The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  Another way to keep good people was to help them buy homes and settle here, a point he made by driving through a cluster of trailers the locals called Little Mexico. “I co-signed with all these people here with these trailers,” he explained and then gestured toward a nice old single-family house. “I gave the house away.” He kept title to the land but charged no rent for it. He had learned that many Mexicans who began as migrants would stay put if they found congenial work, and by giving them housing, offering financial advice, and co-signing their loans, he helped employees he valued to abandon the wandering life, put down roots on his farm, and remain obligated to him. He had done this for about twenty people, he bragged, and the benefit seemed mutual. He pointed to another house, where a shift foreman and his wife lived. “I went to the courthouse and give it to him. He has the title. That way I don’t have to put up with government bullshit no more…. That way if there are beer cans in the yard, I say, ‘He owns the house.’ And you didn’t see any beer cans in the yard, did you? Ownership makes a big difference.”

  The risk to him was minimal. A trailer cost “around $20,000 if you buy it new,” he said, pointing to one after another on Mexico Lane. “This one was used, I think he paid about ten for that one. He bought his new, I think it was eighteen. These are people who are married, wife and children. They don’t want to stay in a barracks anymore. They want some privacy. They don’t want their young ’uns around them boys on the weekend drinkin’ and raisin hell.” Jimmy had never been cheated on a house. “For cars, yes,” he said. “I don’t co-sign for cars anymore. They have some strange idea that when the transmission or motor blows up, the payments stop. I don’t know why they think that way. I don’t co-sign car loans no more. Got burned two or three times. Never been burned on a house, though, never.” He was selective and not altruistic. “It’s after they been here awhile, you get to know ’em. It ain’t something I do for somebody who just walks up here and says, ‘How about helpin’ me out?’ I ain’t into that.”

  He helped out the Delgado family when their kerosene heater exploded and their trailer burned up. They had no insurance. “He lent us money to get a car, lent us room in the camp, co-signed for a loan for this trailer,” said Maribel, a young mother whose face lit up when she talked. With her husband, Hector, she was sitting in the kitchen at the end of the long trailer opposite the two bedrooms. In the middle was an ample living room. The “mobile home” was hardly mobile. It sat on cinder blocks on land that Jimmy Burch and his brothers still owned, land the Delgados wished they could have bought. The land had to be cleared and a well dug, which cost $2,500 on top of $4,000 for the trailer.

  Jimmy had a stake in this family, whose long-term loyalty was an asset. Maribel’s father still worked on the farm, as he had for years, and she worked in the packing plant for $6.25 an hour. Hector got that dollar a box for picking greens, but he couldn’t reach the $10 an hour Jimmy boasted of; it was more like $6 an hour, he figured. At the height of the harvest, the work ran to seventy hours a week. “When there are no vegetables, when there’s snow,” he said, “we aren’t working at all.” And they tried to send $100 every two weeks to their relatives in Mexico.

  The Delgados had no medical insurance, but Medicaid provided coverage for their three children, who had been born in the United States and therefore had American citizenship. The family’s income was probably low enough to entitle them to food stamps, which had been repeatedly denied by self-important clerks who kept telling Maribel that it was the wrong day or that she wasn’t a “real” resident (though she, too, was a U.S. citizen). Such benefits are not available to undocumented immigrants, and are granted to legal immigrants only if they are children, elderly, or disabled and arrived before welfare reform was enacted: August 22,1996. The denial is designed to discourage illegal immigration, but it doesn’t work.

  Maribel demonstrated that no obstacles were imposing enough to serve as deterrents. She came to the country as a teenager, crossing the Rio Grande several times with her father, a migrant worker. Attacked by armed robbers, hunted at night by Border Patrol officers with searchlights, her group was caught and deported. Later, she tried again, but the river was full and roaring and carried her downstream so violently she thought she was drowning. Finally reaching the bank back on the Mexican side, her group was attacked again, and one man was stabbed. On the third attempt, “we passed through a very strange place full of narco-traffickers,” she said. “The person who brought me here, I think he knew them and they let us through.” She lived with her mother in Brownsville, Texas, then applied for the 1986 amnesty granting legal status to certain undocumented immigrants. She received her green card, certifying her right to be in the country, and seven years later she gained citizenship; as a result, Hector obtained documentation as well.

  These folks now seemed like the salt of the earth, the models of elemental striving through a hardscrabble life of incremental gain. The key word is incremental. If theirs was the beginning of the classic immigrant journey from penury to prosperity, it was hard to see. Maribel and her husband were doing the same work as her father, so there had been no inter-generational mobility there, unless the mere fact of moving to the United States could be considered advancement. She was satisfied with her children’s rural school, but whether it put them on a path to college was questionable. From their trailer on a shabby lane in Little Mexico, the horizon of opportunity looked very close and confining. They could not gaze out to an expansive distance of possibility.

  For most such workers, attainable progress occurs only within the enclave of farm labor: from field hand to tractor driver, from picker to supervisor, from migrant to contratista. Severino Santivanez had made that move from migrant to contractor. He oozed success, though he had only a fraction more than the men he supervised. He was somewhat portly, with a bit of a beer belly that he revealed by wearing his white shirt open to the button just above his navel. He flashed a gold tooth when he smiled, which he did frequently as he half sat, half leaned on the driver’s seat of his truck, the door open in the late afternoon shade.

  It was parked outside the group house where he had lived in 1989, and where he now housed his crew, currently nine men from the same town in the Mexican state of Vera Cruz. “I like this house,” he said, “because the water is cold, perfect for drinking. It’s a strong house.” As proof, he noted that it was still standing, which was remarkable since it looked long abandoned. He claimed that a tornado swept by some years ago and left it intact.

  The house was also a firetrap. It felt like a half day’s journey from the nearest fire department, at the far reaches of narrow blacktop roads that crossed endless flat fields, passed tight clusters of houses, then turned to dirt and wandered among fields just being planted with tobacco. The house had a single story and used to be white. The remaining paint was peeling, exposing the weathered wood beneath. One of the windows was sealed with a piece of cardboard where glass should have been. In front, nailed to the stump of a telephone pole was a faded green piece of plywood with a rusty basketball hoop attached. The men had no basketball. Inside the torn screen door was a space—once the dining room, perhaps—with four beds, saggy mattresses, and a rusty refrigerator. The former living room had a boarded-up fireplace and four beds. There were no closets. Nails had been hammered into walls, and wire coat hangers hung on them bore layers and layers of shirts and pants.

  Severino didn’t pay anything for this house. The farmer magnanimously gave him the use of it, paid the rent for the house where Severino lived, and also paid Severino 50 cents an hour per man in his crew. So, at the peak of the season, when his crew grew to twenty-seven men, he was making $13.50 an hour, about the average wage in the United States. It wasn’t bad for a man with a first-grade education who could hardly read or write. “I learned more here ’cause I had to write the names,” he said, showing a list of his crew members, now working for Jimmy Burch. Only by chance did he achieve this rank. After more than a decade migrating among
farms from Florida to North Carolina, he rose to supervisor, and one day the grower asked him to bring more field hands. So he did, and he had a new career.

  His men here were gloomy. They all missed their families and yearned to go home to Mexico, each on a different, carefully planned timetable: next January, a year, two years from now. They sent home about 70 percent of the money they made, but the experience provoked reflections on where priorities lay. “I learned to value the family,” one young man declared. “Here it’s material and it’s money, and that’s not life. It’s sustenance. It’s like eating and clothing are the most important. The spiritual and the family, you can’t buy it with money. That’s the biggest thing there is.”

  Living miles from the nearest town, with no transportation except what Severino provided, the men felt they had relinquished independence. “I depend on everybody here for everything,” one said. At home, “you have freedom,” he added. “You can go there, you can go here. I don’t have to be ten to fifteen kilometers outside a town. I feel pressured here for the money. It’s like being in the house, all you see is the wall. Outside, the wall, it’s like being in prison here. Truthfully, it’s like prison. We can’t go to centers of fun, entertainment. We can’t go together into a store because the immigration will take you away.”

  Not a single one of the men would advise any other friends or relatives to make the journey to work in the United States. “My brother wanted to come, and I told him not to come,” one said.

  “For my family, I would say that nobody else should come here,” said another. “If they have work there, it’s better for them to keep it and not come here.”

  They were also jittery. A couple of Sundays before, Severino had taken them from the trailer where they were living to a Laundromat in Gold-boro. By the time they returned, their trailer had been consumed by an unexplained fire; all their belongings, except for the clothes that were on their backs and in their laundry bags, had been reduced to smoldering ashes. The casualties included their only television set, which they’d bought in a Florida Wal-Mart for $288.86. A lanky guy pulled out the receipt, then said, “For me, material things aren’t important. At least it didn’t get us while we were sleeping.”

  And that’s what made them nervous. Severino had moved them into this house, but they could see how quickly a fire would spread through the bare wooden walls and floors. They wondered about a fire at night. They had no phone, no vehicle. They were miles from the nearest neighbor and could see no other house from theirs. I asked a woman who had brought us here, who worked for a fledgling union called FLOC (the Farm Labor Organizing Committee), if she could get them two or three smoke detectors. She replied firmly that it was the owner’s responsibility. The owner wouldn’t do it, I said, and I suggested that she go buy a few for ten bucks apiece and give them to Severino. That would have violated some peculiar ethic of accountability, and she clearly had no intention of doing so. I asked Severino. He said maybe he had one somewhere.

  When we drove away in the gathering dusk, the men stood outside and said farewell. Even in a crowd, they looked lonesome.

  Ramiro Sarabia was short, stocky, and solidly built, and he wore a black mustache. Bill Bryan was lean and clean-cut, and he wore gray slacks and a white tennis shirt that made him look like a 1950s character out of Ozzie and Harriet. Ramiro’s well-worn office, once the living room of a gray house that sat near the base of the town’s water tower, had the feel of an old shoe with too many miles on it. Bill’s office, at the heart of the Mt. Olive Pickle Company’s processing plant, was crisp and fancy, carpeted wall to distant wall. Its centerpiece was a conference table, of dark wood, covered with jars of the various pickles and relishes that his company produced.

  Since 1998 the men had been cordial opponents in an unusual labor-management dispute. Ramiro, FLOC’s field organizer in North Carolina, had tried to unionize field hands, but not by the traditional bottom-up approach of forging disgruntled workers into a phalanx that demanded their employer’s recognition. Migrants are difficult to organize; they don’t stay long, they can’t risk a strike or dismissal, and most are vulnerable to deportation. So while Ramiro had signed up about half of the six thousand workers he wanted to represent, he was really attempting a top-down approach, trying to start negotiations not only with the direct employers— the farmers—but with the man who bought their cucumbers: Bill Bryan, president of the major business in the little town of Mt. Olive, North Carolina. The farmers Bill bought from were not regarded as wealthy enough to sustain a union contract without Mt. Olive paying more for their cucumbers, FLOC believed. Furthermore, the growers were numerous, far-flung, and impervious to public embarrassment about working conditions. So Ramiro wanted Bill’s company as one party in a three-way contract including FLOC and the farmers. That would have raised wages, improved benefits, and brought decency into the fields and barracks.

  No way, Bill said with the kindly sincerity of a scoutmaster explaining why it was up to the older boys to decide who got the leaky tent. “We don’t believe that we should interfere in the relationship between other employers and their employees,” he explained. “If you go out on a farm and convince the farmers and the workers that a union’s in their best interest, we’re gonna respect that, just like we’ll respect it with the other people we’re doing business with. We’ve got some union suppliers; we’ve got some nonunion suppliers. On the ag side, the only unionized supplier we have would be in Ohio, where FLOC is based. And in that case, the supplier … came to us several years ago and said for several reasons, he was looking at negotiating a contract with FLOC, he thought that was in his best interest, and what did we think of it? And we said, ‘Well, we think you have to make a decision that’s in the best interests of your operation and do what you think is best. As long as you continue to be the kind of supplier you’ve been, with the quality and the service level and being competitive, we think—that’s not a problem with us, we’ll continue to do business with you.’ We still have a good business relationship with that supplier.” But Bill said he was not about to force farmers to unionize their own workers.

  FLOC figured that in agriculture, as in the garment industry, it was the brand-name producer, highly sensitive to bad publicity, that would get suppliers to shape up. Furthermore, Ramiro argued that Mt. Olive was not as far removed from the growers as it pretended; it often signed contracts for a certain quantity of cucumbers at a certain price before the farmers even planted, making the growers little more than subcontractors. Mt. Olive “dictates conditions for growers and workers alike,” said a FLOC position paper. In rebuttal, Bill noted that his suppliers grew lots of crops besides cucumbers—everything from tobacco to sweet potatoes—and so were truly independent.

  The unorthodox labor-organizing tactic that treated the processor as the effective employer had worked for FLOC in parts of Michigan and Ohio near its home office of Toledo. Campbell’s signed on after a boycott, then escaped from the arrangement by halting purchases of tomatoes in the region. Heinz, Vlasic, and Dean Foods had three-party contracts with FLOC and farmers for cucumbers in that area. But FLOC hadn’t made a dent in little Mt. Olive. Eastern North Carolina is to labor unions what the Wild West was to string quartets, and Ramiro received a rough education in the resilience of small-town politics and economic interests. After a year of fruitless meetings in which Bill didn’t budge, FLOC launched a boycott of the Mt. Olive Pickle Company’s products. Ramiro and his colleagues circulated dramatic leaflets, sent around open letters, and solicited support for the boycott from churches and area colleges. Bill countered with contributions to those worthy institutions, Ramiro contended. Indeed, Bill was a prominent citizen, generous and important and well liked. The town even put on an annual pickle festival. But the boycott finally succeeded. In 2004 Mt. Olive signed a three-party contract with FLOC and a growers’ association to pay farmers more for cucumbers, contribute to workers compensation insurance, and establish grievance procedures.

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LOC and other farm unions have not limited themselves to wages and contracts. They have also focused on the pesticides and herbicides that have damaged men and women and children who have harvested bounty from the American earth. Even as government has removed from the market more and more of the “hot stuff,” as Jimmy Burch called the most deadly chemicals, some farmers (not he, Jimmy insisted) have used the permitted compounds irresponsibly. Spraying in the wind, sending workers into fields too soon after application, failing to provide sinks and showers and laundries, many growers have exposed their employees—and their employees’ children—to untold health risks. Of particular worry are children who live in camps among the fields, who play outside in the weeds and soil, who put their hands in their mouths, who crawl around floors where parents have tracked the toxic residues, and who are especially vulnerable during their growing years when their brains and bodies are developing.

  The most obvious effects of poisoning are “vomiting, nausea, dizziness and headaches, fatigue, drowsiness and skin rashes,” as well as bronchitis and asthma, according to a study of incidents in California. Less visible and more serious problems may include “childhood brain tumors, leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, sarcoma,” and damage to the immune, endocrine, and nervous systems, though these “are very difficult to link definitively to pesticide exposure,” the report concedes, since they develop long afterwards, possibly resulting from years of cumulative contact. The toxins may be responsible for the higher incidence of birth defects among farmworkers, recorded at three to fourteen times the rates among the general U.S. population.4 The statistics are incomplete, however, because many symptoms go unreported. Most field hands have no health insurance, and the nearest free clinic may be far away. Unless they’re very sick, they usually don’t want to miss a day’s pay and risk dismissal.