Rural Laws: April, 1998 - Number #7

There are an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 tomato harvesters in the Immokalee area, and six of them began a hunger strike on December 20, 1997 to pressure nine tomato growers-- Barfield Farms, B&D Farms, Bonita Tomato Growers, Nobles Farms, Red Star Farms, Immokalee Tomato Growers, Pacific Land Co., Seminole Farms, and Six L's Farms--to raise the piecerate wage for picking tomatoes. Pickers said they were paid $0.40 for each 32-pound bucket of green tomatoes, or about $0.01 a pound of tomatoes picked. Grower prices fluctuate, and were about $0.36 a pound in December 1997, while retail tomato prices were $1.50 to $2 a pound.

On January 18, 1998, the final three workers ended their 30-day hunger strike after receiving a letter from ex-President Carter, who promised to mediate direct talks between workers and tomato growers. However, growers rejected mediation, and there were no talks mediated by Carter.

The highest-revenue vegetable growers in Florida, A. Duda & Sons Inc. and Dimare-Homestead, were not targeted by the hunger strikers.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers said that many workers can earn $50 to $100 a day when the weather is good and their are lots of tomatoes, but that intermittent and seasonal work limits most workers to about $9,000 a year. The Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association countered that pickers average $8 an hour at current piecerates.

Gargiulo Inc. agreed to increase the piecerate by $0.05 in 1997, and another $0.05 in November 1998, bringing the piecerate to $0.50 in November 1998. The Department of Labor in 1981 reported that the piecerate was $0.40 a bucket. Migrant advocates say that a 1977 strike raised the piecerate wage from $0.35 to $0.40. The piecerate peaked at $0.45 a bucket in 1987, and has since fallen to $0.40.

A worker employed by B&D Farms reportedly received $0.40 a bucket and $52 for picking 140 buckets in six hours. However, he was working, traveling to the fields or waiting for rain to end for a total 12 hours. The best pickers average 100 to 150 buckets a day for daily earnings of $40 to $60, while women and older workers often pick 70 to 80 buckets, for about $28 a day. All pickers are guaranteed the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour.

California tomato growers generally pay higher piecerate wages to tomato harvesters. The UFW contract with California tomato grower Meyer Tomatoes includes a piecerate wage of $0.50 a 25-pound bucket, equivalent to $0.64 per 32-pound bucket used in Immokalee; Meyer is moving some of its operation to Mexico. The non-union piecerate is $0.45 to $0.48 a bucket.

One local ex-grower, Johnny Goodnight, said: "Why should the growers talk to these people when they have all the labor they need to get the tomatoes picked?... There are more pickers than there are jobs and the people keep on coming... It's a hundred times better than where they came from... Picking tomatoes has always been a job for people with no skills. It's a stepping stone to climb the economic ladder." Goodnight said that he employed an average 60 pickers a day during the harvest season, but issued 4,500 W-2 statements each year, indicating extremely high worker turnover.

Immokalee is a city of 14,000 in southwest Florida (some put the population at 20,000), about 40 miles east of Naples and 25 miles southeast of Fort Myers, and most farm workers live in private housing, which can be very expensive--mobile homes often rent for $1,000 a month or more. Immokalee has one of the nation's last day-labor markets; 46 percent of residents have incomes below the poverty line.

Every morning, several thousand workers mill around crew leader buses that congregate in a parking lot next to the Pantry Shelf grocery, and the buses leave for the fields at about 7 am. Tomatoes are picked while green, taken to one of Immokalee's three packing houses, sorted and packed into 25-pound cartons, and then gassed to turn them red before being shipped to retailers.

Nearby Naples has Florida's highest median income, $51,300 in 1997, while Immokalee's median income was $7,000. About 46 percent of Immokalee residents have below-poverty level incomes. In a 1994 application for federal funds, the city said that the local "economic system - highly labor intensive, seasonal and able to pay only at the low end of the wage scale - has created more people than jobs over the last 20 years."

Florida tomato growers planted about 12,000 acres of tomatoes for harvest in 1998, up about 10 percent from 1996. Collier county tomato sales have been declining--they were $208 million in 1992-93 and $79 million in 1995-96. The farms targeted by the hunger strikers include the third-largest vegetable grower in Florida, Pacific Tomato Growers Ltd., owner of the 17,200-acre Pacific Land Co., a $100 million a year sales operation. Six L's Packing Co. is the fourth largest vegetable grower, with 13,600 acres and sales of $74 million in 1996.

Florida tomato sales in 1996 were $440 million, down from a peak $728 million in 1992.

Oranges. Florida produces most US oranges and expects a record 255 million 90-pound boxes to be harvested in 1997-98; about 95 percent are processed into orange juice. Florida has about 775,000 acres of oranges, which yield 300 to 400 boxes of oranges an acre. California expects to produce 45 million 75-pound boxes of oranges in 1997-98; most will be sold in the fresh market.

Florida growers receive $5 to $6 per box of oranges, or $0.05 to $0.06 a pound, and workers typically receive about $0.75 for each box picked and dumped into a plastic field bin, or less than $0.01 a pound. Workers climb trees that are up to six meters high, hand pick each orange and place the orange into a picking sack.

Most harvesters are assembled by labor contractors into crews of 20. Most crews work for seven to eight hours each day. Supervision and payroll taxes are covered by the contractor's 30 percent overhead. Harvest labor, contractor fees, plus the cost of dumping the bins into trucks, brings the total cost of hand harvesting to about $1.50 a box.

There are a peak 40,000 to 45,000 hand harvesters employed in Florida citrus, and the average worker picks about nine 90-pound boxes an hour. The labor force has been transformed from Black and white US citizens in the 1970s to mostly Mexican-born men in the US without their families in the 1990s.

Efforts to develop harvesting aids such as people positioners are not considered cost effective. Instead of labor aids, most experts believe that, in the long run, oranges that will be processed into juice will be removed mechanically from trees, as are most nuts and some tree fruits such as canning peaches.

In the meantime, there are seven different approaches to removing oranges from trees that are being tested. These approaches range from having workers drop fruit as it is picked on the ground, and then using pickup machines to collect the fruit off the ground to using machines that grasp the trunk of each tree and shake the fruit off into a catching canopy.

A mechanical citrus harvester developed by Blueberry Equipment, Inc. is said to reduce harvesting costs to about $0.50 for each 90-pound box. The machine has nylon rods attached to 12-foot diameter rotating drums that are raised into the tree, shaking loose the fruit.

The Florida citrus industry is moving south, away from Orange and Lake counties, areas rapidly being urbanized as the Orlando area expands, and toward the southwestern part of the state, where there are fewer freezes. The industry is being transformed as well, from one that included large numbers of growers each with 50 to 250 acres, to an industry in which 1,000-to 10,000-acre groves are common.

Housing. The Pasco County Housing Authority reportedly cannot find enough farm-worker tenants in the 102-unit Cypress Farms complex, built with U.S. Rural and Economic Development Agency funds formerly known as the Farmers Home Administration. Over 10 percent of the units were vacant in February 1998.

Eligible farm-worker tenants must be legally resident in the US and obtain at least 51 percent of their annual income from working in agriculture. According to the manager, 60 percent of those who apply to be tenants cannot prove they are legally in the US.

The 570 workers and their families who live in the government-subsidized Farm Worker Village had average household incomes of $16,400 in 1997.

Sugar cane. The sugar harvest in south central Florida was mechanized in the early 1990s. In the 1930s, Eleanor Roosevelt decried working conditions--bending at the waist, using a machete, and dealing with heat, mosquitoes and snakes.

In 1991, about 8,000 Caribbean workers were imported for five months each year to hand-cut sugar cane in Florida; 4,500 worked for Flo-Sun Inc. Lawyers for the workers accused the growers of underreporting hours worked so that H-2A workers would earn the required AEWR of $6 an hour in 1991. Most cane cutters were from Jamaica and most earned about $4,000 for five months of US work.

Florida-based Flo-Sun Inc. (owner of Okeelanta) continues to hand-cut sugar cane using Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic. Its camps, or bateys, are considered model operations compared to the government-run camps, which are sometimes described as slave-like. In 1991, the piecerate in the Dominican Republic was reported to be $1.50 a ton, and average worker productivity was reported to be two to three tons a day.

In 1991, the Flo-Sun Inc. corporation owned by the Fanjul family reportedly farmed 240,000 acres in the Dominican Republic, and 160,000 acres in Florida, making them suppliers of 15 percent of US sugar, and giving the family a net worth of $500 million. The Wall Street Journal detailed the Fanjuls propensity to make political gifts to politicians in both the US and the Dominican Republic.

Al French, the USDA labor coordinator who once worked for the Management Research Institute headed by a Fanjul, was quoted as saying that sugar cane was excluded from the list of perishable commodities when IRCA's SAW program was implemented because "the argument was made that if these workers became legalized and could go any place, they'd leave."

Florida Rural Legal Services, Inc. is headquartered in Lakeland, Florida, and has six branch offices. It received $2.5 million from the Legal Services Corporation in FY96 and employed 16 attorneys, 17 paralegals and 29 other staff. On February 26, the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project in Belle Glade called for the removal of the Florida Agriculture Department as the lead agency enforcing federal farm-worker safety laws. The MFJP claims that the state agency has failed to investigate vigorously complaints of pesticide exposure and failed to impose penalties stiff enough to deter violators.

Mireya Navarro, "Florida Tomato Pickers Take on Growers," New York Times, February 1, 1998. Gina Edwards and Jill Higgins, "Hunger strike ends: Workers halt protest; Jimmy Carter urges tomato growers to talk," Naples Daily News, January 19, 1998. Donald P. Baker, "Florida Farm Workers Fast for Better Wages," Washington Post, January 13, 1998. Gina Edwards, "Gauging of wages is a growing complexity," Naples Daily News, January 10, 1998. Jane Mayer and Jose de Cordoba, "First family of sugar is tough on workers, generous to politicians," Wall Street Journal, July 29, 1991.