Para los Campesinos

This is a great article I came across while browsing the net.. written by fellow CSA farmer Zoe Bradbury. One of the reasons I got into farming was from my experience working side by side with Mexican farmers in California. The passion they have for their work and the tireless way they toil to put food on our tables for no recognition and no word of thanks will always be an inspiration to me.

Hand Picked - Row by row, day after day: The story of the American farmworker

HAND PICKED
ROW BY ROW, DAY AFTER DAY
Zoë Bradbury
For Summer 2008

“Strawberries are too delicate to be picked by machine. The perfectly ripe ones even bruise at too heavy a human touch. It hit her then that every strawberry she had ever eaten — every piece of fruit — had been picked by calloused human hands. Every piece of toast with jelly represented someone's knees, someone's aching back and hips, someone with a bandanna on her wrist to wipe away the sweat. Why had no one told her this before?” — Alison Luterman, “What They Came For”

At the end of Oregon’s winter, the orchards and vineyards need tending: pruning, spraying, thinning. The months advance and heat waves start to belly-dance above the soil. Row crops are planted: Onions and watermelons take root near Hermiston; beans, peas, squash, lettuce, potatoes — an almost endless list of crops — are planted in the Willamette Valley. Irrigation pipes are moved in the mint fields of eastern Oregon. Weeds fall flat behind the sharpened edge of a hoe. Berries are picked, one by one, and packed into plastic clamshells.

Oregon’s agricultural diversity is profound. It is a state that produces some 220 crops and livestock commodities — a greater variety than any state except Florida and California — totaling more than four billion dollars in agricultural production each year. Oregon agriculture is labor intensive, every berry and every pome fruit must be picked by human hands, which explains why Oregon’s agricultural payroll expenses are the fifth highest in the country, despite the fact that the state ranks twenty-sixth in total agricultural production.

Ours are farms that rely on opposable thumbs and an eye for ripeness, on manual dexterity and skilled use of tools. In short, on something so advanced, so complex, and so capable of movement and learning that no amount of engineering has managed to fully replicate it with a machine: the human being.

The Farmworker Experience
There are approximately four million migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the U.S. today, with Oregon agriculture reliant on up to 90,000 each year, according to the Oregon Department of Agriculture. Roughly half of Oregon’s farmworkers are settled in state and half migrate to Oregon for all or part of the growing season. For the migrant population, including 14,558 migrant children and youth, the year might take them from winter reforestation work in the coast range, to spring pruning in the vineyards, to the autumn apple harvest in Hood River, to a Christmas tree farm in the Willamette Valley.

According to the National Agricultural Workers Survey, more than 90 percent of all farm workers are Hispanic, primarily from Mexico. Most are young men under the age of 35. An estimated 70 percent are undocumented to live and work in Oregon.

It’s impossible to generalize the farmworker experience, but interviews conducted by the League of Women Voters for the Farmworkers in Oregon report (2000) reveal a common storyline. From Mexico, a young man borrows money to pay a “coyote” to help him cross the border illegally. He may get caught once, twice, even five times before making it into the country.

Three thousand miles distant from his home and family, his first season will likely be punctuated by a string of migrations, labor camps, and labor contractors. Like every single farmworker in the United States — documented or not — he will not enjoy 15-minute paid breaks, receive overtime for a 12-hour workday, or get benefits.

In a year, he will earn less than $7,500 in Oregon’s fields. He’ll pay his share of taxes, including Social Security and Medicare — none of which he’ll ever see again when, or if, he turns 65. The average life expectancy for a migrant farmworker is 49 years, compared to 73 for the general U.S. population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Each day, as he moves irrigation pipe or travels back and forth to work, he’ll live with the worry of la migra (the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS) and the risk of deportation. What money is extra, he’ll wire home to his family, who may have to wait two, three, or four years to see him again, since the border crossing has become difficult and expensive.

America has prided itself on a history of basic worker protections and rights, including minimum wage, overtime, Social Security, unemployment insurance, child labor protections, and the right to organize into a union. These labor reforms, put in place by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NRLA), apply to everyone except farmworkers.

Such a pointed exclusion of farmworkers from basic labor protections has been blamed on various influences, including powerful agriculture lobbies that insisted the industry needed to be insulated from harvest strikes and high labor costs in order to ensure food security for the nation. The other theory is that the NRLA’s omission was an entrenched expression of racism against African-Americans working on farms in the South.

Despite the historic campaigns of farmworker rights advocates like César Chávez and ongoing efforts to improve farmworker protections over the decades, the disparity in labor law has never been fully reconciled in the U.S., creating an ugly double standard.

Among the inequities in Oregon: There is no clause that requires employers to pay overtime to farmworkers, even though a typical workday is 10 to 12 hours long; farmworkers are exempted from Oregon laws requiring minimum meal and rest periods; and farmworkers are not automatically granted the universal right to organize, strike, and collectively bargain with employers. On top of all that, unemployment insurance laws are written such that fewer than one-third of all farmworkers receive unemployment benefits, despite the fact that the average farmworker is employed for only 24 weeks of the year.

Oregon law does mandate certain protections for farmworkers — things like workers’ compensation, minimum wage, and workplace safety — but poor enforcement and uneven power dynamics meddle with their efficacy.

In the U.S., inadequate enforcement of safety laws contributes to the 300,000 acute pesticide poisonings that occur among farmworkers each year. Documented incidents show that farmworkers — particularly recent immigrants and those who aren’t proficient English speakers — are vulnerable to underpayment, especially when being paid piece-rate (by the pound or other unit). On-the-job injuries often go unreported, and workers’ compensation benefits go unclaimed, for fear of being fired — or worse — reported to the INS.

All together, it adds up to a set of working conditions that makes farmwork one of the most dangerous occupations in the U.S. and farmworkers the most indigent population in the country, according to a General Accounting Office (GAO) survey.

This is an uncomfortable story. But not a new one.

The History of the American Farmworker
“The American agriculture industry has always relied on marginalized workers,” says Daniel Rothenberg, who has written extensively on farmworker issues. First it was African-American slaves in the South, then indentured Chinese in the West. Around the time of World War II, Mexican workers became a major part of U.S. agricultural history after the passage of the Labor Importation Program. Commonly known as the “bracero program,” it brought 4.8 million Mexican workers to the United States, establishing a pattern of Mexico-to-U.S. migration that persists today across the 1,969 mile-long border, one of the world’s longest land borders separating a rich country from a poor one.

Under the bracero program, at least 15,000 Mexican workers were brought to Oregon to work on farms before the program was terminated in 1964 under public pressure by unions, churches, and community groups that exposed stories of worker exploitation and mistreatment. Since then, lawmakers have taken various stabs at immigration reform, none of which have met farmers’ needs for an adequate legal workforce or quelled the tide of immigrants crossing the border undocumented.

The reality behind the production of our food cracks against the conscience. It makes most people yearn for a broom and a rug. It pits farmworker activists against farmers like bears against bulls and annoys the hurried consumer, who resents the fact that he is an unwitting accomplice: Let’s just eat the damn cheeseburger and get on with the day.

The problem with the debate around farmworkers is that it’s instantaneously polarizing and automatically demonizing, like a Vaudeville play in which farmers are cast as the villain and the farmworkers are tied to the tracks. It is, in reality, a whole lot more nuanced than that.

Farm Labor in Oregon
In Oregon, the majority of farms are family-owned operations, some of whom have been in agriculture for three generations or more. They face a collision of issues, including $4 per gallon diesel and rising prices for feed and fertilizer. Land prices are going up as development pressure increases. Market volatility and global competition leave the bottom line awash in uncertainty. Add to that Oregon’s high minimum wage. At $7.95 an hour, compared to $5.85 nationally, Oregon’s farm labor costs top the charts.

Yet farmers are also beginning to grapple with labor shortages each season as the immigration controversy boils over and demographics in Mexico shift. Clark Seavert, director of Oregon State University’s North Willamette Research Station, predicts that labor shortages will become the norm in the future. “As Mexico’s economy thrives, they’ll have more demand for their own labor in restaurants, in construction, in other sectors of their economy, just like in the U.S.,” he says.

At the same time, families in Mexico are having fewer children and the 2005 World Migrant report predicts that half as many 15-year-olds will enter the U.S. workforce in the next ten years. The combination suggests that Oregon farmers could become increasingly short-handed in the next decade.

There’s another chorus, though — comprised of unions in particular — arguing that there is no labor shortage, only a shortage of good wages and fair working conditions on farms. A 1997 GAO study supported this argument, but for one major oversight: The GAO failed to distinguish between legal and undocumented workers. As it stands today, if only legal workers were available, the entire country would be facing a severe labor shortage.

While farmers stress about whether they’ll have enough workers to pick their crops this season, they are simultaneously dealing with increasing pressure from the INS in the form of “no match” letters. For those farmers with workers on payroll, their mailboxes have started to see a rash of mail from the INS indicating that workers’ names and Social Security numbers don’t jive. If farmers ignore the letters, they’ll be subject to sanctions and fines. The alternative — “clarifying” each employee’s information with the INS — could leave them in a tight spot: Either fire every employee whose documentation turns out inadequate — up to seven of every ten farmworkers on the books — or face fines.

“It’s an impossible situation,” Senator Gordon Smith has said, “to have farmers as felons and farm workers as fugitives.” And yet that is where much of Oregon, and U.S. agriculture, has found itself precariously cornered today, hemmed in by a long history of failed agricultural and immigration policies.

One Oregon Farmer's Story
Finding a way through all of this to a fair, affordable, legal food system has a lot of folks stumped.

Jim Bronec, a third-generation conventional grass-seed farmer turned organic squash grower, has spent the past decade trying to tackle the challenge on his farm. Bronec’s operation, Praying Mantis Farm, rolls across 50 acres near Canby. He grows cover-crop seed and pumpkins, but almost half of his ground is planted with a variety of giant butternut squash that gets turned into soup and baby food by local processors. For labor, he maintains a contract with Oregon’s only farmworker union, PCUN (Piñeros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste). His is one of only four contracts PCUN has in the state, three of which are with organic growers.

Nine years ago, when Bronec started growing organically, he hired through a labor contractor who would deliver a crew to hoe weeds in the summer and harvest squash in the fall. As time went on, though, he became uneasy about the situation. “The problem was, I was paying $10 to $11 an hour for those workers, but I knew the contractor was only paying them minimum wage, covering the insurance, and pocketing the rest,” he explains. “I wanted to know that the money I was paying was going to the people who were actually doing the work on my farm.”

Convinced that there was a better way to afford hired help on his farm, Bronec was motivated to seek out a contract with PCUN. Now his workers, all unionized, are ensured a fair grievance process and a seniority structure that creates opportunity for job advancement. Bronec pays take-home wages that are at least one dollar above minimum wage and takes care of the payroll withholdings. Although it’s not in his contract, he also provides his workers a paid lunch break and time and a half for overtime.

Bronec says it pencils out for the farm, even selling squash at ten cents per pound to the processing market.

That said, there are still things he is uneasy about — for instance, the fact that his farm only provides short windows of seasonal work. As a result, he’s unable to provide year-round employment and health insurance. He can imagine creative solutions, though — like a fund that he and other farmers could pay into to cover worker health care in proportion to the number of labor hours they hire each season, or establishing a “crew-share” system among a group of farmers who together could create year-round employment for workers.

But he’s discovered that these kinds of ideas don’t always fly with other farmers when he brings union labor into the conversation. “The thing is, a lot of farmers see the unions as the enemy,” he explains. “Maybe it’s an ingrained thing — don’t give an inch or you’ll have to give a mile.”

Cheap Labor = Cheap Food
Bronec’s observation about the stereotypical antagonism between farmers and farmworker unions is something that Ramón Ramirez, the head of PCUN, believes is tied directly to the economics of farming. “Growers and farmworkers need to work together. The bottom line is that a lot of farmers can’t make it — the way they’re compensated is totally out of whack. We need to see more money going to growers and trickling down to workers,” he insists. “At the end of the day, there has to be recognition that we’re not paying enough for food.”

The idea that food should be more expensive flies in the face of decades of U.S. farm policy engineered to make America’s food the cheapest in the world, relative to income. Americans spend a smaller percentage of our paycheck on food than any other nation on earth, ever, even with the recent jump in prices for staples like bread, milk, and eggs. In 1900, it was 60% of our income; today that number is closer to 8%, at the same time that the English spend 14%, the Japanese 20%, the Indians and Chinese 50%, and an even greater fraction in developing nations. And of every dollar that is spent on food in Oregon, only about 20 cents makes it back into the farmer’s pocket to then trickle down to farmworkers, berry by berry, row by row. Cheap food rests on the back of cheap labor.

Market forces and the power of concerned consumers are one fulcrum being leveraged these days to address farmworker injustices. The Agricultural Justice Project formed in 1999 by groups disappointed by the omission of labor standards from the U.S. Organic Program, has created social justice standards for agriculture. The new certification system is being piloted by farms in the Midwest, and will soon expand to other regions in the country as part of a larger effort to enact domestic fair trade standards in the U.S. Similarly, here at home PCUN is working to help market union label products from the farms it contracts with in Oregon.

Not that paying a dollar more for a pound of broccoli will solve the immigration crisis, an issue that even presidential candidates are stumbling over on the campaign trail this year. Higher prices also won’t resolve the tension inherent in trying to achieve a food system that is both fair and affordable. If food costs more, what do you do about the 28 million near-poverty Americans who are reliant on food stamps, the highest number since the aid program began in the 1960s? And in the bitterest of ironies, how do you ensure that farmworkers themselves can afford food, given that illegal immigrants, the poorest in America, can’t access the food stamp progam?

The complexity of it all is no doubt part of the reason that we haven’t yet met the challenge of building a food system that is fair, affordable, and legal. It might also be because our concept of affordable doesn’t extend far beyond our individual pocketbooks. For instance, can Oregon afford to provide social services to the thousands of farmworkers and farmworker families who are living below the poverty line, 10% of whom are homeless and 55% of whom have no health insurance? Can it afford not to? Can farmers afford to be short-handed at critical points in the season? Can we afford to have our food supply precariously balanced on the backs of workers whose tenure in the U.S. is unpredictable? Can consumers and policymakers afford to remain morally, economically, and politically complicit in a racist system that externalizes the social cost of food?

This past spring, Governor Ted Kulongoski issued a proclamation declaring the first week of April to be “Farmworker Awareness Week” in acknowledgment of the contribution farmworkers make to Oregon’s agricultural economy. Whether or not his proclamation manifests into political will is yet to be seen, but one thing is certain: It’s going to take the governor — and the president, and the farmers, and the unions, and the nonprofits, and the people pushing carts through grocery stores — to find our way through this to fair food.

Zoë Bradbury is a Kellogg Food & Society Policy Fellow. She lives, writes, and farms on Oregon’s southern coast.