Tough Row to Hoe for Most : Farm Workers Still Mired in Poverty

Since the United Farm Workers Union was formed in 1963, its members have made economic gains and the union has pushed through legislation that has helped all farm workers at both the national and state level.

According to a new study by the University of California and the state Economic Development Department, however, most of the state’s farm workers are still mired in poverty despite all the attention given to their plight during the early boycotts led by union founder Cesar Chavez.

“It is not really accurate to say that the average farm worker has improved his or her lot in life in California in the last two decades,” said Richard Mines, an economist who supervised the study.

Farm workers are entitled by law to the minimum wage, workers’ compensation benefits when they are injured on the job and some unemployment benefits when their farm jobs are gone.

The laws are frequently ignored, however, particularly on farms where the majority of workers are here illegally and fear deportation to Mexico.

Job Benefits Fall Short

Even when the laws are effective, the study showed that they do not provide great help to the workers. For instance, jobless benefits add less than an estimated $500 a year to the annual average income of most farm workers.

The presence of the union has helped push wages up for some farm workers. Union workers earn $7 an hour and sometimes more, and some non-union farms pay a competitive wage in order to keep the union out. But the UFW has only about 30,000 active members under contract, or about 10% of the state’s farm workers.

The great majority of farm workers, the study showed, are not so fortunate.

Many non-union workers earn the minimum wage of $3.35 an hour or less, bringing the statewide wage average down to $5.10 an hour. The work is seasonal. Last year, Mines said, farm workers in California averaged only 23 weeks of work a year, slightly less than they were working 20 years ago.

Even when their children help, the Mines study calculated, the average family of four working in the fields has an annual income of only $8,800, well below the federally determined poverty level of $10,600 a year, the study showed.

Frequent Moves Required

Farm workers also must must move frequently from one part of the state to another, and even to other parts of the nation, to find jobs.

Few of their children finish high school--the dropout rate for the youngsters of migrant farm workers is about 90%, and an estimated 50% quit school before reaching the ninth grade.

Constantly working with or near pesticides and insecticides, farm workers nationally are far more susceptible to certain kinds if illnesses than the general population.

For example, they are seven to 26 times more likely to contract parasitic diseases than the general population, according to a report made last year to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration by Dr. Eugene Gangarosa, professor of public health at Emory University in Atlanta.