The Working Poor (20 page)

The unorthodox labor-organizing tactic that treated the processor as the effective employer had worked for FLOC in parts of Michigan and Ohio near its home office of Toledo. Campbell’s signed on after a boycott, then escaped from the arrangement by halting purchases of tomatoes in the region. Heinz, Vlasic, and Dean Foods had three-party contracts with FLOC and farmers for cucumbers in that area. But FLOC hadn’t made a dent in little Mt. Olive. Eastern North Carolina is to labor unions what the Wild West was to string quartets, and Ramiro received a rough education
in the resilience of small-town politics and economic interests. After a year of fruitless meetings in which Bill didn’t budge, FLOC launched a boycott of the Mt. Olive Pickle Company’s products. Ramiro and his colleagues circulated dramatic leaflets, sent around open letters, and solicited support for the boycott from churches and area colleges. Bill countered with contributions to those worthy institutions, Ramiro contended. Indeed, Bill was a prominent citizen, generous and important and well liked. The town even put on an annual pickle festival. But the boycott finally succeeded. In 2004 Mt. Olive signed a three-party contract with FLOC and a growers’ association to pay farmers more for cucumbers, contribute to workers compensation insurance, and establish grievance procedures.

FLOC and other farm unions have not limited themselves to wages and contracts. They have also focused on the pesticides and herbicides that have damaged men and women and children who have harvested bounty from the American earth. Even as government has removed from the market more and more of the “hot stuff,” as Jimmy Burch called the most deadly chemicals, some farmers (not he, Jimmy insisted) have used the permitted compounds irresponsibly. Spraying in the wind, sending workers into fields too soon after application, failing to provide sinks and showers and laundries, many growers have exposed their employees—and their employees’ children—to untold health risks. Of particular worry are children who live in camps among the fields, who play outside in the weeds and soil, who put their hands in their mouths, who crawl around floors where parents have tracked the toxic residues, and who are especially vulnerable during their growing years when their brains and bodies are developing.

The most obvious effects of poisoning are “vomiting, nausea, dizziness and headaches, fatigue, drowsiness and skin rashes,” as well as bronchitis and asthma, according to a study of incidents in California. Less visible and more serious problems may include “childhood brain tumors, leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, sarcoma,” and damage to the immune, endocrine, and nervous systems, though these “are very difficult to link definitively to pesticide exposure,” the report concedes, since they develop long afterwards, possibly resulting from years of cumulative contact. The toxins may be responsible for the higher incidence of birth defects among farmworkers, recorded at three to fourteen times the rates among the general U.S. population.
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The statistics are incomplete, however, because many symptoms
go unreported. Most field hands have no health insurance, and the nearest free clinic may be far away. Unless they’re very sick, they usually don’t want to miss a day’s pay and risk dismissal.

The United Farm Workers of America, the union founded by Cesar Chavez, has complained that California does not vigorously enforce its own laws. Where farmers fail to post warnings that fields have been sprayed, for example, and ignore the mandatory waiting periods before resuming hand harvesting, minuscule fines of $200 or $300 are levied. Only when overt illness results can the fines reach $2,000, the union reports.
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The victims are invisible, after all.

The children of migrants can also be invisible in schools, which they may attend only for a few months before moving on. The United States has a keen interest in educating these youngsters, for most of them will remain in the country and grow up to become working citizens. Severe disruptions in their schooling do not contribute to the society’s well-being. Yet only a few small programs, funded mostly by the U.S. Department of Education, seek to address the problem by providing kids with laptops for learning on the web, for example, or by sending traveling mentors and instructors who keep the studies going as families follow the growing seasons from south to north to south again. Teenagers have been able to graduate from high school through these efforts, which exist in Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon, and elsewhere. But the number of students enrolled is too small to release the vast majority from the educational deficits that confine them to a predetermined path.

Blacks used to work these North Carolina fields, first as slaves, then as free citizens who were imprisoned by the unyielding laws of economics. “They were treated pretty tough,” said Jimmy Burch, who saw some of his fellow farmers drive the workers ruthlessly. “They worked all week, and all they got was the wine and their meals, or marijuana and their meals, whatever the thrill of the week was,” he recalled. “You say, ‘Well, this guy’s taking advantage of them.’ And he is. And on the flip side of the deal is, where else is he gonna go? Where’s he gonna go? What’s he gonna do? I mean, he ain’t got no marketable skills. He’s got a roof over his head. Might not be a nice roof, but it’s a roof. He’s warm at night, he gets fed every day. To me, it would be a shitty existence, but for some of these people, I guess it’s all
right. I guess. Kind of sad to say that. I guess it’s better than being homeless in New York or Washington, waiting for somebody to hand you fifty cents or a dollar.”

Today, after massive black migration from farms to cities and from South to North, most field hands are Mexican and Central American, the bulk of them here illegally; less than 2 percent arrive through a limited visa program known as H2A, whose red tape is formidable. If they complain about employers, they risk not being hired and issued the visa the following year. The remaining 98 percent come without visas, and if the laws against employing them were enforced efficiently, agriculture in North Carolina and certain other parts of the country would shut down, farmers believe; machines cannot replace hands in harvesting crops that are easily damaged. Jimmy argues that since the United States grants visas liberally to foreigners who write videogame software, it should do the same for foreigners who harvest food.

Being undocumented is precarious. Fearing deportation, you will think twice about contesting your wages or working conditions. You will be ineligible for government benefits except free school breakfast and lunch programs, emergency Medicaid, immunizations, and treatment for communicable diseases. And you’ll suffer from less obvious inconveniences, such as the lack of a bank account, which will cost you in fees when you transfer money. In other words, American government and business gain financially from your inability to legalize your presence in the country.

Some 6.1 million Mexicans are thought to be living as undocumented immigrants in the United States, the Pew Hispanic Center estimates, and about 52 percent of the country’s 1.6 million farmworkers are here without permission, the Government Accountability Office figures.
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They send more than $9 billion a year to Mexico to help their families with food, clothing, medicine, and housing; the flood of cash exceeds the government budgets of some Mexican localities. Most workers seem to focus on the immediacy of however many dollars they can earn today, not on some elusive career ladder. A young man named Abel was a case in point. He knew how to repair farm machinery, but he didn’t advertise his skills and preferred to stay in the fields. If he became a mechanic, he imagined, “They’ll be paying me the same as everyone else and I’ll have to work harder, do more difficult work.”

Abel and many others have a single purpose—not to gain a foothold in the United States, not to enter the mainstream, but simply to make
enough money to sustain their impoverished families back home. The common ground of America looks too remote from the twilight margins where they reside.

Earning minimum wage in the cotton fields, Abel and his two cousins worked from seven to seven in the planting season, and from seven in the morning until midnight seven days a week during the harvest from October to December—a peak of labor intensity that saw nine brothers and cousins cram into a tiny grimy trailer sitting among the fields of cotton and tobacco. On this farm, the grower followed the law and paid them overtime of $7.50 for each hour over forty a week, and he didn’t charge them for gas, electricity, or rent for their dingy quarters. That was a better deal than they could get during their winters picking oranges in Florida, where the grower charged them each $40 to $50 a week for housing. At the busiest times, they sent about half their earnings to Mexico as a lifeline to keep their parents out of destitution; in slower months, they sent practically everything home, holding out about $30 a week each for food and $200 a month for payments on the old cars that all three of them managed to buy. The jalopies were not a luxury; they got the men to painting and construction jobs in periods between farm chores. Nevertheless, all that labor yielded only modest results: In three years, the cousin who had been here the longest, Rolando, had saved only $2,000 of the $5,000 he needed to build a house in Mexico. “If you would give me the 3,000,” he said to me with a laugh, “I would go back right now.”

The price they paid was figured in loneliness, separation, and isolation from anything resembling community. No substitute could be found among the rough and transitory flows of migrants from south to north to south again. Abel put it succinctly: “We’re single, and we’re looking for girlfriends.”

As the men send dollars home, 10 to 25 percent of the money is siphoned off by Western Union, banks, and pharmacies in both the United States and Mexico through unfavorable exchange rates and exorbitant fees for wire transfers. People without bank accounts get hit with the highest charges: Their average remittance of $300 dwindles by $80 to $90 as it travels electronically to Mexico, according to the Texas Credit Union League.
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To open an account, a bank usually requires a Social Security number. To get a valid number, an immigrant must be in the country legally, so an undocumented immigrant cannot get a valid Social Security number. No
problem, said Abel, and he pulled out a Social Security card. He and his two cousins were sitting at a scarred round table in their trailer. All three were here without permission from the U.S. government, doing jobs essential to the U.S. economy. And all three had bank accounts. Social Security cards are not very elaborate, and to my untrained eye this one looked real. So did Abel’s more complex, laminated green card bearing the seal of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Together they cost $100—a package deal—and Abel said he could have paid more if he had wanted higher quality. “We present it for work, that’s all,” he explained. “After that we don’t really carry it.”

Producing such documents is part of a charade: The workers know that the farmers generally know that the cards are phony, and the farmers know that the workers know they know, but the little card shuffle seems to exempt the employers from the fines under federal law. Those doing the hiring have dutifully checked the documents, after all. The immigration agency is usually content to deport the workers without going after the employers as well. A noted exception came in the form of a federal grand jury indictment of Tyson’s Foods and six employees on charges of arranging to have illegal immigrants smuggled into the country and provided with false documents. The case was thin, however, and despite testimony by several employees who pleaded guilty, a federal jury acquitted the company and the three managers who were brought to trial.
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The only authentic piece of identification illegal immigrants can obtain is a driver’s license, and that has become more difficult since the terrorist attacks of September n, 2001. A license is not a necessity for the newest arrivals who don’t have cars and don’t drive farm equipment, but it’s essential for those who want to step off the migrant train and stay in one place for a while, or move up a rung on the job ladder from field hand to tractor driver. Certain states require a Social Security number, and one that’s false can get the applicant arrested on the spot for fraud. Among the tighter rules since September 11 is Pennsylvania’s practice of stamping “non-citizen” on immigrants’ licenses, which are now timed to expire when their visas do.
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This provokes some to drive without licenses and encourages ethnic profiling by the police, who park outside trailer camps and stop drivers who look Hispanic. The Justice Department has asked police to enforce immigration laws, which have targeted people from Muslim countries especially.

The crackdown also generates some migration within the migration—
a trip from Ohio, Tennessee, or South Carolina, where the rules are strict, to North Carolina, for example, where lawsuits against the state used to guarantee that anyone without a number was allowed to fill in the blanks with zeros. Even here, though, you needed two forms of I.D., and that could be a hassle. A voter’s identification card from Mexico counted as one, and a Mexican birth certificate was acceptable. Otherwise, a title to a car would suffice, along with the voter’s I.D., but that required a certificate of insurance, which in turn required identification, and on into a labyrinth. After September 11 and the rising fear of immigrants, North Carolina imposed new requirements: proof of state residency and either a valid Social Security number or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, available with some difficulty from the IRS. Then Congress stepped in, barring states from issuing licenses to illegal immigrants after 2008.

Father Paul Brant put fifteen hundred miles a week on his aging van crisscrossing the countryside of eastern North Carolina on behalf of these folks: saying masses; doing counseling; arranging medical care; and helping people get driver’s licenses by pleading, urging, demanding that the motor vehicle administration adhere to its own regulations. He was a Jesuit priest who got his start helping the poor in the Bronx—a tall bear of a man with a flushed, puffy face and a constant smile in his blue eyes. He wore a pleasant squint of jolly compassion behind narrow-rimmed glasses, the thinnest wisp of a gray beard, and a T-shirt that said, “Festival Latino Wilmington ’98.” His fluent Spanish tumbled along in a very American accent.