Chavez’s Season of Gain for Farm Workers Slips Away : Labor: Despite progress, wages are meager and living conditions wretched. Enforcement of laws weakens.

A quarter-century after Cesar Chavez rattled the nation’s conscience by publicizing the plight of those who tend our crops, California farm workers such as Juan Maciel enjoy protections denied to laborers in other states.

Laws ban many hazardous tools--notably the notorious short-handled hoe--and have brought toilets, drinking water, lunch breaks, unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation benefits to the fields.

But wages are still meager, living conditions wretched and the work, when you can find it, is hard. Maciel, 22, got work this week thinning plum trees of excess fruit for $4.75 an hour. That is an enviable wage in these dusty San Joaquin Valley farm towns, but still Maciel lives with 13 others in a tiny house with no beds.

Inadequate enforcement of labor and health laws, coupled with tumbling wages and backbreaking work amid toxic pesticides, have sentenced hundreds of thousands of farm workers and their children to a precarious existence from which they have little hope of escaping.

“There were many extraordinary accomplishments on behalf of farm workers in the 1960s and ‘70s,” said Clete Daniel, a labor historian at Cornell University who wrote a book on California fieldworkers. “Yet today you still have people living under bridges, in lean-tos, in ditches. There is still an inexcusable level of misery.”

Here in Dinuba--about 65 miles from Delano, where Chavez will be buried today--both the misery and the gains are plain to see. Late April is a quiet time in California’s agricultural heartland, a pause before the summer harvest. But already farm workers are flooding this Central Valley town, crowding by the dozen into two-bedroom hovels and joining a fierce scramble for jobs.

Maciel’s workday begins well before dawn. He boards a labor boss’s van and races through the morning darkness to the orchards. He makes enough to send $200 a month home to his family in Mexico, which he left three years ago to work these fields.

Maciel has something farm workers in most states do not--the right to workers’ compensation if he is injured on the job and the right to unemployment pay when his work runs out. Unlike most agricultural workers in California, he also receives medical insurance through his employer.

“I have no problem,” Maciel said with a shrug of resignation, his bare fingers nimbly plucking hard green plums. “The wages are better than home. . . . We are used to working hard.”

The benefits Maciel enjoys were born of a remarkable struggle launched in the 1950s by Chavez. When he founded the United Farm Workers union in 1965, crop pickers in California averaged $1.50 an hour, received no benefits and lacked any mechanism for challenging abuses by employers.

Mass peonage by growers was not uncommon, and housing for many migrants was rarely more fancy than a primitive camp at the edge of a muddy irrigation ditch, complete with fires of cow dung to chase off the mosquitoes.

Such conditions had been the norm in California agriculture for decades--even during the officially sanctioned bracero program that supplied growers with Mexican labor when millions of Americans went off to fight in World War II.

John Steinbeck vividly chronicled the squalor in “The Grapes of Wrath,” and a U.S. Senate report in 1940 found farm workers “ill-fed, ill-clothed, poorly housed and almost completely lacking in many other things commonly considered necessary for civilized life.”

It was Chavez, however, who most forcefully brought jarring images of the conditions into American living rooms. And 10 years after he founded the UFW, the picture began to change.

Boycotts and strikes led to sharp pay increases--not only for workers under UFW contracts but for those whose bosses feared unionization. Passage of the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975 gave workers two victories won decades earlier in America’s other industries: the right to collective bargaining and the right to seek redress for unfair practices on the job.

Other regulations banned tools that caused crippling back injury--such as the short-handled hoe--and required growers to grant work breaks and to provide toilets and fresh water in the field.

“Things became good in those years,” recalled Manuel Benitez, who was a unionized broccoli picker in the Salinas Valley during the 1970s. “I was making $10 or $11 an hour, can you believe it? And we had insurance for medical troubles, too. It was a pretty nice life.”

But gradually the gust of public interest that fanned such reforms died out. At the same time, internal strife and other problems weakened the UFW, and Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.--a champion of farm workers’ rights--was replaced by Gov. George Deukmejian, who had other priorities and cut the budget of the board that investigates charges of workplace abuse.

More recently, advocate groups that represent workers in claims against growers have suffered severe staffing cuts. And continuing waves of immigration have caused a labor glut, with the newest migrants--including large numbers of Mixtec Indians from the mountains of southern Mexico--often willing to work for less than the minimum wage.

“There is always a new population of migrants who are less sophisticated, more desperate and more vulnerable,” said Michael Kearney, a professor at UC Riverside who has studied the Mixtec migration. “There is always someone willing to work for less.”

The result of these factors, experts say, has been a disheartening erosion of many of the gains achieved in the last 25 years.

The short-handled hoe has reappeared in some fields from Monterey to Oxnard, and some growers have tried to get around its ban by requiring workers to weed by hand. Advocate groups such as California Rural Legal Assistance say they are once again pressing cases of slavery-style treatment of workers by employers and routinely represent workers who say their pay was withheld by growers.

Makeshift camps where workers live in squalor beside streams and in caves have proliferated, in part due to a steep decline in employer-provided housing, and agencies that enforce the laws passed to protect workers are thinly staffed. Advocates say children are showing up in fields again.

Don Villarejo, director of the California Institute for Rural Studies in Davis, said he went to a vineyard last year in San Joaquin County and found two youths 8 and 10 working barefoot among the vines.

“It was a school day in September, it was boiling hot,” he said. “There were toilets but no drinking water. The violations were plain to see if any inspector had bothered to look for them.”

The rise of farm labor contractors--middlemen who supply growers with groups of workers--has created other problems. Workers report widespread minimum wage violations and say the contractors often charge them exorbitant fees for everything from rent to transportation to sodas in the field. In many cases, workers must purchase such services in order to be hired.

“Many of them are unlicensed, and they often have feudal sorts of arrangements for extorting money from the farm worker,” said Kearney.

Workplace safety is another major concern. Agriculture ranks among the most dangerous industries, with 42,000 injuries--everything from pesticide exposure to fractures and lacerations--reported each year.

But perhaps most distressing to workers is the continuing slide in real wages. One study estimated the overall drop at more than 10% in the last decade and said those employed by farm labor contractors have seen their earnings cut by 25%.

The usual wage now ranges from $4.25 to $6 an hour. Because more than half of the state’s farm workers are jobless at least 20 weeks a year, their annual income averages about $6,500--far below the poverty line.

Ruben Gonzales, 34, has experienced the pain of shrinking wages firsthand. Gonzales has worked the Central Valley fields since he was 14 and today is a crew boss near Dinuba.

“They paid $3.50 an hour 10 years ago,” Gonzales said as he surveyed neat rows of zucchini one recent morning, “and now they pay $4.50. Before, you could buy a loaf of bread for 49 cents. Now it’s $1.29.”

Nearby, 70-year-old grower Tosh Sadahiro leaned on a shovel as tall as his wiry frame and said he would pay higher wages if he could. He says he understands the workers’ plight, noting that his family lost the farm in the 1940s when they were sent to a World War II internment camp. When they returned, it had been sold to someone else.

“I wish I could pay them $6 an hour but I’m a small farmer, 40 acres, and I just can’t afford it,” he said. With a razor-thin profit margin, Sadahiro said, even a 50-cent raise is too much to absorb.

As Sadahiro spoke, his workers stooped over their zucchini plants, methodically slicing the fruit from the stalk with sharp knives. Although they understand the pressure on the farmer, they said $4.25 an hour was too little for the backbreaking work, too little to support families and get ahead.

At 9:30 a.m., the men take a short break for lunch, a meal of tortillas, beans and shredded beef. At day’s end, they pack into vans, sitting shoulder to shoulder for the ride back to town.

Gonzales, a veteran of many harvests, watches them go. Yes, he said, there are now toilets in most of the fields, and “a lot more water to wash your hands and drink.”

“But the lifestyle we lead is still the same. Maybe worse. . . . I tell my son, if he doesn’t pay attention in school, this is what’s left, the field.”