In the fields, a rude awakening
By Lee Romney Los Angeles Times Staff
Writer
November 5, 2006
TULELAKE, CALIF. The ad in his hometown
newspaper was enticing, the meeting with a company recruiter even more
so.
For six to eight weeks of strawberry work, Ricardo Valle and his
wife, Ana Luisa Salinas, would get good pay, free transportation to and from
Mexico with food included, three daily meals even a little cabanita
with a kitchenette that they would share with just one other couple.
Like
most of the 250 Mexicans on U.S. guest worker visas who arrived Sept. 22 at this
lonely post near the Oregon border, Valle and Salinas did the math: In the
contract period promised, they could make more than they would in a year and a
half in Nogales, Mexico. Valle quit his maquiladora job, where for a
dozen years he had assembled electric curtain motors.
As strict
immigration enforcement limits the pool of available farmhands, growers are
clamoring to expand the federal guest worker program. But the experience of the
workers, whose contract ended last week, offers a rare look at the system's
potential pitfalls. In interviews and legal declarations, dozens of workers have
said they went hungry not just on the bus north but in the weeks that followed.
Instead of the cabanitas, they got crowded dorms. They were also paid
less than they'd been told they would be and less than the law required for
a shorter period than they'd been promised.
"From the moment we got on
the bus in Nogales, we knew they were feeding us lies," Valle, 52, said as he
tended to his sick wife in a cramped dormitory set up in an exhibition hall on
the county fairgrounds here. On the bus, he said, "they gave us a liquid diet
pure water for 24 hours. Those who had money could eat. The rest of us, we ate
air."
After they arrived in Tulelake, the workers said, they found out
their contract term had been cut nearly in half, to just over a month.
Furthermore, they were required to trim 1,025 strawberry plants per hour to
prepare them for later transplantation. Without farm experience, meeting the
goal proved so grueling that they worked through breaks and lunchtime.
Many failed and quit. Others were fired. Soon, only a little over half
the original workforce was left. The employer, Sierra-Cascade Nursery of
Susanville, Calif., is now under investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor,
which oversees the guest worker program. California's Department of Industrial
Relations has ordered the company to correct numerous wage violations and
conduct a self-audit.
And, responding to an emergency request by
attorneys for the nonprofit advocacy group California Rural Legal Assistance, a
federal judge two weeks ago ordered Sierra-Cascade to make meals more
nutritious, give workers more living space and heat the fairgrounds' frigid
shower rooms.
Sierra-Cascade's human resources director, Larry Memmott,
said the company was using the visa program for the first time and had made
mistakes.
"We may not have provided the proper food for them in the
beginning," he said. "We may have missed a meal. But we went in and corrected
what we need to correct
. We'll take our lumps and move forward."
The
complaining workers were "bad apples," he added.
Advocates with
California Rural Legal Assistance, which has filed suit on behalf of more than
50 workers, point instead to systemic problems that arise when human labor
becomes an importable commodity. Employees entirely dependent on the sponsoring
company are unfamiliar with the law and unlikely to complain, they
say.
"Unlike workers in any other part of the free market, who have the
ability to vote with their feet, these workers don't," said Mark Schacht of the
rural legal group's foundation, which plans to propose state legislation to
strengthen worker protections.
"These guys get delivered when the
employer wants. They get taken away when the employer wants, and they are
subjected to a regime that has elements of un-free
labor."
Sierra-Cascade's seedlings are grown in Northern California and
Oregon, then trimmed and shipped to warmer climates. In 2004, Memmott said, an
immigration review indicated that 80% of the company's workers were
undocumented.
"Last year, we couldn't fill our trim shed at all,"
Memmott said. "We figured that this year we weren't going to wait and
see."
Memmott recruited in the state of Chihuahua and in neighboring
Sonora, which has achieved relative prosperity from ranching and multinational
assembly plants known as maquiladoras.
Some learned of the jobs
through friends. Some saw fliers. Rigoberto Talamantes Flores and his wife,
Alicia Punuelas Ledezma, both 42, of Nuevo Casa Grande, Chihuahua, heard a radio
pitch. "We thought we would come, because of the illusion that it would
alleviate some of the economic pressures on us," said Flores, who shuttered his
shoeshine shop to make the trip.
They said they were told the pay would
be $9 an hour the legally required rate under the program plus production
bonuses. Nowhere in the solicitation, workers said, was any mention of the high
work quota. That was disclosed only in the contracts handed out at night in
Susanville, where the bus dropped off 200 visa holders before taking the
Tulelake workers farther north.
Disappointments multiplied upon arrival.
The site of the nation's largest World War II Japanese internment camp, Tulelake
sits in a desolate volcanic basin of rich soil. Road signs warn motorists not to
run down migrating fowl, more numerous here than humans.
"We were
cramped so close together that our legs would knock when we put on our shoes,"
Reyna Amelia Tarango Ponce, 45, whose husband closed his Chihuahua brake shop to
come north, said of the dormitories.
At first, couples were housed with
single women until a man was accused of a sexual assault during the night.
Foreman Javier Chavez fired the accused worker and installed wooden barriers to
split the room.
The eight-hour days that workers say they were promised,
and for which they were paid, quickly stretched to 10 and longer, with the bus
ride to the trim shed, where they stood in the cold for up to an hour waiting to
begin.
Breakfast at first consisted of bread and coffee; after a few
weeks the food did improve when Memmott changed cooks. Come payday, many workers
were unable to cash their checks in the tiny town, whose bank is closed
Saturdays and charges $15 for the service.
"We have nothing not even
enough to buy soap," said Valle, who, without change for the laundry machines,
spent Sundays scrubbing clothes under a cold outdoor spigot and drying them on
the fairgrounds' chain-link fence.
The gloves, aprons and boots that
advocates say are required by law to protect workers from such hazards as icy
plants and knife blades were not provided, though some workers purchased
them.
Attorneys for the workers say the production quota is unreasonable
and should have been disclosed during recruitment. Memmott says he showed them a
video and told them: "It's going to be cold. It's going to be hard
work."
Many others make the grade, he said. Most are domestic hires
experienced migrants from the poorer farming states of Oaxaca and Michoacan. The
working conditions, housing, wages and food are no better or worse than what
they are used to, said 28-year-old Alejandro Ramirez of Zamora, Michoacan.
"Those on the contract, they were made certain promises," he said. "But for us,
it's pretty good."
On a recent morning in the company's trim shed,
18-year-old Federico Hernandez of Oaxaca moved with a spasmodic rhythm, his
hands twitching and his feet dancing as he separated plants at the roots.
Working this way, he said proudly, he could trim 1,200 plants an hour and make a
decent wage.
But a lack of experience hampered many of the visa
holders.
It was a Oaxacan laborer from the Central Valley who took pity
on the visa holders. The worker called an activist in Oaxaca, who in turn
contacted an organizer at the Fresno office of the rural law group. That
organization alerted regulators and dispatched attorneys to Tulelake.
Memmott said his company is cooperating with the U.S. Department of
Labor. In response to the agency, he said, the laundry machines now operate
without coins and the kitchen is serving healthier fare.
Meanwhile, the
state Department of Industrial Relations' Division of Labor Standards
Enforcement has notified SierraCascade that it is violating labor law by failing
to pay overtime after eight hours, to ensure rest breaks and a 30-minute lunch
break, and to compensate workers for time in transit and waiting to begin work.
They "intend to correct the issues we've addressed and pay restitution
to their employees," said Dean Fryer of the Department of Industrial Relations.
The pending lawsuit alleges, among other violations, that the company,
through false representations, enticed the workers across an international
border.
Memmott attributed the problems to the program's learning curve.
Sierra-Cascade had planned to provide couples the more private housing in nearby
Newell, he added. But when fewer guest workers arrived than anticipated, the
company opted to save the cost and time of busing them farther.
Next
year, he said, the company might seek some more-experienced workers farther
south in Mexico. Advocates, however, say they may petition the U.S. Department
of Labor to block Sierra-Cascade from using the program.
The company has
pledged to make workers whole. Still, some damage cannot be undone, workers
said. In Mexico, where age discrimination is pervasive, Valle is certain he will
never get his maquiladora job back.
"Twelve years to quit for the
American Dream, which is now a nightmare," he said.
###