Bitter fruits

Re “Hope withers on the vine,” Column One, June 23

The fruits sprouting in the Coachella Valley do so at a severe cost to California.

The backbone of the state’s giant agricultural industry are the underpaid and overworked farmworkers who bring fresh foods from our fields to our plates every day.

It’s time that Californians realize that our current agricultural system is unsustainable when farmworkers are paid low wages for grueling, dangerous work.

Systemic changes, including union contracts and better safety standards, will do much to ensure that our food is harvested by people under just conditions.

Sarah Newman

Los Angeles

Thanks for featuring Mike Anton’s informative story about picking grapes in the Coachella Valley.

The conditions workers face for low wages and no benefits make our state seem like a Third World country. I learned more about an area near my home, but I didn’t find out who or what entities own the 9,000 acres of vineyards described in the article. Some owners have settled lawsuits on behalf of wronged workers, but must they remain anonymous?

Are there no laws that require better housing, at least for workers who start at dawn? If not laws, how about common decency to fellow humans?

Lou Jacobs Jr.

Cathedral City

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Thanks so much for the article on grape pickers. It should be required reading for all Californians who complain about “illegals” who are lowering others’ “quality of life.”

I am always angered and saddened when I read complaints in the letters section about undocumented workers who supposedly are breaking immigration laws, living on others’ taxes and taking jobs from real Americans. In place of these platitudes, you give us the brutal lives of these Latino farmworkers, bent over in the heat and dust, sleeping amid the cockroaches, trying to support their families on so little.

David Eggenschwiler

Los Angeles

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Should we be surprised that grape-picker wages, when adjusted for inflation, haven’t risen in 40 years? With an endless supply of migrant laborers from Mexico willing to toil uncomplainingly, why should the farmers of the Coachella Valley be more generous?

Back when the United Farm Workers was organized, it was recognized that a great threat to UFW members was illegal immigration, with its eroding effect on domestic worker wages. Maybe we should be paying more than $1 per pound for handpicked grapes.

Matthew P. Mackenzie

Arcadia