Dirty jobs worthy of respect

Ruben Navarrette of the San Francisco Chronicle reminds us that farmworkers deserve society's respect for their hard work.  North Carolina is home to over 150,000 field and poultry workers, and this Labor Day we honor the daily, hidden sacrifices they make to create a better life for their families.

Just in time for Labor Day, a reader critical of my views on immigration sends along some career advice.

"You really need to find another line of work," he wrote. "You are not worth a (expletive) at what you are doing now. I hear they need strawberry pickers."

He signed the note, "A white legal American citizen."

It's interesting that the reader felt it necessary to identify himself as white. I plan to keep this letter - and others like it - handy for the next time someone claims that the immigration debate isn't about race. It sure sounds like it is to Mr. "white legal American citizen."

Yet, what was really troubling was when the reader suggested I go out and pick strawberries. This guy owes an apology - to strawberry pickers.

I don't know whether a farmworker could do my job. But, coming from a family of farmworkers, I'm absolutely sure I could never do his.

Read more here.

22 migrant workers escape house fire in Western NC

FAN worked for two legislative sessions to improve North Carolina’s law that sets the standards for bathing, cooking, and sleeping facilities for farmworkers who live in employer-provided housing. Modest improvements were passed in 2007.

There remains a laundry list of changes that still should be made in our state law so that farmworkers have safe and dignified places to live, including locks on windows and doors, privacy in bathrooms, better access to laundry facilities, and guaranteed access for visitors of farmworkers’ choice. Unfortunately, enforcement of even these very basic housing standards that we have today remains lax. This story shows the terrible consequences that can occur when our migrant housing laws are not adequately enforced:

CANDLER — Twenty-two people living in a house for migrant farmworkers escaped an early morning fire unharmed, authorities said Tuesday. The blaze destroyed the split-level home at the intersection of Luther Road and Smoky Park Highway near the Haywood County line, said Woody Trotter, battalion chief with Enka-Candler Fire and Rescue.

The fire broke out about 4:45 a.m., and it took firefighters from several departments about 30 minutes to put it out, he said. “It's a total loss,” Trotter said. The residents “all got out safely. They just woke up and smelled smoke.”

“They have lost everything,” said Bob Hvitfeldt, a volunteer with the Red Cross. “The house and the contents are a total loss. “We'll put them up for a few days, and we'll help them secure food and clothing,” he said....

Investigators had yet to find a smoke detector.

Read more here from the Asheville Citizen-Times.

This employer never registered this camp with the North Carolina Department of Labor (NCDOL), which is a required first step to house farmworkers. There were no smoke alarms, which are required by law. Had the camp been registered, NCDOL would have seen that smoke alarms were missing and presumably required the owner to install them – hopefully preventing this tragedy.

One of FAN’s priorities has been to ensure the NCDOL has the resources and the impetus to seek out unregistered housing and force camp owners and operators into compliance. Let’s get it done in 2011, before more farmworkers suffer in housing that doesn’t meet the most basic of standards.

California Wants to 'Decriminalize' Immigrant Farm Workers

Here's one model of worker protections for North Carolina's leaders to consider, since we rely so heavily on immigrant labor to make agriculture work in this state:

​The California Department of of Food and Agriculture calls for a sweeping effort to protect immigrant farm workers -- including those who traveled to the U.S. illegally -- in a new plan outlining the state's agricultural future.

The plan, called AgVision 2030, asserts that immigrant labor is vital to the state's farm economy and advocates a raft of immigrant-friendly policies -- including "decriminalization" of farm workers without proper immigration documents, increased access to health care and education for immigrants, and fewer immigration raids on farms.

The plan affirms a commonly held view among immigrant-rights advocates -- that migrant laborers, many of them from Mexico, do jobs that U.S. citizens are unwilling to do. 

"Coordinated efforts at recruiting domestic labor have largely failed, despite high unemployment in many agricultural communities," the plan states. "Thus, an estimated 75 percent of California's agricultural workforce is foreign-born, primarily Mexican, and about half of the workers are believed to be unauthorized under current immigration laws." The plan goes on to state that the H-2A temporary visa program for farm workers is "cumbersome and ineffective."

The plan urges state officials to support federal immigration reform and take measures to protect immigrants from current federal policies. Among the recommendations: state and local authorities not conduct immigration-related inspections of farm sites; enable immigrant farm workers to obtain driver's licenses or identification cards; and establish policies that prevent families from being broken up by deportations.

Continue reading at SF Weekly.

40 years ago, workers won

Alvaro Huerta's recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer reminds us that the struggle for worker rights is difficult and long-term work.  At key moments, though, workers have won critical victories that have led to improved living and working conditions in fields and factories across this country.  

The question facing North Carolina today is whether we will have the courage to honor the legacy of Chavez and countless others by making vital improvements to the way we do business.  Will our children look back 40 years from now and be able to say that we won a great victory in our time?  Or will we keep doing business as usual, exploiting some of the most vulnerable workers in our society?

Forty years ago, workers in the United States won a great victory.

On July 29, 1970, the United Farm Workers of America ended its successful grape boycott when the growers agreed to sign the first contract with the union.

It seemed like an improbable outcome, as the battle pitted a mostly Mexican as well as Filipino immigrant workforce against powerful agricultural growers in California.

Led by the late Cesar Chavez and tireless Dolores Huerta, the UFW was founded in the early 1960s in response to the inhumane working conditions for farmworkers in California and other states, such as Arizona, Texas, Florida, and Washington.

While many American workers during this period enjoyed the right to organize, 40-hour weeks, a minimum wage, and relatively safe working conditions, farmworkers lacked these basic rights and protections.

In an effort to seek justice, dignity, and respect in the rural fields of America, UFW leaders, members, and sympathizers organized and joined picket lines and marches, signed petitions, supported labor laws, lobbied elected officials, distributed educational fliers, produced documentaries, penned songs, performed plays, held teach-ins, and generally supported the nationwide boycott.

The charismatic Chavez - who graced the cover of Time magazine on July 4, 1969 - engaged in numerous and lengthy hunger strikes to draw attention to the cause.

As was the case with the civil rights movement, many UFW activists were beaten up and a few were killed for the simple act of supporting the right of farmworkers to organize a union and negotiate for fair labor contracts.

But the rightness of their cause prevailed.

Click here to read more.

Heat Can Be Brutal To Farm Workers

On the drive into work this morning, the radio announcer warned of dangerously hot temperatures across much of NC today with heat indexes as high as 110.  For those of us who have the privilege of working in air conditioned spaces, this kind of heat poses little threat.  But for those who do some of the hardest work in the state, providing food for our tables and profits for our farms, this kind of heat can be deadly.  This story from NBC-17 explains:

Long stretches of heat can be deadly to farm workers. 

Three agricultural workers in North Carolina died from heat stress in 2006. 

None have died since then, according to the North Carolina Department of Labor. The department attributes it to extensive educational efforts, said Regina Cullen, Chief of the Agricultural Safety and Health Bureau at the Department of Labor.

"We do a heck of a lot of educating. And say, ‘this is the best way.' Nobody wants to have an accident. Nobody wants to have a fatality on their farm," Cullen said.

The department doesn't track heat illnesses. But the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs has received reports of symptoms of heat illnesses among farm workers this summer; and of workers without enough water, shade, or breaks.

"We have seen families that are sleeping under trailers to escape heat. We have seen slurred speech and slurred vision in a lot of the youth that are out there working in the fields long days," said Emily Drakage, the North Carolina Regional Coordinator for the Association's Children in the Fields Campaign.

The Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs is a member of FAN.

Seasonal workers sue agricultural giant

Far too many farmworkers tell the same story: a recruiter promises them steady work and good pay, only to leave them more or less stranded in terrible living conditions with little work.  This story reported by The Monitor is just one example of a much larger trend.

As a day laborer, Raul Salas would often have to wait for odd jobs that were never steady and barely allowed him to make a living.

So he says he jumped at the opportunity when, last year on a June day, a fellow laborer named Pensamiento offered him a seasonal job detasseling corn in Indiana.

"He came up to me over there," said Salas, pointing to a spot in downtown Brownsville where day laborers were known to gather to wait for work. "He said it would be really good work for me."

Pensamiento took him and others from around the Rio Grande Valley to the Weslaco Branch of Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., an Iowa-based corn seed producer, Salas recounted, speaking in Spanish. There, a contractor named Juan San Miguel persuaded them to go to the fields near Warsaw, Ind., with the promise of high wages and substantial bonuses, he said.

But Salas, 69, is now one of 20 migrant workers who this month filed a federal lawsuit against San Miguel and Pioneer, which they said failed to pay them minimum wage, took illegal deductions from their wages and forced them to live in rundown, overcrowded hotel rooms.

Learn more about workers and wages here.

CA Governor vetoes farmworkers overtime bill

From the San Francisco Chronicle story:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill Wednesday that would have made California's hourly agricultural employees the only farmworkers in the nation to receive overtime pay after 40 hours a week or eight hours a day.

In vetoing the measure, Schwarzenegger cited the fragile economy and said that extending overtime protections could put farms out of business, or result in lower paychecks for agricultural workers because farmers would hire more people and cut hours to avoid paying overtime.

The bill's author, Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter (Kern County), blasted the veto. In a statement released by his office, Florez said the Republican governor sided "with a labor practice derived from the segregationist South," and that the veto means it is "acceptable to treat one class of people differently from all others."

It's a classic example of agricultural exceptionalism - the practice of treating farmworkers differently than workers in other industries.  

Below is commentary by the LA Times:

It's not really news when a bill fails to become a law in Sacramento. In this age of partisan gridlock, plenty of good ideas are never enacted.

Still, one bill that made it to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk last week, only to be killed by his veto, is worth looking at for what it tells us about how hard it is to clean out even antiquated moral rot, so long as powerful interests profit from it.

The bill, written by San Joaquin Valley Democratic state Sen. Dean Florez and passed by both houses of the Legislature on party-line votes, would have made agricultural workers, just like everybody else, eligible for overtime pay if they worked more than an eight-hour day. Under current law, farmworkers can collect overtime only if they've put in more than 10 hours in the fields. Florez's bill would also have given workers the right to take off one day out of every seven.

At first glance, and second, and third, the bill looks to be an economic and ethical no-brainer. But in his veto message, the governor noted that he didn't want to put the state's agribusinesses at a competitive disadvantage, which could end up costing us jobs.  

Huh? We enforce overtime law on nonagricultural employers who can relocate their businesses to other climes. And farms, it's safe to say, are far less of a flight risk than other enterprises.

More fundamentally, overtime laws exist because we believe the risk of injury and wear and tear to workers rises if they work past a reasonable limit, and because we believe people's lives should include time for rest, family, socializing and off-the-job endeavors. The right to take off one day a week is as old as the Biblical injunction to keep the Sabbath.

Lawsuit Seeks Ban of Common NC Farm Pesticide

From Public News Service:

RALEIGH, N.C. - From growers of hay, mint and onions to those who cultivate apples and cherries, some North Carolina farmers rely on a pesticide called chlorpyrifos. Its use is as controversial as it is common across the country, and a lawsuit seeks an outright ban by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 

Chlorpyrifos, also sold as Lorsban, affects insects by causing nerve damage, and watchdog groups say it can do the same to humans. It was banned for household use in the U.S.about ten years ago. The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pesticide Action Network have objected to its continued use in agriculture, saying the pesticide causes health problems in farm workers and farm communities, and they say the EPA has had their petition for three years without taking action on it. 

Those organizations' attorney, Kevin Regan with Earthjustice, which filed the suit on their behalf, says chlorpyrifos is bad stuff.

"As far as pesticides go, this is one of the worst of the worst. Science clearly shows that chlorpyrifos doesn't just poison insects, it poisons people. And our suit is attempting to get EPA to take action and make a decision, once and for all."

Learn more about how the abuse of pesticides affects NC farmworkers.