Growers Still Addicted to Foreign Workers

Congress appears closer than ever to passing a law that will punish--by fines or, ultimately, imprisonment--employers who knowingly hire millions of illegal aliens who are usually willing to accept low wages and harsh working conditions.

However, regardless of any legislation, chances are that many growers, who rely heavily on illegal aliens, will be given an “escape clause” so that they can legally continue the hiring practices that they have been using for more than 100 years.

In fact, on Monday the Reagan Administration gave its general blessing to a Senate-approved proposal by Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) to create a new “guest worker” plan that would allow growers of certain crops to continue bringing in hundreds of thousands of foreign workers for harvesting crops.

Wilson insists that, without the help of foreign workers, crops will rot in the fields, growers will go out of business or move their farms to Mexico, food prices will skyrocket and, in general, the nation’s entire economy will be badly hurt.

Not everyone agrees. There is strong opposition to the idea of giving special treatment to growers from many quarters. Former Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz calls the plan “a sad but perhaps not surprising example of the cynicism and greed that has characterized the actions of so many growers for so many years.”

Twenty years ago, Wirtz was bitterly denounced by growers for the crucial role that he played in ending the old bracero program, which helped growers legally get 1 million or more foreign nationals as fieldworkers from 1941 to 1964.

Wirtz, now in retirement, said in a telephone interview from his home in Washington that “it all sounds so similar to growers’ cries of outrage when Congress allowed the old bracero program to die on Dec. 31, 1964, in large part because so many workers then in this country legally were without jobs.”

“At that time, the U.S. unemployment rate of about 5% was considered too high, and Congress decided we didn’t need the foreign workers. Now the jobless rate is well over 7%--and more than double that in the rural areas--yet once again we are hearing the cries that ‘crops will rot in the fields’ unless growers get foreign workers.”

There are differences between the bracero program and the proposed “guest worker” plan that Wilson and others insist will provide adequate protection of foreign workers from abuses by employers. In addition, they say, the new plan will reduce, if not eliminate, the competition for farm jobs between the foreign nationals and U.S. domestic workers.

But it is going to be difficult to reassure domestic workers that they will be protected by the new law when, for instance, one of those involved in enforcing the proposed “guest worker” plan will be Deputy Labor Secretary John Norton, who testified in Congress on Monday in favor of the plan.

That’s because Norton’s family farm, J. R. Norton Co., has been found guilty by the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board of numerous state farm labor law violations ranging from firing workers for union activities to refusing to bargain in good faith with the United Farm Workers. Norton’s workers chose the UFW as their bargaining agent in a state-conducted, secret-ballot election in 1977.

The company so far has lost court appeals and faces penalties that could range up to $1 million or more.

An aide to Wilson said that it is unfair to believe that Norton might not properly help enforce the proposed “guest worker” plan. After all, he said, Norton’s company is “just one of many California growers who were unfairly prosecuted by a state agency that was biased in favor of Cesar Chavez and his union.”

The national AFL-CIO has long backed laws designed to punish employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens, and it opposes making an exception for growers. However, Dolores Huerta, UFW vice president, says that no law designed to halt the flow of illegal aliens will work--except one that would help Mexico and other nations make their own economies so strong that their workers would not want to come to the United States. That is her way of saying that the UFW does not support penalties against employers who hire illegal aliens.

One of the more ironic aspects of the efforts by conservatives such as President Reagan, Wilson and others to create another government-sponsored plan to help growers import foreign workers is that they are also among the nation’s strongest advocates of a free-market, free-enterprise economy.

Normally, under the free-market concept, growers would have to raise wages and improve working conditions enough to attract U.S. workers to the jobs.

In fact, when the bracero program was killed by Congress in 1964, Wirtz said that “growers must now compete in the marketplace with other elements of the nation’s economy for their workers. Americans can do the job, and there are enough of them.”

But it didn’t work that way. An estimated half of the present farm labor work force (variously estimated in California at between 200,000 and 300,000) is made up of illegal aliens, and, while farm labor wages have gone up somewhat (in part to keep out the UFW), growers insist that there are still not enough domestic workers to harvest their crops.

Even when the old bracero program was being used to bring in thousands of workers--mostly Mexicans--each year to harvest crops, illegal aliens were also coming here in record numbers. This year, the Immigration and Naturalization Service says the flow of illegal aliens is escalating. An estimated 1 million foreigners--about one-third of those who actually entered the country illegally--were apprehended last year by the INS.

Some of those who backed an end to the bracero program said in the early 1960s that growers should, however, be given a chance to phase out their dependence on foreign workers. Even former Democratic California Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown urged Wirtz to “give the growers time to find domestic workers for farm jobs.”

But the use of foreign labor is obviously a difficult habit for growers to break, and not even advocates of the proposed “guest worker” plan claim the plan will ever mean that growers will do without foreign laborers.

The habit is one of very long standing. Most observers refer to May 10, 1869, as the start of the foreign farm labor story in California. That was the day when a golden spike was driven into the last rail linking the Union Pacific with the Central Pacific railroad, opening an easy route from East to West. Thus, California farmers were able to start shipping food eastward in great quantities. And completion of the railroad also signaled layoffs for the thousands of Chinese who were brought to this country to work on the railroads. Their labor was cheap, compared to the wages expected by U.S. workers, and so the Chinese went to work for growers.

Heavy unemployment in the 1880s ignited the racist Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, abruptly cutting off the major source of foreign farm labor at that time. Nevertheless, the pattern of growers relying heavily on cheap foreign labor had been established. The Chinese were followed by workers imported from Japan, the Philippines, Hawaii, the Caribbean and other foreign areas.

But the closest source for such workers was Mexico, and for many years Mexicans crossed into the United States, at times legally and at most other times illegally. Thus, that nation became the major supplier of cheap foreign labor.

The Great Depression brought Western growers the labor of poor whites from Oklahoma, Arkansas and other Southern and Southwestern states. (They became the subjects of John Steinbeck’s famed “Grapes of Wrath.”) But as the Depression eased, non-farm employers began once again competing for their labor, and illegal aliens, or foreigners brought in by the U.S. government, replaced the “Okies,” and growers’ reliance on foreign workers resumed.

The trend has grown, and today employers in the garment, restaurant and other industries also make extensive use of illegal aliens for cheap labor. The proposed immigration reform law may stop much, if not all, of that, which could mean a substantial increase in the number of jobs for domestic workers.

But unless the “guest worker” plan for growers includes tough, rigidly enforced prohibitions against unfair competition with U.S. workers, growers are likely to continue their 130-year-old tradition of relying on foreign workers as the mainstay of their work force.

BLS Budget Fight

Bitter complaints about the Reagan Administration’s proposals for major cuts in the operations of the Bureau of Labor Statistics seem to have been effective. House and Senate subcommittees have now voted to ignore the Administration’s plans, and the expectation in Washington is that the Administration-sought cuts will not be made.

The Administration wants, for instance, to eliminate BLS plans for a major study of plant closures and their impact on workers; sharply curtail publication of the BLS’ respected, 70-year-old Monthly Labor Review used by the bureau to disseminate analyses of its data, and halt BLS plans to provide more data on the availability of work in the service sector, which provides the largest number of jobs in the United States today.

Also, Labor Secretary William E. Brock III has agreed not to implement another Reagan plan that would have eliminated the bureau’s authority to hire, promote and fire staffers and move that authority to the Labor Department.

The plant closure study had already begun, but another $5 million is needed in fiscal 1986 to finish laying the groundwork for the study and to begin collecting data so that the flow of information will be available on a long-term basis.

Both the House and Senate are expected to give final approval to the BLS budget without the Reagan cuts.

The BLS will spend less than $200 million a year to collect and disseminate key economic and employment data. The data is useful in spotting major economic and social problems, and some critics of the proposed cuts charge that the Administration wants a less active BLS because the less the nation knows about a problem, the easier it is for the government to avoid dealing with it.

The House and Senate are not expected to fully fund the agency, but Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, said there will be a “substantial restoration” of the BLS budget.

Daniel Mitchell, head of UCLA’s Institute of Industrial Relations, said he is now “very hopeful” that most of the BLS funds will be restored and that the congressional action will put a stop to efforts to “eliminate some of the vital programs of the agency, which has gained such respect from the labor, management and academic community for its accuracy and independence.”

But even if the BLS budget cuts sought by the Administration are restored, the agency is unlikely to resume collecting the data it once gathered on such things as major labor-management contract agreements, the number of strikes and lockouts when fewer than 1,000 workers are involved or the number of workers who quit, retire, die or are fired each year.