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At their weekly breakfast bull session at a pancake house in Hillsboro, Matt Unger and his fellow Washington County farmers sipped their coffee and reminisced about the good old days. It used to be you could hire a crew of kids, put them out in your fields to harvest your crop, have a little barbecue at the end of the season and call it a summer. Farmers made a living, kids made enough cash to buy school clothes, and everyone was happy. But since the '70s, with migrant workers from Mexico replacing the school kids, the labor force is as uncontrollable as El Niño. Costs are rising, and farmers are seeing their profits shrink. The farmers say a small guy just can't make a living growing berries anymore. Unger is a case in point. A slight man who wears his baseball cap low over his eyes, he has grown strawberries in Washington County for 30 years. Next year, he says, he may plow his plants under and grow a different crop, or maybe nothing. "I could just let the fields sit idle," he says, "and I wouldn't lose as much money." It's a common threat from Willamette Valley farmers, and Unger wouldn't be the first to give up on the berries. But he'd be the first to do so while chairman of the Oregon Strawberry Commission. Farmers, more than most small-business owners, are at the mercy of forces outside their control. Soggy fields or a saturated market can make the difference between profit or debt in a given year. That's why the farmers long for the days of cheap, reliable child labor. And it's why, as anti-immigrant sentiment continues to bubble around the country, local farmers argue that we need more, not fewer, workers coming across the border. Oregon is at the center of the latest national debate over immigration policy. Sen. Gordon Smith is leading the charge to pass a new bill regulating "guestworkers" before the August recess, while a group of farmworker activists from Woodburn is rallying opposition. The struggle shows how previous immigration-reform efforts have failed both workers and farmers. In the absence of easy answers, it looks as if the solutions will once again be at the expense of America's migrant laborers. Forget June 21. For many Oregon residents, summer starts when those hand-made signs pointing to strawberry stands along the Tualatin Valley Highway start to pop up. The first crop of the growing season also serves as an indication of the seasonal labor pool. Computer chips and pale ales may be what Oregon's economy is best known for, but agriculture is still the state's largest employer. Every summer the population of the fertile land just outside Portland swells from people coming here for the stoop labor that was once done by local kids during summer vacation. Strawberries are the most labor-intensive and backbreaking crop of them all. Blueberries and raspberries can be shaken off the branch by harvesting machines, but strawberries can't. It takes a human to bend over and pick up the fragile fruit. Roy Milenski grows raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and other crops and runs a fruit-packing house in Hillsboro. He gave up on strawberries. Because the crops on his 370 acres are varied and because he contracts his labor out to other farms, he provides some 400 people--mostly Latino migrants--with work from April to December. He also has housing for 270 on his land, which helps guarantee him a steady workforce. Farmers in other parts of the country are raising the alarm that they can't find enough workers to bring in their crops. Oregon growers haven't experienced that yet, but they, like farmers elsewhere, say they do have a serious problem. If past years are any guide, half of Milenski's workers may be in the country illegally. He just received a report from the Social Security office that shows more than 50 percent of the Social Security numbers from last year's crews were invalid, the same percentage as 1996. "It's not that there is not enough labor," says Milenski. "There is. But there isn't enough legal labor." It wasn't supposed to work like this. The Immigration and Control Act of 1986 granted amnesty to more than 3 million aliens residing in America at the time, more than a third of them farmworkers. It's estimated that about 10,000 of those workers chose Oregon as home. But instead of creating a permanent pool of farmworkers, the law contained a provision that, combined with agriculture's unending appetite for labor, increased illegal immigration. Because the 1986 law doesn't require farmers to check the authenticity of their workers' documentation (in fact, challenging a worker's legal status can be grounds for a discrimination lawsuit if it's suspected the questioning is based on race), Milenski doesn't face any fines for hiring workers who are here illegally. But that doesn't mean he's not worried. If the Immigration and Naturalization Service were to raid his fields during the height of picking season, his crops would surely rot, and with them, his profit. It's the same for farmers around the valley. The problem, Milenski says, is upward mobility. The workers who picked his berries after being granted amnesty in 1986 are acquiring English skills and moving into higher-paying jobs in construction and landscaping or service work in hotels and restaurants. Because the Immigration and Control Act closed the border to agricultural workers (no unskilled labor visas have been granted since then), the only replacements are undocumented workers who have arrived in the past 12 years. A recent General Accounting Office report confirmed that at least 600,000 people in the U.S. labor pool are here illegally (some estimates go as high as 1 million). But the report noted that the INS rarely targets crop farming. The same report said that although there have been regionalized worker shortages, many agricultural counties show double-digit unemployment rates, indicating that there are too many people without jobs. So if farmers are crying wolf about fears of losing undocumented workers, and if there are enough workers, why are folks like Unger and Milenski urging Congress to let them bring in more workers from out of the country? Opponents of the legislation say the farmers' real fear is not the INS but the UFW. The United Farm Workers may not be as visible as in the days when Cesar Chavez was leading the California grape boycott, but recently the UFW has started making a comeback, signing labor contracts in the lettuce, rose, mushroom and wine industries in California. In Washington, the UFW recently renewed a historic 1995 wine contract. Oregon's farmworkers union also claimed a big victory this year. In March, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste signed the first contract in the history of the state, with an organic berry farmer in Albany ("Berry Blues," page 23). Ramone Ramirez, president of PCUN, sees the farm lobby's efforts in Congress as a direct attack on the unions. "We're really worried about it," he says. "If something like this went through, it would destroy improvements made for farmworkers in the last 30 years." The famous words on the Statue of Liberty say, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." If some members of Congress have their way, they'd also chisel Tom McCall's famous dictum to visit but don't stay. Under the plan being pushed by Smith, undocumented agricultural workers would be invited back to Oregon and other states as legal "guests." The plan calls for a pilot program that would initially allow farmers to bring up to 25,000 workers into the country to work for them 10 months a year. To ensure that they don't stay permanently, 25 percent of their wages would be withheld until they returned to Mexico. "What we're talking about is people who are already here, giving them a legal standing to be here and work," says Smith. "It gives them also the ability to be here and to go home without fear." Smith's efforts came about because agricultural interests say the existing guestworker law doesn't work--at least not for small-scale farmers. The current law requires employers to recruit nationally before turning to foreign workers, to apply for workers 60 days before they need them and to guarantee the length of the work period. The GAO report says that less than 1 percent of the agricultural workforce came through the program in 1996. Smith's initial proposed overhaul of the guestworker law streamlined the regulations, PCUN says, and the safeguards that went with them. Gone were requirements that employers provide housing and transportation to the work site. Gone was a special wage requirement designed to prevent farmers from undercutting the prevailing wage in their area by bringing in foreign workers. Gone was a requirement that farmers pay at least 75 percent of the guaranteed work period. Under Smith's proposal, workers would be at the mercy of a single employer who could send them back home on a whim. "It's legislation that allows the growers to control the workforce," says Barbara Byrd of the Labor Education and Research Center at University of Oregon. Critics also predict that without stringent requirements for domestic recruitment, the domestic farm labor force will be replaced with foreign workers who do not know their rights and would be afraid to speak up. Farmers can hire them without fearing union interference. "It allows them to set wages and not be bothered by a labor campaign in strawberry season," she says, comparing the program to a form of indentured servitude. "To bring workers in means to have full control. Workers can't complain, they can't organize, they can't protest or ask for more money the way farmworkers who are living here permanently can." PCUN's Ramirez says that if farmers want a reliable work force, they should pay the wages that will guarantee it--or take the union up on its offer to set up a hiring hall for workers, with a seniority system. Bruce Goldstein of the Farmworkers Justice Fund, based in Washington, D.C., says agribusiness should do what other industries do when faced with a labor shortage--compete with other employers by offering perks. "Are there bonuses for completing the season?" Goldstein asks. "Are there worker committees? Do they offer English language classes? Most of them do very, very little to try to recruit and keep workers." Bland Herring, who will succeed Unger as chairman of the state strawberry farmers association, says he has no interest in being an oppressor. He agrees with PCUN that the best way to keep a stable, legal workforce would be to increase wages. Herring grows 45 acres of berries in Newberg. He concedes that many farmers are as selfish as PCUN makes them out to be. "Some of these old boys would rather plow their fields under than give their workers a fair wage," he says. But, he adds, many farmers are scraping by with existing profit margins. He's already paying 20 cents a pound, higher than the going rate in Washington County, which is 14 to 15 cents a pound. Even with the high rate, Herring had to contract with Milenski for more workers to bring in part of his berries. He worries that wage demands will eventually force him to switch to less labor-intensive crops. "If we can't bring in any guestworkers," he says, "the wages here will be too high and we will not be able to compete on the market. That's almost the point we're at now." Herring also likes the idea of using a workforce that he knows is here legally. Still, he says, he has conflicting feelings about Smith's bill. The program would work best, he says, for larger and corporate farms that have several crops to bring in. For him, the five-week picking season is too short to import workers. He is also worried about the effects of unlimited labor on the price of berries. If the bigger farms add acreage, that would lower the price for everyone. Silverton berry farmer Steve Krahmer, who hires a dozen or so laborers each season, also has mixed feelings about using guestworkers. On one hand, he does not know how to get an affordable, legal workforce without it. On the other hand, he knows that not all of his workers want to go back to Mexico when the crop is in. By forcing workers to return, he says, guestwork status limits their chance to move on to better jobs. "We're going to hold those people down on a very low level of the socioeconomic ladder and say, 'You're going to stay there,'" he says. Krahmer says lawmakers have told the farmers that guestworkers are politically popular because they pose less of a threat to "American" workers higher on the socioeconomic scale. "I can see their point," he says, "but I don't think as a public-policy matter it is morally right to hold people down and say, 'This is the only kind of job you can ever have.'" None of this is lost on Smith, who is trying to build enough bipartisan support get a bill through Congress by the end of August and signed by the president. He says the final bill will be different, with more protections for workers. He has gone so far as to say he briefly considered another massive amnesty program, as was done in 1986, but he knows that, given the current anti-immigrant climate in the country, voters will not stand for increased immigration quotas--no matter how much farmers press or how desperate the poverty-stricken people of Mexico are. As Smith says, "The words on the Statue of Liberty are not exactly carried out anymore." |
