In the latest LA Weekly, Marc Cooper has an extraordinary article on California's hordes of immigrant farmworkers. While he was in the Central Valley reporting it, two of the workers died from heat exposure. We are, quite literally, working these people to death. Cooper writes:
exactly 40 years after Chavez's UFW exploded into the national consciousness by leading the great 1965 Delano grape workers' strike and forced America to recognize the plight of those who put our food on the table, nothing could be further from the truth. The golden years of California farm workers lasted barely a decade and then sharply began to fade. “Since the late 1970s, it's all been downhill, it's all been on the defensive,” says Oxnard-based CRLA attorney Jeff Ponting.
The landmark 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) that passed during the Jerry Brown administration promised a New Deal for farm workers. Today it is little more than a historical asterisk. Wages among California's 700,000 farm workers, 96 percent of whom are Mexican or Central American, more than half of whom are undocumented, are at best stagnant, and by most reckonings are in decline. With almost all workers stuck at the minimum wage of $6.75 an hour, it's rare to find a farm worker whose annual income breaks $10,000 a year. “Twenty-five years ago, a worker made 12, 13, 14 cents for a bin of oranges,” says economist Rick Mines, until recently research director at the Davis-based California Institute for Rural Studies. “Today that same bin pays maybe 15 or 16 cents — in spite of 250 percent inflation.” Virtually no workers have health insurance or paid vacations.
The cyclical nature of the crops throws most out of work for two or more months per year. In a pattern that one academic calls “ethnic replacement,” succeeding waves of ever poorer, more marginal Mexicans, many of them from indigenous communities where Spanish is a foreign language, increasingly constitute the field labor force.
When conservatives say the rich deserve their money because they work harder, do you think they mean harder than a migrant farmworker picking grapes and roasting under the Central Valley's sun? Or do you think they just mean harder than someone else in an air-conditioned office, doing similar tasks with less intensity?
Just wondering.
This is why the Labor movement matters. This is why the living wage movement matters. This is why the progressive movement matters. And too often, we forget that. Read Marc's piece, and remember.
