Rural Laws: April, 1998 - Number #5

The Ag Labor Network brings together the major grower organizations in the Central Valley of California to coordinate the efforts of farmers and welfare and employment offices to move welfare recipients into farm jobs. Every year the EDD office in Sanger deals with 200 farm labor contractors, 40 to 50 growers, and 30,000 farm workers. The Fresno Adult School is exploring placements in agriculture, but notes that "one of our concerns is how agriculture can be viable employment with a livable wage."

Participants in a December 1997 welfare-to-work summit in Fresno repeatedly pointed out that there were no farm labor shortages, only the threat of farm labor shortages if the INS begins preventing workers with false documents from finding jobs. Rep Calvin Dooley (D-CA) said: "There's no significant shortage in the San Joaquin Valley. No jobs are going unfilled, no crops unpicked because of labor shortages."

Farmers counter that the pilot guest worker program they are pushing in Congress is an insurance program, to be used if the INS does begin effective enforcement, and if welfare-to-work programs fail to deliver reliable workers.

The removal of an individual from the welfare rolls does not, in itself, end his or her poverty. Moving welfare recipients into entry-level jobs may increase the number of working poor.

Most employers of ex-welfare recipients are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, a maximum 35 percent of the first $10,000 of earnings in the first year of employment after receiving cash welfare (AFDC or TANF) payments for 18 months and 50 percent of the first $10,000 in earnings in the second year of employment, for a maximum $8,500 tax credit for employers. Ex-welfare recipients disclose their welfare history on Department of Labor Form ETA 9061, and then the employer claims the credit on IRS Forms 8850 and 8861.

Helping the working poor move up the job ladder should open up jobs for ex-welfare recipients. However, as the ranks of the working poor swell, there may be pressure to do more to assist them, such as providing them and their children with health insurance.

At a November 1997 agribusiness conference, Bank of America economist Vernon Crowder said that water and labor, not urbanization, were the major "concerns for agriculture." According to Crowder, "There is a political trend limiting the number of migrant laborers allowed in California."

Housing. A $3.4 million state grant financed the construction of the new 62-unit Atwater Migrant Housing Center in Atwater, California. The state will retain ownership of the buildings, but the Merced County Housing Authority will manage and maintain them. Daily rents will be $ 7.50 for a two-bedroom home, $ 8 for a three-bedroom and $ 8.50 for a four-bedroom.

Many farm employers and migrant advocates complain that Not-in-My-Back-Yard attitudes prevent the construction of housing for migrant workers. In Queen Anne's County, Maryland, where there are nine migrant camps, a proposal to permit migrant camps for up to 100 workers which would be open up to 160 days a year and be built in land zoned for industrial and agricultural uses, drew loud opposition from neighbors, who worried about crime, higher school taxes and congestion.

The Los Angeles Times, January 11, 1998 ran several stories on so-called Shangri-Las, resort cities, such as Vail, Colorado, Incline Village, Nevada, Sedona, Arizona or Sun Valley, Idaho, that are so expensive that most of those working in the city cannot afford to live in the city. Jobs are plentiful--many employers complain of labor shortages--but workers must either commute or hold several jobs to afford to live in the city.

The major employers in these areas are building housing for some of their seasonal workers. The owners of the Vail and Beaver Creek ski areas, which have a peak winter work force of 4,500 and a trough labor force of 1,200, built apartments for some of their workers. The average annual wage in the area is $22,300, but an annual income of about $66,000 is necessary to qualify for a bank loan to buy a typical condo in the area. Most service workers sleep four or six to an apartment and pay $1,500 or more in rent. The average single-family home in Aspen, Colorado sold for $1.8 million in 1997.

Poverty. A New York Times story on February 9, 1998 on Owsley County in central Kentucky, one of the poorest Appalachia counties with 5,400 residents, noted that about two-thirds of the county's residents received welfare assistance: 14 percent received cash welfare assistance, 20 percent received SSI payments, and almost 50 percent received Food Stamps.

About 46 percent of residents have incomes below the poverty line, the median family income is $8,600, and a sense of pessimism and fatalism reportedly prevents most government and private anti-poverty programs from persuading people to make longer-term plans. Instead, parents reportedly encourage children to get into special education classes to get disability payments.

Much of the literature on the causes of and solutions for welfare refers to Blacks, not Hispanics. William Julius Wilson, in his 1978 book "The Declining Significance of Race," for example, argued that class or economic status and not race is the decisive factor in poverty: "the life chances of individual blacks have more to do with their economic class position than with their day-to-day encounters with whites... class has become more important than race in determining black access to privilege and power. Privileged Blacks today can pass on privileges to their children."

Wilson's later book, "When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor," makes a distinction between underclass Black poverty in the inner cities and the working-poor poverty that characterizes many rural immigrant towns: "A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor and jobless." Wilson argues that "Many of today's problems in the inner-city neighborhoods - crime, family dissolution, welfare - are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work."

In most "normal" areas, 65 to 75 percent of persons over 16 are employed; in underclass areas, only 35 to 40 percent are employed. Wilson emphasizes that lack of work has many consequences, including less structuring of lives: work "constitutes a framework for daily behavior, because it imposes discipline." Wilson believes that it is lack of jobs, not the lure of welfare, that characterizes underclass areas.

In the Spring 1997 Ford Foundation Report, Wilson says that "many employers prefer immigrant workers over black workers because they think that the immigrants are more dedicated, have a stronger work ethic, and are not into drugs." (Vol 28, No 2, p. 24).

Wilson would like the federal government to launch a jobs program similar to the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s, where "adults with no skills, but the desire to work, get a chance to do so." Douglas Massey, author of "American Apartheid," thinks that a WPA program will not work. The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act spent $75 billion creating jobs between 1974 and 1982, and was widely seen as providing political patronage and make-work rather than skills that would make a participant more attractive to private employers.

A Russell Sage study of labor markets and race in Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles seems to support Massey. Harry Holzer's 1996 Russell Sage book, "What Employers Want: Job Prospects for Less-Educated Workers," finds that whites are preferred to other racial and ethnic groups, Hispanics are preferred to Blacks, and that Black women are preferred to Black men, holding skills and experience constant. Some employers prefer immigrants to Blacks, and hire immigrants "even when blacks have demonstrably higher skill levels and when immigrants live further away than the local black population."

Between 1940 and 1970, five million African-Americans left the rural South and moved north, but they did not re-create a dysfunctional family culture of sharecropping days, according to analysis of census data from 1940 to 1970. "Black Metropolis," a book by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, writing about 1940s Chicago, described "human flotsam which was tossed into the city streets by successive waves of migration from the South."

Nicholas Lemann, in "The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America," noted that many Black residents initially improved their economic position in the north, and then sank again when manufacturing jobs disappeared.

Bob White, "Farm Workers Get Upgraded Houses," Sacramento Bee, April 3, 1998. Michael Janofsky, "Pessimism Retains Grip on Region of Poverty," New York Times, February 9, 1998. Sanford Nax, "Fresno economist says Valley faces economic growth crisis," Fresno Bee, January 13, 1998. Judith Kohler, "Greening of the back-to-nature movement walls off Shangri-La," Los Angeles Times, January 11, 1998. Richard T. Estrada, "Threats to farms outlined," Modesto Bee, November 13, 1997.