Rural Laws: April, 2002 - Number #8

Activists associated with the Apopka-based Farmworkers Association of Florida are supporting legislation pending in the Florida Legislature that would prohibit deducting fees from farmworker wages for the use of tools, transportation to work sites and housing. Growers say the law is not needed. Under the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act, workers may not be charged for tools and other work-related items that primarily benefit the employer.

Southwest. Immokalee has become southwest Florida's farm labor camp, as Mexicans, Guatemalans and Haitians move in to seek farm jobs. Most of the 7,500 to 15,000 workers are employed six to nine months a year, earning $500 to $800 a month. Many farm workers in Immokalee live in mobile homes, or double up in apartments. Farm Workers Village, opened in 1974, has 641 units of low-cost housing that can be rented to legal farm workers--three- or four-bedroom homes rent for a maximum $71 a week.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers organized a cross-country caravan to pressure Taco Bell not to buy tomatoes from Six L Packing Company, one of the southwestern Florida tomato growers. The Coalition says that the piece rate is $0.40 per five-gallon bucket picked, and that most workers pick about 150 buckets a day, earning $60. Taco Bell says it buys tomatoes from a broker who purchases from several companies, including Six L.

Citrus. The US imposes a $0.078-a-liter tariff on Brazilian orange juice, which Florida growers say is necessary to protect them. Florida and Brazil combined produce 90 percent of the world's orange juice: Brazil exports 99 percent of its production, while 90 percent of Florida's production is consumed domestically and 10 percent is exported. Florida is expected to produce 230 million boxes of oranges in 2001-02.

Florida's Treasure Coast region, Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River counties, has about 220,000 acres of citrus and 40 packing houses.

Palm Beach. Palm Beach county is the major agricultural county in Florida, with 502,000 acres of farm land producing $1.2 billion worth of commodities during the 2000-2001 growing season, including $689 million of sugar cane, and $230 million of vegetables; Palm Beach accounts for over a sixth of Florida's $6 billion farm sales.

Mecca Farms, established in 1962, has 8,000 acres of owned and leased land in the county, and grows tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers, grapefruit, and oranges. The Migrant Farmworker Justice Project in November 2001 sued Mecca and one of its contractors, M. Sanchez & Son, on behalf of eight workers injured in an April 25, 2001 accident when the van in which they were riding crashed; seven were unauthorized. The crash was not immediately reported by the FLC.

In November 2001, the MFJP sued Mecca and Sanchez over safety and pay issues among field workers, and in December, the MFJP filed a second suit related to pay issues in Mecca's packing houses. Gregory Schell, managing attorney of the MFJP, says the Mecca field worker case seeks to establish through the courts that farm workers are dual employees of both labor contractors and growers. Some of the workers involved in the suit said they picked tomatoes for $0.40 a bucket, and could pick 150 to 200 buckets in an eight-hour day.

In 1997, Thomas Brothers Farms Inc. of Boca Raton (9,000 acres, requesting 545 H-2As) and Pero Family Farms Inc. (requesting 370 H-2As) of Delray Beach applied for H-2A workers. The U.S. Department of Labor rejected Thomas' H-2A application, and Pero withdrew its application after DOL said it failed to interview and hire US workers, and included unlawful requirements in its clearance order used to recruit US workers, such as requiring applicants to have at least 29 days experience harvesting vegetables. Critics said the production standard in the Pero contract was unrealistic, requiring workers to pick an average of 180 to 200 buckets of peppers a day.

Pero planned to house the H-2A workers in a camp owed by Osceola Farms, a sugar company that used to hire H-2A cane cutters.

M&N Fruit Inc. of Dundee submitted an application to bring in 130 workers to pick oranges in Central Florida.

South Florida has three large sugar companies - U.S. Sugar Corp. in Clewiston, Florida Crystals Corp. in West Palm Beach and the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida in Belle Glade - that produce about one-fourth of US sugar, and half of US cane sugar- two million tons- from 465,000 acres south of Lake Okachobee. US cane acreage has been increasing, and totaled one million acres in 2001, including 510,000 in Louisiana. Florida produces about 50,000 tons of rice a year, often on fallowed cane land. Global production is 400 million tons, including nine million tons in the US. However, Florida is attempting to produce Thai jasmine rice.

Farming dried up the flow of water into the Everglades (the river of grass). The Everglades are to be restored at a cost of $8 billion, in part by flooding thousands of acres of land now used to grow sugar cane and vegetables, eliminating 1,400 farm jobs. The restoration project will involve 333 deep-water storage wells and 265 square miles of reservoirs in 16 counties south of Orlando.

Belle Glade, in the middle of the Everglades agricultural area, was the place where Edward R. Murrow filmed part of Harvest of Shame (1960). Belle Glade is 40 miles west of West Palm Beach, and 80 miles east of Fort Myers. In Belle Glade, the heart of the cane area, about 30 percent of residents have incomes below the poverty line.

Woerner Holdings Inc., the world's largest turf-grass company with 400 employees, grows sod in Florida and six other states and sells sod worth $40 million a year for residential lawns and golf courses. Woerner has 12,000 acres in Florida, including 3,000 acres of sugar cane in the Belle Glade area.

Todd Wright, "Legislation would boost farmworkers rights," Sun-Sentinel, March 1, 2002.