New York needs a Chavez

By MIRIAM PAWEL
First published in print: Thursday, June 11, 2009, Times Union, Albany, NY

Farmworkers in New York are not paid overtime, no matter how many hours they work. They do not have the right to even one day off each week, though the jobs are so physically taxing that only the poorest immigrants want the work.

Some live in labor camps with latrines, exempt from health and safety standards. Fourteen and 15-year-olds who work in the fields are paid sub-minimum wage -- $3.20 an hour.

Farm labor ranks as one of the most hazardous occupations, yet New York farmworkers do not qualify for temporary disability payments. And they most certainly do not have the right to join a union or bargain for better working conditions.

In the closing days of its current session, the state Legislature has taken up a bill that would undo decades of discrimination and grant farmworkers some basic protections enjoyed by almost all other workers. But the fundamental inequities and the stark reality of life in the fields are becoming buried in economic shibboleths.

The agricultural industry has framed the Albany debate with doomsday scenarios and paternalistic reassurances: Paying farmworkers overtime after 40 hours a week would bankrupt growers. Crops would rot; dairy cows would end up in the slaughterhouse. The changes would hurt farmworkers, not help them, driving some farms out of business, eliminating jobs, and curtailing workers' hours. Workers are happy now, well-treated by benevolent employers.

Growers clung to the same arguments in California – four decades ago. Their draconian predictions did not come true. California has the strongest pro-labor law in the country, the only one that guarantees farmworkers the right to organize and sets up a mechanism for union elections in the fields.

California farmworkers have qualified for unemployment and disability for decades, and they are entitled to overtime after 10 hours a day. For every four hours of work, they are entitled to a 10-minute break. California's $30 billion a year agricultural industry has steadily grown nonetheless.

New York, like most states, offers farmworkers few protections and instead follows the lead of the federal government, which excluded agricultural laborers from the National Labor Relations Act more than 70 years ago. California is different because of Cesar Chavez.

For a brief time in the late 1960s and 1970s, Chavez propelled farmworkers out of the shadows and into the national consciousness, where they could not be ignored. He forced Americans to confront an industry that treated farmworkers as disposable implements, that viewed Mexicans as capable of no more than menial labor -- and particularly well-suited for farm work because they were short and close to the ground.

The rhetoric is not all that different today. "Local school kids love the Mexicans, because the kids don't want to do the hard field picking," one local grower told a reporter for The Saratogian. "The Mexicans never complain. They just do the job."

His workers labor from 7 a.m. till after 5 p.m., with a half-day off on Sunday, earning less than $10 an hour.

"They're very happy to come here and work for that money," he said.

In the 1970s, Chavez rallied students and civil rights activists to la causa, staged marches, fasts and massive acts of civil disobedience, and launched consumer boycotts to exert economic pressure. By 1975, a Harris poll showed 17 million Americans were boycotting grapes and lettuce to help California farmworkers win dignity and contracts. The California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, passed a few months later, remains one of Chavez's lasting legacies.

To force change in New York, the same kind of external pressure Chavez generated will have to be brought to bear. Farmworkers are overwhelmingly Mexican and often undocumented. They don't vote. For the most part, they are invisible. Kerry Kennedy has recently taken up their cause, one that her father, Robert F. Kennedy, championed as New York's junior senator. Her support will help; but to date, the issue has barely registered.

I spent many years as a reporter in Albany. I know how legislative leaders resolve issues that pit a moral right against a political might. They bury them. The bill may end up in a graveyard like the Senate Rules Committee. Or the legislation might make it on to the Senate calendar right at the end of the session. But chances are good the clock will run out before senators actually have to cast votes. Because in 2009, who wants to stand up and go on record supporting the vestiges of an inherently unjust system?

Miriam Pawel is author of the forthcoming book "The Union of Their Dreams -- Power, Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement."

Last Updated:06/11/2009
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