Photos courtesy of Food Alliance
HAND PICKED
ROW BY ROW, DAY AFTER DAY
Zoë Bradbury
For Summer 2008
“Strawberries are too delicate to be picked by machine. The perfectly ripe ones even bruise at too heavy a human touch. It hit her then that every strawberry she had ever eaten — every piece of fruit — had been picked by calloused human hands. Every piece of toast with jelly represented someone's knees, someone's aching back and hips, someone with a bandanna on her wrist to wipe away the sweat. Why had no one told her this before?” — Alison Luterman, “What They Came For”
At the end of Oregon’s winter, the orchards and vineyards need tending: pruning, spraying, thinning. The months advance and heat waves start to belly-dance above the soil. Row crops are planted: Onions and watermelons take root near Hermiston; beans, peas, squash, lettuce, potatoes — an almost endless list of crops — are planted in the Willamette Valley. Irrigation pipes are moved in the mint fields of eastern Oregon. Weeds fall flat behind the sharpened edge of a hoe. Berries are picked, one by one, and packed into plastic clamshells.
Oregon’s agricultural diversity is profound. It is a state that produces some 220 crops and livestock commodities — a greater variety than any state except Florida and California — totaling more than four billion dollars in agricultural production each year. Oregon agriculture is labor intensive, every berry and every pome fruit must be picked by human hands, which explains why Oregon’s agricultural payroll expenses are the fifth highest in the country, despite the fact that the state ranks twenty-sixth in total agricultural production.
Ours are farms that rely on opposable thumbs and an eye for ripeness, on manual dexterity and skilled use of tools. In short, on something so advanced, so complex, and so capable of movement and learning that no amount of engineering has managed to fully replicate it with a machine: the human being.
The Farmworker Experience
There are approximately four million migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the U.S. today, with Oregon agriculture reliant on up to 90,000 each year, according to the Oregon Department of Agriculture. Roughly half of Oregon’s farmworkers are settled in state and half migrate to Oregon for all or part of the growing season. For the migrant population, including 14,558 migrant children and youth, the year might take them from winter reforestation work in the coast range, to spring pruning in the vineyards, to the autumn apple harvest in Hood River, to a Christmas tree farm in the Willamette Valley.
According to the National Agricultural Workers Survey, more than 90 percent of all farm workers are Hispanic, primarily from Mexico. Most are young men under the age of 35. An estimated 70 percent are undocumented to live and work in Oregon.
It’s impossible to generalize the farmworker experience, but interviews conducted by the League of Women Voters for the Farmworkers in Oregon report (2000) reveal a common storyline. From Mexico, a young man borrows money to pay a “coyote” to help him cross the border illegally. He may get caught once, twice, even five times before making it into the country.
Three thousand miles distant from his home and family, his first season will likely be punctuated by a string of migrations, labor camps, and labor contractors. Like every single farmworker in the United States — documented or not — he will not enjoy 15-minute paid breaks, receive overtime for a 12-hour workday, or get benefits.
In a year, he will earn less than $7,500 in Oregon’s fields. He’ll pay his share of taxes, including Social Security and Medicare — none of which he’ll ever see again when, or if, he turns 65. The average life expectancy for a migrant farmworker is 49 years, compared to 73 for the general U.S. population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Each day, as he moves irrigation pipe or travels back and forth to work, he’ll live with the worry of la migra (the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS) and the risk of deportation. What money is extra, he’ll wire home to his family, who may have to wait two, three, or four years to see him again, since the border crossing has become difficult and expensive.
America has prided itself on a history of basic worker protections and rights, including minimum wage, overtime, Social Security, unemployment insurance, child labor protections, and the right to organize into a union. These labor reforms, put in place by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NRLA), apply to everyone except farmworkers.
Such a pointed exclusion of farmworkers from basic labor protections has been blamed on various influences, including powerful agriculture lobbies that insisted the industry needed to be insulated from harvest strikes and high labor costs in order to ensure food security for the nation. The other theory is that the NRLA’s omission was an entrenched expression of racism against African-Americans working on farms in the South.
Despite the historic campaigns of farmworker rights advocates like César Chávez and ongoing efforts to improve farmworker protections over the decades, the disparity in labor law has never been fully reconciled in the U.S., creating an ugly double standard.
Among the inequities in Oregon: There is no clause that requires employers to pay overtime to farmworkers, even though a typical workday is 10 to 12 hours long; farmworkers are exempted from Oregon laws requiring minimum meal and rest periods; and farmworkers are not automatically granted the universal right to organize, strike, and collectively bargain with employers. On top of all that, unemployment insurance laws are written such that fewer than one-third of all farmworkers receive unemployment benefits, despite the fact that the average farmworker is employed for only 24 weeks of the year.
Oregon law does mandate certain protections for farmworkers — things like workers’ compensation, minimum wage, and workplace safety — but poor enforcement and uneven power dynamics meddle with their efficacy.
In the U.S., inadequate enforcement of safety laws contributes to the 300,000 acute pesticide poisonings that occur among farmworkers each year. Documented incidents show that farmworkers — particularly recent immigrants and those who aren’t proficient English speakers — are vulnerable to underpayment, especially when being paid piece-rate (by the pound or other unit). On-the-job injuries often go unreported, and workers’ compensation benefits go unclaimed, for fear of being fired — or worse — reported to the INS.
All together, it adds up to a set of working conditions that makes farmwork one of the most dangerous occupations in the U.S. and farmworkers the most indigent population in the country, according to a General Accounting Office (GAO) survey.
This is an uncomfortable story. But not a new one.
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