Tomatoland (24 page)

By the late 1990s, the Beddards had what seemed like an ideal agrarian situation. Although they worked long hours throughout the spring, summer, and fall, they were making a decent living and they had the entire winter off. When Beddard suggested that they buy some land in Florida to offset the risk from having all their crops on one farm, his wife wisecracked, “Yeah, and then we can work 365 days a year.”

Despite the dire predictions of experienced Florida growers, Beddard had a bountiful harvest his first season in the South. He felt smug until he read in
Packer
magazine, a trade publication for the vegetable industry, that growing conditions in Florida that winter were the best they had been in a century. Then a few years later, a single storm,
Hurricane Jeanne, damaged his Florida fields, and then moved up the coast, hitting his farms in Georgia, before drowning out what remained in his Pennsylvania fields.

In 2008 his buyer from Whole Foods Market came to Beddard and said that the natural grocery chain intended to sign the Coalition
of Immokalee Workers fair food agreement. They wanted to know if he would be willing to pay harvesters an extra penny per pound and comply with the coalition’s other terms. That request presented him with a problem. As a matter of policy, Beddard pays hourly wages—there is no antiquated per-pound piece work at Lady Moon. In addition, he provides free housing for his workers when they move north to Georgia and Pennsylvania for the summer. (They are responsible for their own accommodations in Florida, where they live for most of the year with their families.) He consulted his accountants and discovered that he was already in compliance by a comfortable margin with the demands of the Campaign for Fair Food. He laughed, shaking his head. “I mean, come on, we’re talking about a
penny
per pound. What’s a penny a pound to these big producers? What’s it to me? Nothing. It made no sense to me why they fought so hard and in doing so gave the coalition all the ammo they could have ever asked for. I told one of them, ‘Give them the damn penny per pound and they’ll be off your back.’”

We arrived back at his packinghouse, where Beddard carried on a conversation about laying some irrigation lines for a new field with his field foreman, a slight, mustachioed Latino whose features were hidden in the deep shade provided by the brim of his straw cowboy hat. As I turned to leave, he told me, “Organic farming in Florida can be a bitch,” he said. “But it can be done.”

THE LAWYER

In 1976 two classmates who had just graduated cum laude from liberal arts programs at Harvard College decided to have one last summer lark together before immersing themselves in the grind of three years at Harvard Law School. A professor of theirs needed someone to drive his car out West, where he had accepted a new position, and the two buddies volunteered. Today, one of those recent graduates,
Gregory S. Schell, is a lawyer with the
Migrant Farmworker Justice Project of Florida Legal Services, a nonprofit group that offers pro
bono representation to agricultural laborers in disputes with the farms that employ them. His friend,
John G. Roberts, is now Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. “But he was a Democrat back then,” Schell informed me. “It was before he drank the Kool-Aid.”

Schell chose a radically different path
. It’s hard to know where he would be practicing today if a Harvard alumnus hadn’t come to campus to talk about the legal work he was doing on behalf of migrants in Immokalee. “It sounded a lot like the Peace Corps, except right here in the United States,” Schell said. “I thought, ‘This will be fun.’”

Arriving for what he pictured as a short stint, Schell was surprised to find himself in the company of some top-notch legal talent. “They had gotten into this work and found it very challenging and rewarding,” he said. “And you don’t have to wear a tie. That’s really important.” Over the ensuing years, in addition to notching up a string of courtroom victories, he learned to speak fluent Haitian Creole and married a farmworker, whom he met in Immokalee while he was suing the organization that employed her. Schell may be the only Harvard Law grad whose mother-in-law ran a tomato labor camp until her dying day at age ninety-six. And he rarely puts on a tie.

During his three-decade career as a legal advocate, Schell, with financial backing from the Florida Bar Foundation, has won a series of precedent-setting cases that have changed agricultural labor policies across the country. It was Schell’s lawsuit that established that growers are liable for violations of
labor laws that occur on their farms, even if the immediate perpetrator was a second-party crew boss. The decision established that the farm operator is responsible for making sure that anyone working on his farm, including those employed by subcontractors, gets at least the minimum wage. Owners, not crew bosses, are liable if workers are transported in unsafe vehicles or housed in substandard structures. “We put an end to that contractor fiction,” Schell said. Unfortunately, in 2000, Congress enacted a law that all but exempts farm owners from violations of human trafficking laws perpetrated by labor contractors they hire.

Schell’s work also established that employers are legally responsible for paying for foreign guest workers’ travel expenses to and from their home countries. When farm owners threatened to have lawyers who represented workers arrested if they entered grower-owned labor camps, Schell sent in a sixty-four-year-old associate of his who was a grandmother, knowing they wouldn’t want to incur the negative publicity of having her being hauled away by police. Instead, the growers sued her for trespassing, and Schell, who is a fervent advocate of transparency, not only won the case, but prevailed in a counterclaim that required owners of labor camps to give unfettered access to legal representatives, members of the media, rights advocates, and pretty much anyone else with a legitimate reason to visit. In addition, Schell has won tens—perhaps hundreds—of millions of dollars in back pay for his impoverished clients.

Schell operates from offices on a side street in Lake Worth, a working-class city languishing in the glitzy shadows of its neighbors immediately to the north, West Palm Beach and Palm Beach. A man of slight stature, Schell peers out from behind a pair of owlish glasses. He could easily pass for an English lit professor. On the day I met him, he wore jeans and a faded short-sleeve madras shirt. Behind his desk, he was dwarfed by stacks and bundles of accordion files, manila envelopes, file folders, vertical files, FedEx shipping boxes, loose-leaf binders, notepads, and books. To offer me a seat, he had to bring in a chair and wedge it into a corner, the only unoccupied space. And when I asked if I could place my digital recorder on his desk, he said, “Sure. Just make sure it doesn’t fall into a crevasse.”

Schell talks fast and in a high-pitched voice. His words roll forth in complete paragraphs, although when he warms to a subject, he sometimes neglects to inhale and has to stop and suck in a breath before picking up at the point at which he ran out of air, giving the impression that in the business of making sure that migrant workers get their due, there is far too much work and far too little time. If the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is the crusading political wing of
the effort to end farmworker abuse in Florida’s tomato fields, Schell is its enforcer. “I’m not an organizer,” he told me. “What we do is get people money. I just make sure these guys get the minimum wage.”

His most immediate problem
the morning we met was that he had to disperse the almost $1 million he had just won in a courthouse-steps settlement with Ag-Mart Produce. “Sometimes it seems like all we do is sue Ag-Mart,” he explained. “But they are far from alone and far from the worst actor out there.” Schell had filed eight class action lawsuits against the company on behalf of workers who had claimed that they were paid less than the minimum wage because they had received no compensation for “waiting time,” the industry term for the intervals between when buses arrive at the fields and workers actually begin to pick and between when they stop work and the buses finally leave. Those intervals can amount to several hours per week. In Schell’s practical world view, the biggest obstacle standing between tomato harvesters and a fair wage is not an extra penny per pound, but the lack of enforcement of labor laws that are already on the books. “Our experience has been that for the time they are actually picking, most people make minimum wage. What creates the problem is the waiting time at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day. It adds up. If you could eliminate waiting time, I’d say that you’d have maybe 5 or 10 percent of tomato workers having problems with minimum wage.”

Ag-Mart had vigorously denied any wrongdoing but settled nonetheless. Now it was June, and Schell was trying to track down more than one thousand current and former Ag-Mart workers and sign them up for their share of the settlement before an October deadline. His firm had hired an administrator whose full-time job was to find eligible workers, some of whom had already headed north for the season, some of whom were back home in Mexico. The goal was to reach fifteen hundred pickers. “They will get a check for as much as two thousand dollars,” said Schell. “Will it change their lives? No. But it’s real money.”

In addition to getting workers money that they have legally earned, Schell sees his lawsuits as an important deterrent to any farm owner who might want to cut corners when it comes to giving his workers their legal due. “A company takes a bus load of workers out there and lets them wait without paying them—who cares?” said Schell. “Well, once they’ve been successfully sued for a whole bunch of money, they care. We’re in the process of suing some of the other big growers for similar things. When we sue, we sue for a lot of money and hope it sends the message to people—to quote
Santana, ‘To change your evil ways, baby.’” His work, he said, deals with matters that should be prosecuted by the U.S. Labor Department, but under Clinton and then Bush, there was very little enforcement. “That meant open season on farmworkers.”

Unfortunately, early signs reaching Schell’s office indicated that the adoption of the Coalition of
Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Code of Conduct would not eliminate the need for the sort of strong-armed tactics that Schell has shown himself so effective at providing. “Enforcement is going to be a big problem,” he said, saying that he was joining forces with a private legal firm to file suit against one of the big Fair Food signatories, who was breaking the law by not paying for waiting time and transporting workers in uninsured vehicles driven by unlicensed drivers.

Over the years, Schell has developed an approach to negotiation that, while effective, has not endeared him to corporate agriculture. “We give them one chance,” he said. “We say, ‘You can do this the easy way or the hard way. Here’s the easy way: It will cost you
X
dollars. The hard way, unfortunately, is war, and our backers have already agreed that whatever amount we need to spend, we can spend. We are going to sue you to oblivion.’”

Recognizing that farmworkers’ exposure to pesticides has not gotten the attention that such issues as wages and involuntary servitude have received, Schell began taking steps in 2009 to rectify that. The problem, he said, is that no one has made an organized, concerted
effort to bring
pesticide complaints before the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which is charged with regulating the use of agricultural chemicals. Some farmworker advocates have called for the control to be wrested from the agriculture department and given to the health department. Working with Schell, the
Farmworker Association of Florida filed a half-dozen formal complaints. “We want to see what the state does with them,” said Schell. “If they do a great job, terrific. If they do a crummy job, then we have the basis to go in and say that we need a new agency in charge. We are poorly positioned to critique them if we don’t give them enough rope to hang themselves. So we’re giving them ample rope.”

Schell’s battle to see that workers get their due is made all the harder, he said, because most of his would-be clients lack legal status in the United States. “You have a workforce that has no rights or perceives that it has no rights,” he said. Like many players in the tomato industry, Schell feels that giving migrant workers documentation would not only legitimize the illegal status of the majority of Florida agriculture’s workforce but reduce the migrants’ vulnerability to exploitation. “Until you resolve that issue, the potential for all sorts of human trafficking and other labor abuse is there. We feel that we’re sticking fingers in a dike and that we don’t have enough fingers. Until it’s resolved, it’s hard to see how things will dramatically improve. Even after it’s fixed, we’ll have plenty of problems.”

Before I left, I asked him whether he has any regrets when he looks at his Harvard Law School peers like Chief Justice Roberts or the multimillionaire rainmakers on Wall Street. He responded unhesitatingly, “I probably enjoy my work as much or more than any of them. I can’t believe they are paying me, I’m having so much fun. I mean, we get together here and say, ‘Let’s take a run at this constitutional case. Let’s try something creative that a private attorney couldn’t risk the money on.’ We have the chance to move the law forward, and sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But it works often enough that it’s pretty cool. Plus, how could you not like this group of clients,” he continued. “
All they want is to be paid what the law requires for their hard work. You don’t have to be a raving liberal to say that that is a pretty basic concept. And the system is stacked so heavily against them. I try to equalize the scales. That’s what I went to law school for—to give the little guy a shot. Our client in every case has been ripped off big time. The only question is who is going to pay. And in every case, we’re the only source of help. They come to us when there’s nowhere else to turn. I get to represent the best group of people imaginable.”

THE TEACHER

Barbara Mainster cracked open a door
in a building behind the
Redlands Christian Migrant Association’s head office in Immokalee, turned to me, and put her index finger to her lips. “Shhhhhhhh!” She led me into a darkened room. It was silent and the cool air inside provided welcome relief from the numbing humidity of an overcast autumn day. Even in the dim light, the room and all its furnishings abounded in reds, yellows, and blues. It was spotlessly clean. In a whisper, Mainster introduced me to two Hispanic women who both looked like they were in their late twenties or early thirties,
Hilda Enriques, in a rocking chair, and
Francesca Sota, who was stretched out on the floor. Both women cradled infants in their arms. One other baby slept in a crib. “We usually have eight babies in this room,” said Mainster, a gray-haired seventy-year-old grandmother. “The others have gone home for the day.” Enriques had been a caregiver at Redlands for five years; Soto for seven. Before that, both women had labored in the same fields where the mothers of the children in their arms were working at that very moment. “They have walked in the same shoes as the babies’ parents,” said Mainster.