COLUMN ONE : The Grapes of Wrath Revisited : Squalor and poverty have again become common for farm workers in California. Gains made in the ‘70s have been lost as growers rely on labor contractors and the UFW’s influence has declined.

Drive the highways of the San Joaquin Valley in late summer, during the height of the raisin grape harvest, and you see a pastoral setting. Workers cut grapes and lay them out to dry between the vines, the rows of pale green fruit stretching as far as the eye can see.

But take the back roads after the workday ends, and you are confronted by jarring Third World scenes. Farm workers wash their clothes in muddy rivers; workers sleep under trees, on mattresses in back yards, in equipment sheds; homeless workers cook dinner over open fires at the edge of dirt fields.

On a recent afternoon, men bathed in the shallow water by a bank of the San Joaquin River. Some women, too shy to disrobe, washed beneath their clothing and dipped underwater to rinse off. Other workers spread clothing over rocks and scrubbed them with bars of soap.

Drying off beside a willow tree, Samuel Flores said he lived better in Mexico. He sleeps in a car parked on a Madera side street with two other farm workers, and the river is the only place he can wash after a day of picking grapes.

“If I stayed in an apartment, I’d be spending all my earnings on rent,” Flores said. “I have to sleep in the car. . . . I have no place else to go.”

Such scenes of squalor and poverty have again become common in California, and not just in raisin country around Fresno. Last month, Monterey County officials found 200 farm workers living in hand-dug, hillside caves and plastic lean-tos north of Salinas. In northern San Diego County, workers sleep in holes scooped out of the brush not far from $300,000 homes.

Since the late 1970s, when widespread concern about farm workers forced reforms, conditions have deteriorated throughout California’s farm areas. The pay of workers has dropped, fewer workers belong to unions, and the housing for many workers has turned abysmal.

“Every gain, every farm worker achievement is being eroded,” said Clete Daniel, a professor of labor history at Cornell University who has written extensively about California farm workers. “If we consider ourselves a modern, humane society, I don’t know how we can allow people to live under such degrading conditions.”

The situation is so disheartening to farm workers and their supporters because so much has been lost. In the late 1970s, the United Farm Workers union was at its peak; its leader, Cesar Chavez, was a folk hero in some circles, and even non-union workers were being paid above minimum wage because of the UFW’s influence.

For the first time, many California farm workers were covered by medical insurance and had fringe benefits on a par with workers in other industries. But as the living standard of California farm workers has faded from public concern, many of the gains have vanished.

Conditions have regressed to the point that tools similar to the short-handled hoe, which caused crippling back injuries and was outlawed by the state in 1975, have reappeared in the fields. California Rural Legal Assistance, an advocacy group, has reported numerous incidents of Salinas Valley workers being forced to use short-handled knives, a tool that also is illegal and causes back problems.

Growers acknowledge that the plight of farm workers has declined dramatically. But the growers say foreign and domestic competition in the last decade has forced them to cut back on their biggest cost--labor.

“There’s a crunch on workers now, no doubt about it . . . but we’re competing against companies in Mexico that pay their workers between $3 and $4 a day,” said Richard Quandt, president of the central coast chapter of the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Assn. “Growers have to cut costs to compete.”

Growers contend that Americans have dictated the conditions for farm workers by demanding low food prices. Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food--about 10%--than Japan or any country in Europe, said Ed Angstadt, the group’s Salinas Valley president. Consumers, he said, “can’t have it both ways--cheap food and rapidly increasing wages for farm workers.”

But farm worker advocates say most people are not aware of the sorry conditions, and they are angry because the situation has worsened during a time of steadily increasing productivity for California’s $16-billion agricultural industry.

Labor experts cite a number of reasons for the deteriorating conditions:

* In California’s agricultural valleys, the majority of workers now are employed by farm labor contractors instead of by growers. Contractors generally pay less, offer few benefits and no job security. Labor violations are widespread. The UFW has also steadily lost influence and membership during the 1980s--from a peak of more than 100,000 workers to about 10,000 today.

* There are many more people competing for the same number of farm jobs. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, critics say, has failed to control illegal border crossings, which have increased sharply because of worsening economic conditions in Mexico and political unrest in Central America.

* Farm worker wages--an average of about $5,000 a year--have not kept pace with inflation. At the same time, rents for rural housing have continued to climb, and growers have shut down migrant labor camps. Today there are only about 800 state-licensed camps left, about half the number of a decade ago.

At dawn in a foggy supermarket parking lot in Salinas, Juan Mendoza searches for his day’s work. Field foremen stand in front of dusty white school buses, signing up lettuce cutters for the day, and Mendoza slowly makes his way from one end of the lot to the other.

But the lot is jammed with many more men than there are jobs. After an hour, as the sky begins to lighten, all the buses have left for the lettuce fields and Lopez joins a small army of dejected men who head home, unemployed for another day.

At one time, Mendoza was considered among the elite of America’s agricultural workers. He was a lettuce cutter, one of the most highly skilled jobs in agriculture. He worked in the Salinas Valley, where field hands were once among the best paid in the country. He belonged to the UFW, the union most feared by growers.

“Now I can barely survive,” Mendoza said. “I never know if I’m going to get work or not. . . . It’s a struggle every day.”

A decade ago, Mendoza earned almost $500 a week working for a grower and enjoyed comprehensive medical insurance, sick leave, vacation pay and a pension plan. But he was laid off three years ago. He now makes $200 to $300 a week, working for labor contractors. He has no benefits and can only find work a few days a week.

The UFW’s decline in the Salinas Valley, once a union stronghold, has contributed to the worsening picture for workers, labor experts say. The union has only one contract left among vegetable growers in the area, where once it had about 35.

Chavez, using marches, boycotts, strikes and civil disobedience by followers, at one time had the power to force growers in Salinas Valley and elsewhere to the bargaining table. The UFW won tremendous wage increases and extensive benefits for workers, and defeated the powerful Teamsters Union in several battles for contracts.

But the UFW’s influence began to wane in the early 1980s. There was considerable internal strife at the union, and growers became more sophisticated in their battles with the union. Labor experts say the oversupply of workers during the 1980s also hurt union recruiting.

“When you’ve got five workers competing for every job . . . it’s extremely tough to organize,” said Phillip Martin, a professor of agricultural economics at UC Davis. “No amount of talk is going to overcome that fact.”

UFW officials blame former Gov. George Deukmejian for contributing to the union’s decline. After Deukmejian was elected governor in 1982, he cut the budget of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board and named a conservative Republican as general counsel. Prosecution of unfair labor practices charges diminished substantially, farm labor experts said.

Chavez determined that the union could not organize workers and hold elections in such a politically hostile environment, said David Martinez, treasurer for the UFW. So Chavez switched tactics, turning to boycotts instead of focusing the union on organizing workers. This decision was widely criticized and caused a split among UFW members.

As union membership and influence has declined, there has been a steady increase in the number of labor contractors, who negotiate with the grower to harvest fields and then hire workers for the job.

In the early 1980s, the vast majority of farm workers were hired directly by growers, but now more than half of California’s workers are employed by labor contractors, Martin estimated. For some crops, as many as 80% of the workers are hired directly by contractors.

Many growers prefer labor contractors because it is easier and cheaper to deal with one contractor than with hundreds of workers--and it is virtually impossible to unionize workers hired by contractors.

Workers at this summer’s San Joaquin Valley raisin harvest recited a litany of complaints about labor contractors they have worked for throughout the state. Some said contractors did not tell them their wage rate until after the job was done. Others complained that contractors made them pay $5 for rides to the fields and overcharged for lunches and tools.

These conditions of employment violate state labor laws, but enforcement is minimal because of staffing cutbacks by state and federal regulatory agencies during the 1980s, Martin said.

“It’s so bad now we’re seeing people having to pay fees for jobs . . . having to work a day or two for free to get jobs,” said Michael Blank, a California Rural Legal Assistance attorney in San Luis Obispo. “We’re even seeing more violence against workers, people being beaten for not working hard enough.”

In the back yard of a small house in Madera, Emilio Lopez and 10 other men sleep outside on mattresses. They have a two-week job picking raisin grapes for a labor contractor. When the harvest is over, the foreman will tell them how much they earned--and how much he has deducted for their rides, food, tools and rent.

They were afraid to question him before the job started, Lopez said.

“If we ask anything, they’ll just give the work to someone else. We have no choice--we just have to take what they give us.”

Manuel Cardenas, secretary of a Madera farm worker organization that works mostly with Mixtec Indians--who are from the mountains of southern Mexico--pulled out a stack of documents alleging abuses by labor contractors. Some complaints involve contractors who disappeared and left the workers unpaid for weeks of work.

In one case, Cardenas said, a farm worker earned $35 picking garlic for two days. But after paying $5 a day for rides to the fields and $27 for tools, he ended up owing the contractor $2.

Spokesmen for the labor contractors concede that there are abuses, but blame the increasing number of unlicensed contractors. Larry Peters, past president of the Farm Labor Contractors Alliance of California, said these abuses are difficult to control because of the state’s lack of enforcement.

Staffing at the agency responsible for enforcing state labor laws has been cut about 20%. About 70 positions have remained unfilled during the last five years because of state budget cuts, said Simon Reyes, assistant chief of the Division of Labor Standards.

“When you’ve lost that many positions . . . you can only do a portion of the job,” Reyes said. “Obviously, field enforcement is lessened.”

Although the conditions are unfortunate, growers cannot be “put in the position of being policemen,” said Richard Matoian, a director of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League. He said it is the responsibility of contractors and enforcement agencies, not growers, to see that workers are not exploited.

But labor experts say the growers have to accept some responsibility for the deteriorating conditions. Growers support the labor-contracting system and are the chief beneficiaries, said Daniel of Cornell.

“The contractors are just a device growers use to insulate themselves,” said Daniel, author of “Bitter Harvest,” a history of California farm workers. “But when the public finds out how miserable the lives of farm workers are now, it’s going to backfire on the growers. And you’re going to start hearing again the push for reforms.”

As dusk settles on the small farm towns near Fresno, farm workers can be seen scrambling for places to spend the night. Ephraim Camacho, a California Rural Legal Assistance community worker, pointed out the makeshift sleeping arrangements--parked cars and back-yard equipment sheds.

He stopped his car in front of a Madera labor contractor’s house with a large back yard, surrounded by a high wooden fence.

“We found about 50 farm workers sleeping in the back yard a few years ago, without any sleeping bags . . . and the contractor was charging them $20 a week,” Camacho said. “They were all covered with mosquito and ant bites and they washed in the creek that ran by the house . . . before the place was shut down.”

In another farm town, south of Fresno, Camacho pulled up to a series of plywood shacks scattered on a dirt lot. A family lives in a metal camper shell placed on the ground. To the rear of the lot are three makeshift outhouses and an open-air shower, and nearby are open ponds of raw sewage.

In a tiny two-room shack on the lot, 15 people share three beds and a cement floor. The shack is stiflingly hot, has exposed wiring and is infested with rats and roaches. The rent is $250 a month.

“I don’t like raising my children here, but some days I only get a few hours’ work and make as little as $15,” said Salvador Serna, who shares the house with another family. “You can’t find a decent place to live when you make so little money.”

Farm worker advocates face a dilemma in confronting these living conditions, Camacho said. They fear that enforcing the health laws would leave residents homeless, but they also know that the unsafe conditions are making people sick.

“Most of the illnesses we see are caused by poor housing and unsanitary conditions,” said Steve Schilling, director of Clinica Sierra Vista near Bakersfield, one of the nations’ largest health clinics for farm workers.

“We see a lot of sick kids in winter, a lot of nutritional problems, anemia, urinary tract infections . . . all related to living conditions,” Schilling said.

In the agricultural areas north of the San Joaquin Valley, the Mexican consul in Sacramento, Nicolas Escalante, has taken to driving the back roads as an unofficial one-man enforcement squad. He spends two days a week driving to fields and labor camps, and has reported numerous violations to local authorities and the U.S. Department of Labor.

During the last year, Escalante said, he found olive pickers near Lindsay living in tents made of garbage bags, and using irrigation water for bathing and drinking. He found a group of 100 asparagus workers near Stockton who were paid $67 for 15 days work--less than they could have made working in Mexico.

The labor contractor deducted $8.50 a day for lunches and would not provide water in the fields, but charged workers $2.50 for a beer, Escalante said. A third of the workers’ pay was deducted for a nonexistent tax.

“We feel a responsibility to these workers, and so should the growers . . . because without them they couldn’t survive,” the consul said. “Growers aren’t going to find Americans to pick crops for so little pay.”