The Day They Quit Coming

It was Aug. 12, 1996, the first day of the Republican National Convention in San Diego. The man who would be president hurried to his hotel suite. He had invited up the party power brokers for a meeting that, if all went well, could sew up the nomination. He unlocked the door to his room and cursed.

The bed was a tangle of sweaty sheets. Wet towels were draped over the lampshade. His suit from the day before remained in rumpled piles on the floor. He picked up the telephone and dialed housekeeping. No answer. He called the front desk.

“I need my room cleaned right now,” he snapped.

“Sorry, sir,” the clerk said. “The maids didn’t show up for work today. We don’t know why.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do?”

“Perhaps, sir, you can make your own bed?”

He had a better idea. He hung up and dialed the room of a certain politician who yearned to be his running mate.

“Pete,” he said, “I’ve got a little job for you. . . .”

*

Three hundred miles north, halfway up the San Joaquin Valley, a grape grower stomped through his vineyard, kicking up dust clouds. The lush vines sagged under the weight of fat grapes. It was 106 degrees. In another 48 hours, the crop would begin to shrivel on the vine.

“Where’s my picking crew?” the farmer shouted at the white-hot sky.

He had heard from other farmers. He knew it was this way all over the valley. The pickers simply had vanished from the fields. One neighbor had gone that morning to the welfare office in Fresno. He had felt downright philanthropic, offering these idled city folk an opportunity to earn a few honest dollars in the great outdoors.

“Let me get this straight,” one had said. “You will pay us minimum wage to bend over all day in the heat and dust in order to save your crop?”

“That’s right,” the farmer said.

He could still hear them laughing as he climbed into his pickup and drove away to check on his crop insurance.

*

The strike had been in the works for months. The organizers saw it as a last resort. For too long they let the politicians pile on, staging photo-ops at the border, building high fences, scapegoating immigrants, illegal and otherwise. Apparently, with the Reds gone, the politicians needed a new bogey man. Also, it was much easier to posture on the border than to confront the real enemy within--the red-blooded American criminals who prowl the streets of every city and town.

They had tried to explain the benefits of a migrant labor pool. They had pointed out that the jobs in question were ones no one else would touch. They had talked about low prices for consumers. They had described the long history of migration back and forth across the border, the comparative fortune in foreign aid that would be needed if Mexico, deprived of this pressure valve, ever were to blow. For their trouble, they got back angry slogans:

“What is it about ‘illegal’ you don’t understand?”

So they walked. They walked from factories and fields, from carwashes and dry cleaners and construction sites, from gardener shacks and nanny quarters. They weren’t out for more money. They simply wanted respect. Their gamble was that the bosses would never pay the wages needed to attract American replacement workers. Even if they did, the resultant rise in prices would trigger a consumer revolt.

They had developed a slogan too. As crops began to rot, as hotel rooms went unmade and tables un-bused, they would start showing up at work sites with picket signs that asked: “What is it about hard work you don’t understand?”

*

In San Francisco, the senator arrived at her field office in a foul mood. She was to host a garden reception that evening, and the grounds were a mess. Where were her gardeners? The labor contractor with whom she dealt--thus inoculating herself from a “Zoe Baird problem”--was vague. Something about a strike.

How could those people strike, she demanded. What right did they have?

Exactly their point, the contractor said.

Now she buzzed for her top aide. She wanted to explore options. Could the National Guard be called in to clip her lawn? A secretary tip-toed through the door. She was sorry, but the aide had just called from home. Her nanny was a no-show. She wanted to know if she should bring her children into work with her.

Lord no, the senator said. Tell her to stay home. Children are swell for campaign commercials, but all that crying and cooing, all those smelly diapers. . . . She made a note. Hire a new chief of staff. Make sure it’s a man, a single man, with no kids.