GUEST WORKERS AND A UNION FOR TOBACCO WORKERS
By David Bacon
TruthOut Report, October 29, 2012
http://truth-out.org/news/item/12276-north-carolinas-tobacco-workers-stand-to-benefit-from-states-strong-farmworker-union
North Carolina has one of the lowest
percentages of union members in the country. Yet
in this non-union bastion, thousands of farm
workers, some of the country's least unionized
workers, belong to the Farm Labor Organizing
Committee. That gives the state a greater
percentage of unionized farm workers than almost
any other.
The heart of FLOC's membership here are
the 6000 workers brought to North Carolina with
H2-A work visas every year, to pick the cucumbers
that wind up in the pickle jars sold in
supermarkets by the Mt. Olive Pickle Company.
Not all farm workers, or FLOC members, are guest
workers with H2-A visas, however. In fact, a
report last year by Oxfam America, "A state of
fear: Human rights abuses in North Carolina's
tobacco industry," estimates that of the 100,000
farm workers in the state, only 9% have H2-A
visas. Almost all the rest have no legal
immigration status.
Nevertheless, when workers fall under the
union contract, FLOC represents them, regardless
of whether they have visas or not. Some contract
growers employ both H2-A and undocumented labor -
the union doesn't ask. This is the case for
every farm worker union in the country. If a
union only tried to represent workers with visas,
it would have no power. Only a small minority of
the workforce would qualify for membership, and
in a given workplace, workers would be divided
against each other. The ability of a union to
unite workers in action in a workplace is the
basis of its strength, and its ability to protect
rights and win better conditions.
In North Carolina, FLOC has a total of
7,000 members, and 80% work in tobacco fields,
for the same growers who raise the cucumbers for
Mt. Olive pickles. That gives the union a base
for organizing the tobacco industry, using the
same corporate and boycott strategy it used to
gain its original agreements here with the Mt.
Olive Pickle Company.
This time FLOC's adversaries are the
world's largest cigarette manufacturers - Philip
Morris, Lorillard Tobacco Company and Reynolds
American. None of them actually own land or grow
tobacco themselves. They contract with growers
and buy what they produce, at a price these
manufacturers totally control. Some growers
contract for workers through the North Carolina
Growers Association, where the union has its
contract. Other growers hire workers themselves,
usually through labor contractors. The NCGA
workers all have H2-A visas, while those working
for labor contractors are mostly undocumented.
Some growers do both.
"Conditions for tobacco workers are worse
than those for farm workers anywhere else in the
country," says Baldemar Velasquez, FLOC"s
president. Velasquez says he's out to organize
all workers, regardless of status. "Just because
someone's undocumented doesn't mean they don't
have rights," he emphasizes.
The hands of Ruben Barrales, a farm worker from
Xalapa, Veracruz, show the juice and dirt from
tobacco plants. The rancher discourages him from
wearing gloves, saying that it would cause him to
harm the plants.
As a hot August sun beats down on a field
in Nash County, Manuel Cardenal moves down his
row almost at a run. He pauses for a second in
front of each tobacco plant, breaking off the new
shoots at the top. He calls them "rotoños."
They have to be removed so that the growing
strength of the plant will flow into the leaves
below, making them broad and heavy.
Cardenal understands the way tobacco
plants grow, and knows what must be done to make
them productive. He used to have a farm of his
own in Esteli, the best-known tobacco region of
Nicaragua, a country famous for cigars.
Five other workers like him race down
their own rows, deftly choosing and plucking out
the right parts of the right plants. To do this
well, rancher Corey (they don't actually know his
full name) says they have to use their bare
hands. Gloves would be too encumbering, he says,
and might damage the plants. In addition,
they're being paid a piece rate. The workers
have to work fast just to make the minimum wage.
Corey says the whole field has to be finished by
the end of the day.
By one in the afternoon, the temperature
has reached 102 degrees. Cardenal's arms shine
with sweat. Since six that morning, when they
went into the field, the hands of all six workers
have been covered with a sticky green tar -- the
residue of tobacco juice and gum from the leaves.
The same thing that gives cigarettes and cigars
their kick, the nicotine, is not just present in
the tar, but permeates even the dust in the air.
Anyone walking into the field starts to feel that
heady sensation you get from smoking the first
cigarette of the day.
"I feel it as soon as I start work,"
Cardenal says. "Then, after my body gets used to
it, I can hardly feel it at all. But I know I'm
absorbing it all day." The other workers say
they still feel light-headed, though, even though
hours have passed since they started work. When
the heat reaches its peak, they sometimes feel
nauseous as well.
Another component of the sticky tar is
the residue of pesticides sprayed on the plants.
Growers aren't supposed to send workers into the
field for 72 hours after they spray. Some do
anyway, but even past that limit chemicals remain
on the plants' sticky leaves.
"I know I'm getting exposed, but I don't
know what I'm exposed to," Cardenal says. "On my
own farm I'd at least know what I was using to
kill insects. But here I have no idea, and the
growers never tell us."
Manuel Buendia, a farm worker from Alamo in the
state of Veracruz, Mexico, trims the tops of
tobacco plants so that the leaves will grow
larger.
The reason all six workers know so well
the operations needed to grow tobacco is that
they all come from the tobacco regions of Mexico
and Central America. They've all worked in those
fields at home. Ruben Barrales and Manuel
Buendia come from Veracruz, where tobacco leaves
even form part of the coat of arms of Alamo,
Buendia's hometown. Maynor Gonzalez, his brother
Ismail, and Francisco Escobar all come from Santa
Rita in Honduras. That town is an hour from San
Pedro Sula and the port of Puerto Cortez, where
Honduras manufactures and exports its cigars.
Migration to North Carolina from Honduras
and Nicaragua is relatively recent, but the flow
of people from Veracruz dates back to the mid
1980s. The Veracruz flow is connected to the
passage of the Immigration Reform and Control
Act, and later the implementation of the North
American Free Trade Agreement. Central American
migration, with its origin in the exodus of
refugees from its civil wars, got a big boost
following the passage of the Central American
Free Trade Agreement.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of
1986, best known for its immigration amnesty,
also modified and expanded a previous guest
worker program. It took a previous H-2 visa
category, a vestige of the old bracero era, and
divided it into two categories - H2-A for farm
labor, and H2-B for unskilled non-agricultural
workers. Once the law took effect, U.S. growers
could recruit workers in other countries, and
bring them to the U.S. on the H2-A work visas.
Workers with H2-A visas can only work for the
length of their employment contract -- less than
a year - and then must leave. They can only work
for the grower or contractor who hires them.
Importing contract labor to the U.S. on temporary
work permits was halted when the notorious
bracero contract labor scheme was ended in 1964.
The H2-A visa program, however, reopened the
door.
Soon after the law took effect in 1986,
hiring agents for North Carolina growers appeared
in Veracruz, offering people the chance to work
in the U.S. on the guest worker visas. In the
tobacco regions they found plenty of takers.
During that period, Mexico's constitution
was changed to allow the sale of communally owned
land, the ejidos. In a wave of free market
reforms, the government dissolved Tabamex -- the
agency that helped small tobacco farmers market
their product. Then the North American Free
Trade Agreement took effect in 1994, taking down
the barriers on agricultural imports to Mexico.
It became very difficult for Mexican farmers in
many crops to compete against imports from the
U.S. Small farmers who couldn't sell tobacco or
corn for a price that paid the cost of growing it
began to sell off their land to survive.
While these changes caused an enormous
crisis in rural areas throughout the country,
Veracruz suffered more than most states, because
it is more dependent on agriculture. Unable to
survive on their land in Veracruz, tobacco
farmers began to come north as contract workers,
to the fields of North Carolina.
Once their original work contracts ended,
many H2-A workers simply stayed in the U.S.
without visas, and became undocumented. Over
time, others came north on their own to join
friends and relatives already living in North
Carolina. A pool of Mexican workers began to
grow, most from Veracruz. Eventually they were
joined by people arriving from Central America as
well, displaced by the Central America Free Trade
Agreement. That agreement took effect in 2005,
and unleashed the same economic forces NAFTA set
loose earlier, on rural communities in Mexico.
In the evening workers return to the Royce Bone
Labor Camp in a bus from the Þelds.
According to the U.S. Department of
Labor, 7% of the nation's 1.4 million farm
workers have H2-A visas, while 53% have no visa
at all. Of the 103 workers interviewed for the
Oxfam report, almost all were undocumented. A
quarter said they were paid wages less than the
legal minimum. This is not unusual. In
California, the Indigenous Farm Worker study
conducted by Rick Mines found that a third of the
farm laborers it surveyed were paid less than the
state's minimum wage.
A majority of those interviewed in the
Oxfam survey reported the same physical symptoms
Cardenal and his coworkers describe - a syndrome
called green tobacco sickness - and most had no
gloves or other protective equipment. Only a
third said there were toilets in the fields where
they worked. Every year North Carolina's
Department of Labor reports the death of several
field laborers from heat exposure.
Most farm workers in North Carolina live
in labor camps, which are like small company
towns where workers depend on the employer for
housing, transportation and food. Almost all
those surveyed complained of problems like
dilapidated barracks, inadequate showers and
toilets, lack of heat or ventilation, and insect
infestations.
Today conditions for H2-A workers are
better than those described by the undocumented,
primarily because most belong to a union, the
Farm Labor Organizing Committee. This was not
always the case, however.
In 2004 FLOC signed an agreement with the
North Carolina Growers Association, and the Mt.
Olive Pickle Company. The union had mounted a
long corporate campaign against Mt. Olive,
because it was a non-union competitor to union
pickle producers in Ohio and the Midwest. Mt.
Olive's lower labor costs were subsidized by its
use of the H2-A program.
Until the signing of the FLOC contract,
North Carolina's H2-A workers were held in a form
of low-wage bondage. Federal law requires
growers to pay an "adverse effect" wage to H2-A
workers, supposedly set high enough so that it
doesn't undermine local wage standards. North
Carolina growers, however, were well known for
paying less than the legal minimum, and North
Carolina Legal Aid filed many complaints against
them. Even today, most growers using the program
pay the minimum wage or slightly above.
To enforce the low-wage regime, NCGA
maintained a blacklist, called in its employee
manual a "record of eligibility [which] contains
a list of workers, who because of violations of
their contract, have been suspended from the
program." The "1997 NCGA Ineligible for Rehire
Report" listed 1,709 names. The reason for
ineligibility was most often given as abandoning
a job or voluntary resignation. Legal Aid,
however, charged that when workers were fired for
complaining, they were given a paper to sign
saying they'd quit voluntarily. Among the
hundreds of names were also many whose reason for
ineligibility was given as "lazy," "slow," "work
hours too long," "work too hot and hard," or
"slowing up other workers."
Workers were warned not to talk with
legal aid attorneys, and were even told to burn
the pink Legal Aid know-your-rights books in a
trash barrel at the association office.
The NCGA was organized in 1989 by Craig
Eury and Kenneth White, who were fired that year
as rural manpower representatives of the North
Carolina Employment and Security Commission (the
state's unemployment office). The two then set
up businesses in North and South Carolina,
Kentucky, Tennessee and other states for
importing guest workers. In 2003 they brought in
over 10,000 workers, recruited in Mexico by
Manpower Of America, which used local
"enganchadores," or recruiters.
When Mt. Olive signed with FLOC in 2004,
NCGA signed as well, since it was the recruiter
of the workers employed by the growers who grew
the cucumbers for Mt. Olive pickles. As a result
of the agreement, FLOC was then able to police
the recruitment system. North Carolina is a
right-to-work state, which limited the union's
power over hiring, however. Today a grower has
the right to make a decision about whom he hires,
but the union maintains a seniority list. If a
worker isn't rehired by a particular grower at
the start of the season, the union can get the
NCGA to find him or her another job.
The union has a grievance system, and
workers can make complaints about the kind of
health and safety problems they previously had to
suffer in silence and fear. The Oxfam report
notes that in 2010 FLOC processed more than 700
complaints.
The contract, especially the monitoring
of hiring, came at a high price, however. In
2004, FLOC opened an office for that purpose in
Monterrey, Mexico. Then, on April 9, 2007,
Santiago Rafael Cruz, sent by the union to staff
that office, was tied up, tortured and murdered.
To this day the Mexican government has been
unable to bring his killers to justice. There is
little doubt, however, that he was murdered
because the union was threatening the
enganchadores who'd been demanding that workers
pay bribes to get hired.
Aristeo Luna sleeps beneath bare plywood walls
covered in grafÞti, like the "13" that is the
symbol of a gang based in Los Angeles.
The fact that union members hired through
the NCGA are H2-A workers makes NCGA growers
uncompetitive, he maintains: "They have to
provide better conditions, from the adverse
effect wage rate to paying Social Security and
workers' compensation," Velasquez says. With Mt.
Olive, all growers supplying pickles to the
company have to abide by union conditions and pay
the same wages. Tobacco, however, is a much
larger business, in which NCGA growers with the
union contract are competing with non-union
growers.
Since the vast majority of the farm labor
workforce in tobacco is undocumented, an
agreement with the big cigarette manufacturers
will have important differences from the first
contract with Mt. Olive and the NCGA. One
question is whether undocumented workers will be
represented by the union if the industry is
forced to sign a master agreement.
Another complexity is the ability of
manufacturers to dictate prices to growers.
After the U.S. government abandoned its marketing
regulations for tobacco, growers lost much of
their leverage for negotiating those prices.
"Typically, the farmer must sign the contract as
written [by the manufacturer] or else lose the
chance to grow tobacco during the upcoming
season," the Oxfam report notes. One grower told
investigators that "[in] 2010 our crop is going
to bring us half a million dollars less than it
did in 2009." Growers today have only one way to
respond to price pressure: get workers to
produce more for lower wages, while spending even
less on their food, housing and health. That
exerts a continuing downward pressure on wages
and conditions in the fields. A union contract
would force growers to pay the same wages,
essentially taking labor costs out of competition.
H2-A workers have become more expensive
in North Carolina because of the union contract.
In every other state, where H2-A workers have no
union protection, their wages and conditions are
often no different from those of undocumented
workers. On many ranches they're employed and
housed together.
Some North Carolina growers see
advantages in using H2-A workers, however,
especially if competing growers must do the same.
One told the Oxfam investigators, "you want to
know if you are going to pour all this money into
these crops, that if you do everything you are
supposed to, you are going to have the labor
there till the end of the year to get that crop
out of the field ... When you hire, you know, a
crew leader, an undocumented worker, you are
running the risk they are going to leave you
before you finish, you run the risk they're going
to leave when you need them the most."
What makes the program desirable to
employers, however, also makes workers vulnerable
to employer pressure. The means used to make
workers dependable - the employment contract,
grower control of recruiting and hiring, and the
ability of employers to deport workers by firing
them - deprive workers of power. In 2007 the
Southern Poverty Law Center's report, "Close to
Slavery," said the program was structurally
flawed because workers "are bound to the
employers who 'import' them. If guest workers
complain about abuses, they face deportation,
blacklisting or other retaliation." Regulations
to protect workers "exist mainly on paper.
Government enforcement ... is almost
non-existent."
H2A wages have been especially
controversial, and have always been hostage to
politics. At the end of the Bush administration,
the methodology for calculating the "adverse
effect" wage was changed, resulting in a $1-2
wage cut for H2A workers. In March 2010, Labor
Secretary Hilda Solis reinstated the old wage and
the method for determining it, requiring
employers to document efforts to recruit local
workers.
"Some improvement is possible with
changes in the regs," argues Mary Bauer, SPLC's
legal director and the "Close to Slavery"
report's principal author. She suggests raising
wages and policing recruitment. "But the
structure of the program is the real problem.
Workers need a visa that's not dependent on
employment. They should come here with a visa
that lets them shop their labor around, like any
other worker."
The Oxfam report, however, recommends
expansion of the H2-A program instead, claiming
this would improve wages and conditions.
Allowing growers to import more workers under
this program, however, simply means that more
workers will endure the abysmal conditions
described in the "Close to Slavery" report. Even
in North Carolina, where H2-A conditions are
better, the reason for the improvement is not the
visa, but the fact that workers have a union
contract. Without a strong union, conditions
would quickly return to what they were before
2004. Yet the Oxfam report makes no
recommendation that tobacco manufacturers sign a
union contract.
Families, including children, live in the
Strickland Labor Camp. Many come from Mexico,
mostly Veracruz, and work in the Þelds of tobacco
and sweet potatoes.
In the end, the choice faced by the six
migrants in the Nash County field is simple.
Stay home and go hungry, or come to the U.S. and
survive. Bad conditions and lack of legal status
are no deterrent. These workers are not
unsophisticated about the situation they face in
the U.S. Nor do they lack knowledge about the
perils of farm labor. They simply have very
little power to change their situation other than
by leaving home and migrating to North Carolina.
Cardenal asks about DBCP. He cites it as
an example of the possible dangers of working in
the U.S. where he comes in contact with plants
and chemicals without knowing their effects.
DBCP is an agricultural pesticide that was used
by Dole Corporation on banana plantations for
many years in Nicaragua. The chemical was later
found to have caused sterility among farm
laborers. "Some people got money to settle their
legal cases," he explains, "but the price they
paid was very high. They never had children.
How do I know that years from now some chemical
on the leaves here won't cause me a problem like
that?"
A strong union would make sure he knows
the potential dangers from pesticides. A higher
wage, not tied to a piece rate, could allow him
to work more slowly using gloves, instead of
absorbing nicotine through his bare hands. And a
union contract could protect him if he went to
rancher Corey and demanded these things, keeping
Corey from firing him, evicting him from company
housing, and even deporting him.
At present, whether he comes into the
tobacco field as an H2-A worker or without any
visa at all, he runs the risk of retaliation if
he demands better conditions. Undocumented
workers can always be threatened with the
"migra." But H2-A workers lose their visa along
with their job if their boss fires them.
The choices in this field are very
circumscribed. But envisioning a more liberating
solution for the workers here is not hard. Get
rid of NAFTA and CAFTA so that people can earn a
decent living at home, making migration only an
option, not a necessity. Give a green card -- a
residence visa -- to tobacco workers, instead of
an H2-A employment contract or no visa at all.
Give workers enforceable organizing rights and
require huge corporations to sign union
agreements.
It's just the toxic and deadlocked
politics of Washington DC that call real
solutions impossible. Today US immigration
policy is largely shaped by the desire of US
employers for labor. That's what limits what's
possible for Cardenal and his workmates. But
should it? Can't migration produce strong
communities of people fully able to assert their
rights in this country, and healthy communities
in their countries of origin? Or must it be
geared primarily to supplying labor to cigarette
manufacturers at a price they want to pay?
Coming in 2013 from Beacon Press:
The Right to Stay Home: Ending Forced Migration
and the Criminalization of Immigrants
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization
Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
(Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California,
2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
Entrevista de David Bacon con activistas de #yosoy132 en UNAM
Interview of David Bacon by activists of #yosoy132 at UNAM (in Spanish)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyF6AJQa9po&feature=relmfu
Two lectures on the political economy of migration by David Bacon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GgDWf9eefE&feature=youtu.be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd4OLdaoxvg&feature=related
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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