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Mexican workers listen to union organizers, keep their own counsel
Julia Oliver - The Fayetteville (NC) Observer - 09/14/2004
DUNN - Suddenly, everyone wants to know what Ramon Anaya thinks. His boss of 12 years, tobacco farmer David Godwin, says Anaya's happy. The union says he's scared to talk.
Constantino
Santiago plucks the tops off tobacco plants on the final day of
harvesting at David Goodwin’s farm near Dunn. Santiago and some of the
other immigrant workers wear rain gear to keep moisture off their
clothing. |
Anaya, a Mexican citizen who comes to work in North Carolina each summer, is part of a labor pool that has shifted drastically in the past two decades. He's not ready to take sides as a farm-labor union tries to organize workers.
"I don't know what they're about yet," Anaya said recently, after a union representative's visit to Godwin's farm.
Before Godwin hired workers from Mexico each summer, he had contract crews or high school students harvest his tobacco. But the contract labor was unreliable and, as the area's families became wealthier, their children were often away on vacations.
Now, Godwin and about 1,000 other North Carolina farmers are hooked on a federal program that lets them import foreign workers for six months each year. But the farmers are facing more change: This summer, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, part of the AFL-CIO, began vying for the workers' allegiance.
"We're fixing to be unionized, sure as hell," Godwin, 66, said one morning as he zoomed between his curing barns on a three-wheel scooter. He was nursing a knee problem and one of his tractors had just been in a wreck. To him, this union thing was just another problem. When he was growing up, he said, "union was a dirty word to everybody, because Chevrolets was so expensive."
The North Carolina Growers' Association, an organization that helps Godwin and the other farmers hire Mexican workers, sees things a little differently. The association has been sued several times by worker advocates. Hoping to improve its public image, it signed a "neutrality agreement" with the union last month. On Aug. 10, it sent a letter to growers, including Godwin, asking them to let labor organizers on their farms.
"After years of withering litigation and an unresponsive Congress, we have begun a new and innovative solution," the letter said.
Anatolio Guerrero Recendiz sorts tobacco leaves as they move down a conveyor belt to be baled. |
Baldemar Velasquez, president of the Ohio-based union, says conditions on North Carolina's H-2A farms are better than camps where undocumented workers live. The H-2A program already includes some worker protections. It requires growers to pay the men $8.06 an hour, provide them free housing and carry workers' compensation.
But Velasquez and other worker advocates say the men in the H-2A program are still vulnerable to poor treatment, despite federal regulations. They argue that the employers, who hold the workers' visas, have too much control over their lives. They say workers suffer through health problems and substandard living conditions because they are afraid they will lose the right to work in the United States if they complain.
Brendan Greene, 27, a union organizer, says one of the most telling signs of problems in the H-2A program is this response he gets from workers who are in the country illegally: "When you ask undocumented workers if they're H-2A, they say, 'No, somos libres'" - No, we're free - he said. Even without papers, "they have the freedom to go and stay as they wish."
The union says it would provide oversight of the program and a structure to process complaints. It says it would help resolve disputes between workers and growers.
For Godwin, the changing face of tobacco labor answers a simple, practical question. Local workers will not do the work, so he hires Mexicans who will. Pointing to a friend's son napping on a bag of tobacco one morning, he joked, "If it weren't for H-2A, that's the kind of help you'd be hiring."
Stan Eury, executive director of the Growers' Association, said his organization is required to give Americans a chance to take any job he fills. About three-quarters of the positions are in tobacco. Eury said jobs are advertised on the radio and in newspapers, but the association gets few responses. Out of the 8,500 positions the association filled this year, 129 were taken by U.S. citizens. Midway through the contract period, only five of them were still working, he said. "They just won't stay."
For union organizers, the shift in the nationality of the workers poses a question of justice. They point out that the men live on isolated rural camps without independent transportation. The farmers can control who visits the camps. The workers support families in a country where they can't find jobs. And the men watch as, year after year, those who complain don't come back, Greene said.
"They have to turn their voice in at the border, basically," he said.
While Godwin zipped around the loading dock by his barn, workers hefted armloads of cured tobacco leaves from wire racks onto a conveyer belt. Sweating through their shirts at 8 a.m., they picked out green stems and shoved dried yellow leaves into a baler.
Godwin's employees don't gripe about their working conditions. Many have been coming back to his farm for years. But within their ranks, there's a hierarchy.
The most senior workers choose baling or drive the tractors; the newer ones plod the rows and pick the leaves.
The fields are hot and exhausting. The tobacco tar stiffens workers' clothes, and some workers get dizzy or ill from the leaves, they said. Anaya, the worker who's been with Godwin 12 years, said most of the men rotate about three sets of clothing during the season.
"When we're finished with tobacco, we have to throw away our clothes," he said.
In July, workers pick the leaves lowest on the plant. That job, like the sweet potato harvest that comes later, is the most grueling.
"You get tired when you're picking from under the plant," Anaya said. As the season progresses, the workers move up the stalks, clearing them week by week. By late August or early September, the stems are nearly bare, except for the highest, most prized leaves - "what they make Marlboros out of," Godwin said.
Sergio Delgado,
right, makes his way down the sparse rows of tobacco with other workers
earlier this month on the final day of harvesting on David Godwin’s
farm near Dunn. |
Constantino Santiago, 36, was one in a group of workers finishing up a field one Wednesday morning. Even though the sun was out, the men were dressed in raincoats and wind pants to protect themselves from the dew or rain gathered on the leaves. Some wore trash bags over their clothing. The workers' grabbed leaves mechanically, hands turned palms down: snap, snap, snap.
"That's a perfect finished crop of tobacco," Godwin said proudly as he watched from his pickup.
Santiago chose to pick tobacco through the season even though he's been here four years. He could have had a baling job in the shade, but he said he prefers the open fields.
"Whenever there's a cool breeze, you kind of feel like you're free," he said.
Before the H-2A program, high school students on summer break would do what Santiago does.
"I enjoyed the high school young 'uns," said Larry Eason, who owns 70 acres of tobacco and works 160. But he said that system only worked "until everybody started making a little better living."
Families began taking two-week vacations in the middle of the summer, he said, and school usually started before all the picking was done. Eason hired housewives to finish up the crop.
"They were good workers - fast with their hands," he said. "Now that's a thing of the past."
When vacations ate into Eason's season too much, he hired contract workers. But they were unreliable.
Immigrant workers pile tobacco leaves onto a truck on Godwin’s farm. |
"There was excessive drinking," Eason said. "They drank a lot of wine, a lot of whiskey."
Godwin said he could never be sure whether the contract workers' supervisors would give out the checks he handed them. Under the H-2A program, he pays the workers directly.
Eason has been using the H-2A program since 1991. Like Godwin, who has 15 years in the program, he loves it.
"These boys are more aggressive than the local workers. They can stand the heat," Eason said. And they don't get into trouble or drink too much, he said. "They pretty much abide by what we say."
Eason said the union has talked to his workers, but he doesn't know whether they'll join.
"I don't see how they could have it much better," he said.
On a recent Sunday, Brendan Greene, the union organizer, stopped by Godwin's camp to pick up workers for a meeting. All the workers he invited said they were busy, so Greene left.
Most of Godwin's employees were reluctant to talk about the union. Several said they didn't quite understand what it can do and many wanted to hear an opinion from the Growers' Association before they agreed to anything.
Guillermo Alonso Camacho, who is 43 and earning money to pay for his diabetic wife's medical care in Mexico, said he is most worried about how Godwin would view any union activity.
"It depends on what the boss thinks," he said. If the workers join the union and Godwin doesn't want them any more, he reasoned, they could end up on a farm with worse conditions.
Ramiro Reyes, center, hoists leaves onto a conveyor belt for sorting. |
"You already know what you're going to do here and what to expect," Camacho said. He does the baling work, which he considers less strenuous than the picking. "If I get a new boss, I might have to start over picking tobacco."
Anaya said he thinks the union has good intentions but isn't sure it can help him. He said the 2.5 percent of his paycheck he would have to pay in union dues seems high.
"We get decent pay. We have cars to go out," he said. "We have a phone. We have everything and we don't have to pay any bills."
But Santiago, who picked tobacco all season, said he has a few requests. He wondered whether the union would help the program expand, so more people could come from Mexico. And he wondered whether workers could have more choices in the work they do. Another type of crop, maybe.
"There are people who work in tobacco who can handle it," he said, "but there are people who get sick, get dizzy."
He said he would prefer something else.
"You can spend the whole day hunched over picking sweet potatoes," he said. "The difference is, the sweet potatoes don't harm you."
|
Santiago also said he wouldn't mind seeing some improvements to the corrugated metal building where he lives with the 15 other workers. The building's bedrooms are divided by particle board and most of them open to the outside. The bathrooms are in a separate building. Santiago said he'd like it better if the kitchen and bathrooms were connected to the bedrooms so he didn't have to walk through the rain to cook or take a shower.
Javier Alvarado said he didn't mind talking to the union organizers.
"It seems good, because of the help that they're promising," he said. But he said it was not something he wanted to get involved in - he was too busy getting ready to go home. He was already thinking about seeing his year-old daughter, Citlali Abigail, and about the second floor he planned to add to his house. Alvarado and other H-2A workers said they often send home $1,000 each month.
"My family keeps growing," Alvarado said. "I have to prepare for that."
Staff writer Amneris Solano contributed to this story.
Staff writer Julia Oliver can be reached at oliverj@fayettevillenc.com or 323-4848, ext. 280.
