Farm workers don't have to be poor; the bosses say higher wages would mean fewer jobs. Don't believe them

Washington Monthly, April, 1989 by Tina Rosenberg

The bosses say higher wages would mean fewer jobs. Don't believe them.

Sometimes the news from south Texas seems like news from the Third World. Like when the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) recently adopted a new policy of requiring immigrant aliens to remain at their point of entry into the country pending the lengthy processing period. Harlingen, Texas, one of the main immigrant thoroughfares in the Rio Grande Valley, was quickly overwhelmed with several thousand Central Americans forced to loiter in buildings and sleep in the streets. Things got so bad that the cops finally shut down the town's INS office.

While this seems distressing, there are other folks in Texas who endure much worse-working below minimum wage for years at a time, suffering Third World-caliber filth and disease, and dying 20 years beforetheir time. These people are already U.S. citizens or at least hold the legal status Harlingen's minions were clamoring for. If you think you'd never do anything to support exploitation like this, maybe you should stop eating that salad.

When I visited La Frontera, Texas it resembled a Central American town, filled with the sounds of roosters crowing and mothers yelling in Spanish, the cries of children playing in old tires in front of small wooden houses, and the scent of smoke from burning trash. There was neither garbage collection nor a paved road. And La Frontera had no fresh water.

From the outside, Luis and Oralia Trevino's home in La Frontera, with its clean white paint and red roof, looked like it belonged on any prim Main street. But inside, the Trevinos' family pictures-Louis and Oralia have four children-were tacked up against a few planks that only suggested walls. The living room couch sat on a floor made of boards and sawdust.

Tommy Helle's family has been farming in the Rio Grande valley since the 1920s. In his early forties, he is the head of Helle Farms, which he owns with his father and two younger brothers. Helle Farms grows about 4,000 acres of vegetables and melons, and Helle Tomato is the largest tomato producer in the valley. Helle's office in the town of Mission is decorated with paintings and sculptures of tomatos and wall hangings from Texas A&M, where he earned a degree in agricultural economics.

Driving around his farms in his white suburban van with two cellular phones, Helle says that if his regular employees need money for food or medicine to tide them over when there is no work, he lends it to them, taking it out of their paychecks when work starts again. "The image of the farmer is of someone who oppresses labor and tries to get it for nothing," Helle says. But he wants to set me straight"On my farm, everyone makes minimum wage."

Los loopholes

The residents of La Frontera are among the valley's 200,000 migrant farm workers and their families, who spend the winter months weeding, thinning, and picking valley produce and in the spring or summer pile into old cars and follow apples or beets north to Minnesota and New York. Luis Trevino was born in Mexico, but Oralia and the children, like most people in La Frontera, were born in the United States.

Farm workers' life expectancy is about 25 percent shorter than the national average; their infant mortality rate, 25 percent higher. They are the secondpoorest occupational group in the country, ahead only of domestics. The average per capita income of farm workers in San Juan, Texas is around $1,400-less than the average income in Mexico. The workers make higher hourly wages in the U.S. than they did in Mexico but, due to the overflow of labor, usually end up working fewer hours. The local unemployment rate is about four times the U.S. average. Farm workers in Texas do not receive overtime and are virtually uncovered by labor-relations or safety laws. There is no minimum wage on very small farms, and even at the biggest ones workers are often cheated out of the $3.35 minimum.

Farm work runs like Kelly Girl office help. Growers contract a crew leader, usually a Hispanic ex-farm worker who owns a bus. He in turn hires the farm workers.

The crew leader makes 90 cents for each bushel of spinach, for example, and then pays his field hands 50 cents per bushel. Supposedly coming out of the other 40 cents is Social Security, a safe bus for workers, toilets, fresh drinking water, and unemployment and workers' compensation insurance, Probably not. Especially when you don't pay for all those extras, crew leader can be a lucrative profession. Ruben Saenz, the head of the valley's crew leader organization, says that some crew leaders make $250,000 a year.

Saenz's membership files contain lists of violations of even the few legal protections afforded Texas farm workers-failure to pay wages when due, failure to keep records, unsafe transport, hiring illegal aliens. "It's harassment from the Wage and Hour people," he says defensively. I ask how many of his crew leaders were harassed that way"I'd say a hundred percent," he replies.