The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  “They smile every day,” Father Tony observed, even though across a field, behind trim white fences, they could see mahogany-colored horses gamboling before an ample house painted gleaming white.

  Sometimes, as in the case of the cinder-block camp, the owner rents housing to a contratista, a contractor who collects, transports, and organizes the teams of farmhands. Some farmers charge their migrants rent; some don’t. Some pay them decently and co-sign loans for cars and trailers; some don’t. Some are simultaneously cruel and caring, ruthless and paternalistic.

  Unlike the decrepit wooden houses, this barrack clearly had one function from its conception. Whoever owned it—Father Tony didn’t know his name—must have understood what he was doing when he designed this harsh building, for its configuration could have had no purpose other than to house workers—and to deprive them of their dignity. It was not an old structure, just chillingly efficient. The kitchen contained one gas stove and hookups for five others, which were supplied in season by the contractor. The common room, also used for dining, was furnished with two picnic tables and a bulletin board where the required notices were posted in Spanish and English on the minimum wage and the rights of migrant workers. Typed in English only was this warning:

  MEN

  Stay out of the women’s bathroom.

  WOMEN

  Stay out of the men’s bathroom.

  If caught you willbe fined $30.00.

  Everybody has there [sic] restroom so stay in your own place.

  The men’s bathroom had one sink, four toilets in full view, and four showerheads in a stall too cramped for four people to shower at once. The women’s bathroom had the same arrangement, with two toilets and two showerheads. It looked as if nothing had ever been cleaned or repaired. There was no privacy, no comfort, not even the quiet sense of sparse simplicity that could be found in a primitive village. There, at least, human beings live. Here, they were kept, warehoused, stored like seed and fertilizer.

  Father Tony knew to let us wander through the rooms in silence, as if we were visiting a memorial at the scene of a crime. Independently, Michael and I were suffused with the same recollection, which we learned later by comparing notes: of another kind of camp where the greatest crime occurred. And then we apologized to ourselves for feeling the parallel, which of course was no parallel at all. No injustice that happened here approached what happened there. And yet the sensation of standing where something terrible had taken place was not dissimilar. Even in the emptiness, you were somehow a witness.

  Claudio and his eighteen-year-old wife had lived here. He was an unsmiling man of twenty-four, dressed in a sweater and camouflage fatigues. A mustache and a thin beard defined his narrow face, which looked gray in the pale December light. The previous summer, the young couple set out on their journey to a new life in America by agreeing to pay a coyote, a smuggler of humans, to sneak them across the border from Mexico near Laredo, Texas. The price was $1,300 for Claudio and $1,400 for his wife, rates that had doubled in the last decade. “He charges more for women; it’s more work,” Claudio explained.

  They didn’t have the cash, so the fee was advanced as a loan to be repaid in three months by withholding installments from their paychecks. For collateral, Claudio’s father had to sign over his house and seven and a half acres of land in Mexico, putting Claudio and his wife into a modern form of indentured servitude. They could not fail to work, because they had no money; they could not fail to pay, because his father would lose his property. It was typical of the arrangements through which Mexicans cross illegally into the United States.

  The journey can be difficult and dangerous, and has become more so as the U. S. Border Patrol has beefed up surveillance of the frontier, especially in urban areas. Deflected into remote regions of desert, immigrants traveling with too little clothing or too little water have succumbed in rising numbers to the cold and the heat of the wilderness. In the five years following the introduction in 1993 of new technology and additional manpower to monitor the border, the number of deaths from exposure jumped from six to eighty-four. In the year from October 2004 to October 2005 alone, 473 people died.1 As small comfort, the numbers murdered by thieves or killed in road accidents have declined.2

  Claudio and his wife had the luck of a relatively easy trip. They hid from border agents in Texas during daylight and walked in darkness, but only for three nights and for short distances. At a predetermined location, a contratista met them with a van and drove them (for no extra charge, Claudio was pleased to say) to a farm in South Carolina to spend a month removing stakes and plastic sheeting from tomato fields. He was not quite sure how their wages were figured. “We never knew how they were paying us,” he admitted. “They didn’t tell us.” It wasn’t by the hour but by the row, he thought. All he knew was that it was a lot more than Mexican wages, and—as he was now learning—minuscule by American standards. He and his wife together, working the same rows, received about $250 for the two of them—but only every other week, really, because the contractor withheld half their earnings for the coyote: “One check for us and one for him,” Claudio said.

  Then they were moved to the cinder-block camp in North Carolina. Up at five every morning, they were driven by van to some distant farm a couple of hours away—he didn’t know the farmer’s name—where they spent eight or nine hours walking behind tractors that were unearthing sweet potatoes. They gathered the potatoes by hand and filled bushel-sized pails as fast as they could for 40 cents a bucket. He could fill about thirty buckets an hour, he said, “if the field is in good shape and there’s a lot.” So that would be $12 an hour, I said. “No,” he replied and looked confused. “No, it was less because in order to make $50 in a day we had to work really hard all day.” Either Claudio’s arithmetic was weak or the contractor’s was cunning. Neither Claudio nor his wife had gone past the sixth grade; the contractor, on the other hand, knew how to invent deductions to list on the pay stub, leaving about $40 for each day of labor. That was still as much in a day as Claudio earned in a week doing farm work in Mexico, so he displayed no hint of grievance. “In the checks there were a lot of discounts,” he said dispassionately, “like cleaning. They did a discount of rent, of light, of all those things.” He could not remember how much.

  Cleaning. Rent. In the squalid cinder-block camp for which Claudio and his wife paid involuntarily, they were lucky enough to be placed with another married couple in a cell for just the four of them. Many later arrivals were jammed into the small rooms, he said, where they slept on floors, sometimes on flattened cardboard cartons laid over the raw concrete. “What we made wasn’t enough to buy food,” he remarked. Then the hurricane’s torrent of rain flooded everything except the camp, which sat marooned like a derelict in a sea of muddy water. Work was halted. The migrants played cards and waited. Claudio and his wife still owed the coyote $2,300.

  After a month the young couple learned in a phone call to Mexico that their fourteen-month-old daughter was ill; they had left her with his parents. They needed to send $50 for treatment. So they stopped waiting for work and left the cinder-block camp, setting out on foot. Few migrants here have their own cars; most are trapped in remote locations, dependent on contractors to take them periodically to a grocery store or a Laundromat in town. But their contractor didn’t come, so the young couple hiked for miles into Newton Grove. At a gas station, they met a Mexican man who took them into his home until the network of hard-luck migrants stranded by the storm began to function. Two other Mexican men invited them to share rent in a tiny, weather-beaten house in the scruffy town of Wade. That is where the thin December light now filtered onto Claudio’s gray face. He had no work. For a while he had been employed by a roofer for $250 a week, then for a woodcutter whose truck broke down and put him out of business. A week ago Claudio’s wife was hired by a meat-cutting plant; he wasn’t sure how much she would be paid. She wanted to return to Mexico. The coyote was waiting for his money, but he had given an extension bec
ause of the hurricane.

  Having just visited the barrack the day before, I tried now to see it through Claudio’s eyes. He was a taciturn man, not given to introspection or graphic description, so the questions had to be specific but not leading. I wanted to know how he felt living there, without suggesting how I thought he should have felt. He conveyed a sense that the squalor of the camp was overshadowed by the lack of work, for work was the entire purpose of his coming. Were the conditions in the camp what he expected when he came, or were they worse? “For me it wasn’t good because there was no work there,” he replied. Aside from the fact that there wasn’t work, did he have any complaints about the camp and the way it was? “Like what?” Well, whatever occurred to him. Was there anything about it he didn’t like? “The only thing was that there was no work.”

  The following April we again encountered a curious absence of anger. Pedro, twenty-five, was sitting on a bunk in an eight-by-ten room in another cinder-block building, this one on Burch Farms between Mt. Olive and Faison, North Carolina. The inside was painted a dirty robin’s-egg blue; the outside, a faded pinkish cream. On the door to room 13, someone had pasted a bumper sticker: “Eat More Sweet Potatoes.” The first spring lettuce, kale, and turnip greens were poking up through rows of plastic strips that made the sweeping fields look like washboards glinting in the sunlight.

  Pedro wore a little gold cross in his left ear and a dirty Cleveland Indians baseball cap. He had just moved in as a refugee from another house called El Infierno because of the rough bunch there who drank and fought with knives. He had no bed and slept on the floor. After his fifteen-year-old cousin was stabbed and wounded, Pedro got his contractor to switch him to this place with a less exciting name: “the camp.” It was grim but quiet so far. Both beds in this room had mattresses; one bunk was propped up on cinder blocks. A colored drawing of Jesus was stuck to the wall with gray duct tape. In the corner, strung between two nails, a black electrical cord no longer attached to an appliance was used to hang towels and jeans. He kept all his other possessions in two black plastic milk crates, a cooler, and a few plastic bags; on top of a crate was a fairly new baseball mitt and a ball signed in big letters, “PEDRO, TE AMO,” by his girlfriend back in Mexico. He hadn’t seen her in a year.

  This was census season, but Pedro didn’t exist. He hadn’t received a form and hadn’t seen a census-taker. Luckily for him, the Immigration and Naturalization Service didn’t know he existed, either. But the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration did, because they got a portion of his wage, duly withheld each week by his employer, who paid him the minimum of $5.15 an hour. Pedro would never see any Social Security benefits, of course, and he didn’t dare file a tax return, even though he might have been entitled to a refund. The IRS is not supposed to tell the INS, but who believes that?

  After the hurricane, Pedro decided to stay on for the winter, packing sweet potatoes and radishes that survived the flood. He worked sixty hours a week, earned nine times what he had made in a Mexican slaughterhouse, and managed to send $300 to $500 a month to his parents, who were using the money to build him a house there. “God willing, two years from now,” he hoped, he would go home to Mexico, live in his new house, and harvest corn and beans on his family’s farm. That was the closest Pedro came to a complaint.

  The owner complained about this building, though. Jimmy Burch griped loudly when he drove us past it in his pickup-truck tour of the large farm he owned with his two brothers. “See the beer cans and shit in the yard?” he said in his country twang. “I paid $60,000 to build that ten years ago. I been fined prob’ly $25,000 for that camp. Beer cans in the yard, torn screen. I say, ‘They did that, not me.’ Don’t matter. They fine me.” The fines were levied by the state Department of Labor, which licensed the housing but seemed ineffectual in enforcing decent standards. Jimmy would have liked to give the building to somebody. “It just gets trashed every weekend. I get tired of pissing my money away. Just keep it up to minimum standards and don’t worry about it. The stove my grandma gave me lasted forty years. The stoves in these camps won’t last twelve months.”

  Jimmy was a rather round man, not tall, but he carried himself with a tautness that said: in charge. His light brown hair was unruly, his face ruddy. His alert blue eyes, constantly sweeping the gleaming rows of red lettuce, had a piercing acuity that enabled him to see—and to know what he was not seeing. He talked constantly while he drove in his mud-spattered black Chevy pickup, suddenly whirling off the pavement onto a dirt road, then spinning into a field, first running straight so his wheels straddled the rows of greens, then knifing diagonally across the jouncing rows until he got to a couple of men with a tractor and trailer piled with irrigation pipe. He talked with the older worker in a trashy Spanish so corrupted by North Carolina drawl that Michael couldn’t understand a word. The younger one, looking frightened, hung back and said nothing. Jimmy was down to earth and above the landscape, comfortable and wary in his natural habitat.

  The one place he wanted us to get out was a dirt yard near a trailer, where he stopped his truck. “This is where we started,” he said. He was fourteen when his brother David, a helicopter pilot, was shot down and killed during the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. His family used the life insurance payment to buy this piece of land—fourteen acres, later expanded to thirty-five, which produced enough vegetables to put all five sons through college. “We thought we were rich,” Jimmy said, looking down at the dirt. “They spent all their money on us, my parents did. They didn’t have any damn money left over.”

  With 2,000 acres now, he and two of his brothers grew cucumbers, peppers, squash, eggplants, various greens, and sweet potatoes, which found markets from Boston to Miami. They grossed $15 million a year and usually made a net profit of 3 to 4 cents on the dollar, before taxes. That margin is typical for many businesses, but in agriculture it’s vulnerable to weather, of course. The floods produced a loss of $1 million last year, he figured, and he received just $17,583 in federal subsidies, including $8,095 in disaster relief.3 “Horrible. Lost all the fall greens, all the fall cucumbers and squash. We saved most of the sweet potatoes. We were lucky,” he added incongruously. “That’s the way it goes with Mother Nature. He gives and he takes it away.” So do the oil companies: Jimmy was spending $3,000 a week more on fuel this year than last. The cost of seed, fertilizer, and pesticide had doubled in the last decade.

  Furthermore, modern farming is a tricky business of calibrated timing to hit the market with the right vegetable at the right moment in a season that rolls relentlessly from south to north. “You only got a window you can plant in,” Jimmy explained. “You got to plant in your window. If you don’t, you know you’re not gonna make anything. Florida’s got their time. Georgia’s got their time. We’ve got our time. Then it goes into Jersey and Michigan. Everybody’s got their slot for the vegetable deal. If you overlap, you always get murdered in the marketplace. Prices go to hell.” The only way to survive is to average out the bad years with the good. “It’s like going to Atlantic City. Very little difference. Very little difference. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve done very well.… You work a lot of years, you hit the hot markets, make a lot of money one year, pay off all your debts and go again. Fortunately, I’ve had enough of them years, I can pay off them debts and go again.” The loan officer was interested enough to drive out and look over the crops once in a while. “I’m on a first-name basis with my banker,” Jimmy said laughingly. “We know each other well. But I’ve never failed to pay him, so he don’t never fail to lend it to me.”

  Jimmy wheeled his truck through a mustard field and stopped at the end of an array of rows lush in kale and other greens. A team of men was cutting by hand and packing the crisp new growth into crates. He paid them a dollar a box, he said, and most workers did about ten boxes an hour, the quick ones, fifteen. He sold the greens for $5 a box but added hastily,

  “I’m not gettin’ rich here, you know. The box costs $1.10,
the labor’s a dollar, twenty-five cents for the ice, you figure a buck and a half to raise it. If I make fifty cents a box, that’s about all I can get.” Given those figures, the profit actually worked out to more than twice that much; math seemed to be a fuzzy science in these parts. “I’d like to charge ten bucks but the market won’t allow it.” Could he have paid the workers less than a dollar a box? “Hmmmm. I probably could. I know I could. Sometimes. But hell, I want to keep these people here year-round. I want a stable workforce.” That’s why he grew a sequence of crops: to have a steady demand for labor to keep a core of good workers busy. It’s a reason other farmers raise tobacco, which can be planted before, and harvested after, cucumbers, for example.

  Burch Farms employed 115 to 120 people year-round and added another 100 or so from May through November. Labor accounted for about 25 percent of the farm’s expenses, so there was an obvious incentive to keep wages down. On the other hand, Jimmy professed a passionate desire for reliable workers who would stay on or return year after year. “They’re not up here to make me rich,” he said. “They’re here to make a living for themselves. That’s the way it is. They got their own dreams, you know.” So he tried to pay them enough to compete with a factory wage; that meant field hands got a piece rate that he thought allowed them to average $10 an hour (“They have to hustle, but they do it”), and packers started at minimum wage but went to $6 or $7. He was planning to add health insurance for his full-time employees. “You want to keep ’em you got to pay ’em more. Not anybody gonna stay here for minimum wage. Hell, they can’t live on minimum wage.” In fact, the minimum wage has an impact on wages above it. If it were raised by a dollar, he figured, employees making more than the minimum would have to be raised by at least fifty cents. The reason was simple, he declared: “Nobody works for you ’cause they love you.”