Small Harvest : Many Farm Workers Have Little to Show for Reform Effort

The struggle continues in California’s fields.

Jose Mejia knows that struggle intimately, and it shows on his furrowed hands, grimy blue vest and brown jeans. For three decades, he’s worked in San Joaquin Valley fields, traveling over the border from his native Michoacan state in Mexico. From his perspective, conditions are worse now for a farm worker because the cost of living is higher but wages haven’t changed much.

“So what do we get?” Mejia asked through an interpreter.

Mejia’s story is by no means representative of all farm workers, many of whom have gained from reforms over the last two decades that brought government-subsidized housing, migrant health care programs, worker safety rules and a chance to become U.S. citizens.

But there are thousands who missed out on those reforms and continue to suffer the indignities that they were designed to rectify.

Toilets and drinking water weren’t available for farm workers “at many job sites” in Fresno County fields last summer--at a time when temperatures were above 105 degrees, a state Employment Development Department wage survey showed.

“At one vineyard, the survey team was refused admittance and they felt certain that it was because there was no drinking water for the workers,” the report said.

Children Sick in Winter

At a labor camp in the Tulare County town of Cutler, a woman cradling an infant said her children are sick all winter long because her house lacks a heater. The woman, through an interpreter, said she pays $200 a month rent, which includes water and electricity.

A group of young men from the Mexican state of Guerrero told a reporter that they paid $350 a month to live in a barn outfitted with five soiled mattresses on metal bed frames, one refrigerator and two stoves--one of which was broken. The tin-roofed barn, tucked behind a set of small cabins in Parlier in Fresno County, has rusty barbed wire strung in an open area above a door to prevent break-ins.

During last summer’s harvest, the men said, they paid for seven people but actually put 12 workers in the barn and had to fend off rats and cockroaches.

Faced with living conditions such as these, health care for farm laborers produces mixed results.

“Irrespective of advances made in environmental safety, healthier life styles, preventive medicine and health education, we still have not corrected the problems sufficiently to change these poor outcomes,” said Steve Schilling, director of the Clinica Sierra Vista in Lamont. The health clinic is one of the nation’s largest for migrant and seasonal workers.

“Substandard housing, poor nutrition, poor water systems, poor bathing and laundry facilities . . . these are a major cause of the medical symptoms we treat here,” Schilling said.

Farm workers suffer under conditions similar to urban homeless men and women.

“In my opinion, we haven’t even begun to address the issue of rural homelessness and conditions of people living in substandard housing,” Schilling said.

In general, health conditions for farm workers “haven’t progressed much,” said Sonia Leon Reig, director of the migrant health program for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She laid the blame on housing conditions.

“If we in the health care industry have a good and effective health care program for farm workers but that farm worker has to return to poor housing or (dangerous conditions) in the work place . . . our program, no matter how good it is, would not have an impact,” she said.

The federal government lacks a good understanding about life expectancy and infant mortality among the nation’s farm workers because of their transient life style, Leon Reig said.

A study earlier this year by the University of Washington in Seattle indicated that women living in California’s agricultural belt where pesticides are heavily used have a higher risk of bearing children with birth defects, including missing and malformed limbs.

The grower-supported Farm Employers Labor Service survey of wages in 1988 showed the lowest-paid farm worker received an average $4.85 hourly wage, and supervisors could earn up to $15 hourly.

Such wages are a powerful incentive for workers to cross the border and endure the substandard living conditions.

“Below the border, workers commonly earn less in one day than they would in one hour at the U.S. minimum wage,” according to an immigration report by the University of California cooperative extention.

In the late 1950s, before Cesar Chavez’s attempts to unionize farm workers gathered steam, wages among year-round Fresno County farm workers averaged 85 cents an hour. As was the case this year, attempts in 1959 to raise the minimum wage for farm laborers met with stiff resistance from growers who predicted that such an increase “would break the big ranchers,” according to a report by the Fresno County Rural Health Education Committee.

Through his United Farm Workers, Chavez supplied the political muscle in the late 1960s and early 1970s that let field hands obtain minimum wage and enforce contracts with growers.

But the union’s strength and membership has waned since then. Workers who face sub-minimum wages and fraud, especially from farm labor contractors, frequently turn to groups such as the California Rural Legal Assistance for help.

“The No. 1 complaint was the minimum wage increase and the fact that contractors and others pay low piece rates,” said Gloria Hernandez, a community worker with CRLA.

A state Employment Development Department wage survey in August reported that about 90% of the workers interviewed didn’t know how much they were earning or the names of their employers.

Jasuja Shudh, a native of India now working in Fresno County’s vineyards, said he earns an average $5 hourly wage, but his wage was much lower when he arrived here three years ago.

“When I first came here I was making $2 an hour,” Shudh recalled outside the Fresno Immigration and Naturalization Service office. “They were exploiting a lot of farm workers who are illegal aliens.”