principal opponents of the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act.

            An industry that large obviously
needs a lot of employees, but, given the seasonal nature of farm work, it needs
them for only short periods of time. “I don’t want a workforce of 100 all year
round,” says Kathy Martin of Martin Farms, a 3,000-acre operation in Brockport
that primarily grows cabbage and squash.

            Lamont, the apple farmer, agrees.
“Agriculture doesn’t want these people to stay all year if there’s not a job,”
he says. “We want them to come in, do the job, and go back.”

            Given the extreme poverty the
migrants are escaping, New York farmers generally feel they’re doing them a
favor by employing them at all. “They’re happy with the opportunity,” says
Lamont. “They’re coming from Mexico, where there are very few jobs. People
don’t understand that these people are making ten times what they’re making at
home.”

            While that’s undoubtedly true,
farmworker advocates still don’t believe the conditions under which workers
earn their pay are right or just.

            “[Farm] owners are benefiting from
those of us from poor countries who come here to work,” says Solis of CITA.
“They should not benefit from the poverty of other countries.”

            Bill Abom of Rural and Migrant
Ministries, another advocacy group, puts it more strongly. “It’s like the
argument about slavery, that the slaves were happy, that they weren’t the ones
complaining, it’s all these other people who are making trouble,” he says.
“Just because migrant workers aren’t complaining doesn’t mean they’re happy.”

            Conditions in New York’s farm fields
have only recently begun to approach modern — some would say humane —
standards.

            For example, in 1996, after two
years of legislative wrangling, a bill finally passed requiring drinking water
for all farm workers. (Yet, even with the law, water is not always available on
New York farms. “I know there are farms that don’t provide water,” says Barbara
Deming of Rural and Migrant Ministries. “I check.” Several migrant workers said
they’d worked on farms within the last two years where no water was provided.
“We did not know it was a law,” said one of them.)

            In 1998, advocates scored another
victory for farmworkers’ basic human rights, when a bill passed requiring that
toilets be made available in farm fields. According to advocates, legislators
acted only after they learned that fields were being contaminated with human
waste.

            Given the difficulty advocates faced
securing such basic rights, it’s small wonder the effort to pass the Farmworker
Fair Labor Practice Act has been an uphill battle.

            Farmers fear that removing the
exclusion laws will increase their labor costs, which are already a large
percentage of their expenses. Bob King, agricultural specialist with Cornell
Cooperative Extension, estimates that labor costs constitute about 45 percent
of the expenses of a crop, a figure Lamont also cites.

            Martin, of Martin Farms, estimates
her labor costs at 60 percent of her total expenses, and adds, “I might even be
low on that.”

            Since food prices are set by
retailers and food processors, farmers like Martin say they’re unable to pass
their costs along. “Mostly, we sell wholesale,” she says. “If [wholesalers]
want cabbage from me, and I say it’s ten cents a pound, and they say five cents
a pound, I have to decide [whether to] take the five cents or let it rot.”

            The globalized food market is also a
factor farmers cite in opposing the act. “China and Mexico have very low-cost
products, because their labor costs are so low,” Martin says. “They can put
their products into this country at a price [at which] the American farmer
can’t even produce his product.”

            “With all the foreign stuff coming
in, more of the money goes to the middle man and the retailer rather than the
farmer and the workers,” says Senator Robach. “I don’t know how to change
that.”

            “This is the first year we had to
subsidize apple farmers, since so much came in from Australia and China,”
Robach continues. “That blows my mind, that they could somehow bring it in
cheaper from there than we can produce in New York, which is an apple-growing
state.”

Robach is also
a bit bewildered that farmworkers, farmers, and their respective advocates
haven’t been able to find common ground, as he believes the Fair Practices Act
would benefit both groups.

            There’s clearly some confusion over
the bill’s various elements. For example, farmers complain that a mandatory day
of rest would be impractical, given the nature of harvesting. “A crop is
perishable,” says Martin. “If you’re picking cherries, the cherries aren’t
going to wait for that day off, so you’re going to get them picked and then
take your day off.”

            In fact, the bill does not require a
mandatory day of rest. It merely stipulates that workers be given the option of
taking 24 consecutive hours off. And even if they’re given that option, most
workers wouldn’t take it.

            “There are times [when farmworkers]
won’t take a day off, because they want to make as much as they can,” says
Sister Marlena Roeger of Hispanic Ministries. “The bottom line is, they should
have the option.”

            Victorrio, a farmworker, shrugs when
asked about receiving a day off. “It’s the nature of farming,” he says. “You
have to work.”

            Martin says that though her workers
may have put in a long week, when the peak day comes to harvest a crop, they
harvest. “Workers are very good at being aware of that,” she says.

            Victorrio is more concerned about
the lack of overtime pay. “It isn’t fair,” he says, that workers in other
industries get overtime and farmworkers do not.

            Suarez, of the Farm Bureau, says
that if overtime were enacted, farmworkers would lose out in the end. “Farmers
can’t increase their labor costs,” she says. “We would have to cut hourly wage
rates.” She also says some farmers would hire additional workers, so there
would be “more workers working fewer hours.”

            “There’s no place for overtime in
agriculture, absolutely not” Lamont says. “Because of the very high labor input
in the apple industry, we are opposed to anything that will increase the wage
rate. It’s not like you can schedule work in a plant and you can make it 40
hours every week. You have to have flexibility.”

            “In industry, 40 hours is a work
week,” Martin says. “On a farm, it’s 80. You can’t treat everything equally.”

            Actually, according to the act, a
standard work week for farm laborers is defined as 60 hours per week (again,
overtime would be required for time worked in excess of 120 hours over 14
days).

            A 1995 report by the New York State
Senate found that several states, including Florida, California, and Maryland,
require that farmworkers receive some form of overtime, and that this had no
discernible, negative impact on farmers. The report urged New York farmers to
do the same.

            The right to collective bargaining
is undoubtedly the most controversial part of the proposed legislation. But to
farmworker advocates, it’s probably the most important piece of the act,
because without it, workers are, as several of them say, “powerless.”

            The majority of farmworkers either
do not or cannot vote, so in political terms, they have no clout. Most, in
fact, don’t speak English, and many don’t even speak Spanish, but one of
several native Mexican languages. Opposing them are farmers who do vote and who
belong to the Farm Bureau, which has 32,000 “member families” in New York.

            “What we want is to end each worker
negotiating with each farmer,” says Aspacio Alcantara of CITA.

            Workers know there’s no shortage of
poor migrants like them willing to do the same work, so they have practically
no leverage in their negotiations with farmers. For that same reason, they are
also unlikely to complain about abuse.

            Pablo, the worker living in the
crowded apartment with 12 others, did speak up once, and he paid for it. He
describes being cursed and pushed by a farmer. “He didn’t know I understood
English,” he says. “I know what he was calling me. I told him it wasn’t good to
treat me like that.”

            Pablo says he was fired for speaking
up, and his two brothers also lost their jobs on the same farm, even though
they hadn’t said anything. None of them had any recourse.

            Lamont questions the objective of
collective bargaining. “As growers look at it, it’s a way to take something
away from them and give it to the workers, and this is a very delicate
situation,” he says. “Collective bargaining would just completely throw the
balance of power off.”

            Farmers say that workers already
bargain with them in informal groups and, if conditions on a particular farm
are bad, they’ll “vote with their feet” — leave to work on another farm.

            Suarez says the Farm Bureau is
opposed to collective bargaining “because of the perishability of agricultural
products. No other industry is as vulnerable to a strike as are farmers. That’s
the fear that plays on our members’ minds.”

            Jim Schmidt of Farmworker Legal
Services scoffs at the idea of a strike. “Farmworkers aren’t going to strike,”
he says. “Where’s the history of that? Migrant workers come here to work. Their
survival is based on earning money.”

            A strike would certainly not do
anyone any good. “When you have a crop out there, it’s to no one’s advantage to
let it rot,” says Martin. “They lose money, we lose money, we’re all out of
jobs.”

            Another finding of the 1995 Senate
report: the right to collective bargaining had no negative impact in
California, where workers have had the right since 1975. The report goes on to
say there had been an increase in production, gross sales, and profits in the
state since then.

It’s possible
that the act will be broken into parts to be voted on separately in the
Senate. This may be the most feasible course of action, in terms of getting any
of it enacted into law. But some advocates fear that once the more palatable
aspects of the act are passed, such as the optional day of rest, they’ll never
get other, more contentious, rights, such as collective bargaining.

            Republican State Senator George
Maziarz, of North Tonawanda, opposes the act, saying it would hurt farmers
economically. However, he says, “I think something like a day of rest could be
passed, with the support of the Farm Bureau.”

            Republican Senator Jim Alesi, of
Perinton, also supports the optional day of rest. And he believes that once
given the right to bargain collectively, other rights and benefits will follow.
“With this ability, they can negotiate things such as overtime pay, workers’
compensation, unemployment insurance and much more,” he wrote via e-mail.

            The act’s fate this year remains
unclear. The two people whose support would almost certainly make the act law,
Governor George Pataki and Republican Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, did not
return calls requesting their position on the legislation.

            In one sense, the battle over the
bill exemplifies two clashing perspectives. “Farmworker advocates tend to
approach this with their heart,” says Martin, “while farmers approach it like a
business.”

            And there’s the inherent conflict:
social concerns versus economics. “When you’re looking at the bottom line,”
says Suarez, “justice seems a little skewed to you.”

            In the current situation, says
Schmidt of Farmworker Legal Services, “the bottom line is, this is the way a
profit can be made — by the exploitation of a workforce.”

This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2003.