Rural Laws: January, 1999 - Number #10

NBC's Dateline ran a one-hour special on migrant farm workers on December 4, 1998, following a family from south Texas that picked cucumbers in Ohio, and encouraged their children to work in order to maximize the family's piece rate earnings. The family was very unusual--it was large and legal; most migrants are solo men.

The Muskegon Chronicle ran a series of articles on farm workers on November 22, 1998, written by a reporter who returned to farms in Western Michigan's Ottawa and Oceana counties where he had worked as a teen. A couple with medical assistant licenses elect to continue to migrate to do farm work so that they can live with their migrant families in the summer months. The Michigan Commission On Spanish Speaking Affairs believes that Michigan is the fourth-largest employer of migrants at 45,000 a year.

The United Paperworkers International Union in October 1998 suspended an organizing drive at the former DeCoster Egg Farms, now Maine Ag and Quality Eggs of New England. In March 1998, workers voted 52 to 21 against the union.

In Ohio, workers at the Buckeye Egg Farm voted 36-23 in August 1998 against representation by the United Food & Commercial Workers Union. Buckeye argued that it was a farm and not covered by the NLRA, but the NLRB ruled that Buckeye was a nonfarm operation. Buckeye in 1997-98 settled citations that it failed to provide workers overtime pay. Buckeye, which currently has about 2.5 million chickens, plans to expand to have 18 million chickens in north-central Ohio.

Federico Martinez, "Generations of migrants maintain the cycles of life," Muskegon Chronicle, November 22, 1998.