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"Let's Stop Subsidizing Growers' Profits" (Issue #3, August 1990)
For decades, Willamette Valley growers have been fostering and directly benefiting from surpluses of workers at harvest time. We think the time has come for some drastic measures which will force growers to pay the social and economic costs of agricultural labor surpluses. PCUN proposes that growers finance a major fund, something like the EPA's Superfund for pollution clean-up, which farmworkers can tap whenever labor "disaster" happens.
First, before explaining our proposal further, a quick review of how and why these surplusses occur.
The process of ensuring an oversupply of farmworkers has come to work more like a well-rehearsed drama rather than any highly coordinated conspiracy. The players have performed their parts so many times that no one even needs to give cues.
This year's version went like this. Key growers and government officials involved in agriculture perpetuated a mentality of shortage. Example: the six-page, Spring 1990 edition of The Agriculture Quarterly, edited by Danny Santos for the state Agricultural Labor Commission, used the word "shortage" thirty times.
Labor contractors, smugglers, and their helpers responded by hustling workers in California and Mexico, using promises of plentiful, well-paid work in Oregon. Example: One contractor brought more than 500 workers to the Woodburn area in May alone, even though he had work committed for, at most, half that number. Growers receive this "service" without cost, since contractors and smugglers make comfortable livings collecting an exorbitant fee from each worker they transport and house, regardless of whether enough work is available.
Most "surplus" workers have never been to Oregon. They arrive in debt and thus must work for virtually any wage. Most stay in overcrowded housing (rented by the contractors) or sleep in cars; many depend on local charities for food.
True to our society's laws of supply and demand, a labor surplus depresses wages for all farmworkers employed in the harvests. Again, the 1990 harvest proved to be a classic example. In April, growers predicted a prevailing piece-rate in the strawberry harvest of fifteen cents per pound. When the harvest started in June, growers paid twelve cents and some contractors paid only ten cents per pound. The huge surplus also meant less work for each worker. Valley growers hired two and even three times the "normal" workforce and finished an entire strawberry picking in as little as two hours.
Tallying the gains and losses, we find that growers netted extra profits of nearly $2,000,000 in the strawberry crop alone, over and above the additional $6,000,000 which the processors paid them in the form of higher crop prices. Contractors have surely made a killing, too. One local contractor bought a new house three years and expects to have paid off the entire mortgage by year's end.
Obviously, the workers lost big. In the strawberries, many earned fifteen, ten or as little as five dollars per day, and worked only one out of every three days.
But these surpluses are also squeezing taxpayers and donors to charities. The Oregon Legislature appropriated hundreds of thousands of tax dollars just to modestly increase the otherwise impotent enforcement of wage and farmlabor contractor laws by state agencies. For every contractor who the state can finally put out of business, though, two or three others take his place. Food banks' emergency appeals for donations have, by now, become a late-Spring ritual.
It's time we stopped subsidizing growers' windfall profits. If the growers insist on swelling the laborforce rather offering improved wages and conditions to the workers already here, they should pay the price.
We propose that, before each harvest season, the growers post a substantial bond. If the workforce is adequate, the bond remains untouched. However, if the growers' henchmen create a surplus, the bond pays unemployed workers' living expenses, transportation costs, and lost wages. The bond gives the growers a strong financial incentive to control the labor contractors or, if they can't, to stop employing them altogether.
Thirty years ago, the Oregon Legislature established commodity or "crop" commissions, authorized them to tax all who commercial farm a particular crop, and allowed the commissions to spend the money on agricultural research and marketing. In other words, growers collectively pay to promote their crops' health and economic welfare. We think they should do the same for the workers who pick those crops.
The Legislature should mandate that each of these commissions post the "labor" bond we described, and allow them to tax their members to pay for it. The fund, however, must be administered independently.
Some will criticize our proposal as politically unthinkable--just like collective bargaining rights for farmworkers. But given that surpluses have become the rule, not the exception, and that state regulation of labor contractors has utterly failed to police them, doesn't it make sense to work for change that really makes a lasting difference, rather than compromise on reforms that don't?
As a long-time PCUN member remarked after a two-hour day picking strawberries: "The truth is that there's no shortage of farmworkers already in this Valley; there's only a shortage of pay."·