‘We are not eating well, we are not sleeping well, we are not living well. But we go to work each day.’ : Migrant Workers Have Only Tree for Roof

Barred from nearby labor camp barracks condemned by Riverside County health officials, 15 migrant farm workers have been living for weeks in an open field beneath a tree, where they have no heat, running water or sanitary facilities.

The men, who work in nearby vineyards owned by David Freedman & Co. of Thermal, sleep in cars or on soiled mattresses on the ground.

“The workers with cars are the lucky ones,” said David Serena, a local field office director for the United Farm Workers union, which has made the workers the focus of a labor dispute with the grower. “The others will have to spend Christmas under the trees.”

Seasonal Workers

They are among a group of about 40 migrant seasonal workers who arrived here in late November expecting to live in the barracks complex, owned by the Freedman firm and located in a rural area about five miles east of Indio. They are scheduled to work in the vineyards until the season ends in June.

The camp was closed by Riverside County Health Department officials on Nov. 10 and formally condemned Dec. 1 when the company refused to make required repairs to the buildings. Since then, all but 15 of the workers have managed to find housing elsewhere.

“We are not eating well, we are not sleeping well, we are not living well,” said Salvador Avalos, 57, who came here from the Mexican state of Michoacan. “But we go to work each day.”

The closure followed a routine pre-occupancy inspection of the barracks by health inspectors who reported numerous minor infractions, including broken windows, torn screens and damaged electrical outlets.

“There were no conditions of immediate danger to health,” said Mike Garcia, a county health inspector. “But the owner did not want to make the repairs. If they refuse to make (repairs) we have no choice but to post it for non-occupancy.”

Lionel Steinberg, Freedman’s president, said the company could not afford improvements at the 35-year-old camp.

“To tear it down and rebuild it would cost $500,000,” Steinberg said, “and farming is tough these days.”

Besides, he added, “We don’t need these single male workers anymore. . . . There is an adequate supply of family workers in the Coachella Valley who house themselves and are available for work.”

Asked about the health conditions in the makeshift settlement in the open field, health inspector Garcia replied, “now that they (the workers) are out (of the barracks) it is not our responsibility to take care of them--that’s not the way the law is written.”

On Federal Land

That is the jurisdiction of other agencies, he said, and the workers should contact the county Housing Authority for assistance. Garcia also said that the tree under which they are living is on U.S. Bureau of Land Management property and that unless the federal government complains about the squatters, he does not plan to take action to move them out.

The United Farm Workers local here has made the displaced workers’ plight a focal point in efforts to negotiate a new contract with Freedman. The former contract expired in July.

The barracks served for years as a labor camp for as many as 50 male migrant workers who came from throughout the Southwest and Mexico. They now earn $5.50 an hour, plus $2 in benefits, in Freedman’s fields.

One of them is Pedro Sanchez, 54, of Calexico, Calif., who said he has performed seasonal work for Freedman for 10 years.

“I’m sad that after so many years with the company, this is how they treat us,” Sanchez said. “It is very cold out here and there are spiders and scorpions on the ground.”

‘No Other Place to Go’

“I am sick with a flu I caught from sleeping out here,” said Tomas Barrios, 51, of Mexicali, Mexico, standing beside his “bed”--a mass of coiled springs in a metal frame placed next to a fire. “I have no other place to go. I can’t afford an apartment in town.”

Steinberg dismissed such claims, saying that all the men could find housing if they wanted to. He also suggested that their decision to live under the stars was part of a “political statement” intended to help the union.

The men, he insisted, “shouldn’t be there. . . . They should be in town like the other 1,000 workers we employ. What makes these people so precious?”