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Mexico Farm Workers Win Pay Hike In Landmark Deal, But Fall Short Of Goal

Mexico Farm Workers Win Pay Hike In Landmark Deal, But Fall Short Of Goal

By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

SAN QUINTIN, Mexico — A volatile farm labor strike that crippled exports from one of Mexico’s key agricultural regions ended Thursday night with an unprecedented accord that boosts wages as much as 50 percent for thousands of laborers in Baja California.

While considered a landmark achievement for a farm labor movement in Mexico, the mood was subdued after labor leaders learned that the federal government was pulling its offer to provide subsidies to reach the 200-peso daily wage rate — about $13 — sought by laborers.

The agreement reached after a six-hour negotiating session calls for a three-tiered compensation system. Large farms will pay workers 180 pesos per day; medium farms, 165 pesos; and small farms, 150.

Since most work at large agribusinesses, the wage increase amounts to about $4 per day for many of the estimated 30,000 workers in the region 200 miles south of San Diego.

“This isn’t the agreement that laborers were hoping for…but we made significant gains,” farmworker leader Fermin Salazar said after the meeting.

After the meeting at a salon in a San Quintin restaurant, Baja California state officials beat a hasty retreat, fearing that news of the accord could upset laborers. Governor Francisco Vega de Lamadrid had to push his way through an angry crowd yelling epithets and banging on his SUV.

“Coward! Rat!” yelled the crowd.

The deal appeared to conclude a nearly three-month strike in the San Quintin Valley that was marked by fierce clashes between police and protesters, drawing international media coverage. Large U.S. retailers, including Wal-Mart, Costco, and Safeway, import berries, tomatoes, cucumbers, and other produce from the region.

Workers, who had been on strike since mid-March, dropped their initial demand of a 300-peso daily wage to 200 pesos. But growers initially were only willing to boost wages 15 percent.

The breakthrough came in mid-May, when the federal government agreed to push agribusinesses to offer more and to make up the difference with federal funds, as “close as possible” to leaders’ demands.

But the proposal to subsidize wages, which was widely criticized in Mexico, was deemed to be unlawful, according to farm labor leaders who were briefed on the matter by a representative from Mexico’s Interior Ministry. They did credit the federal government for getting agribusinesses to budge from the position they held for two months.

At a news conference after the meeting, several leaders of the Alliance of National, State, and Municipal Organizations for Social Justice — the coalition of indigenous groups representing laborers — said they would not stop fighting for labor rights, and set their sights on establishing a national union of farm laborers.

Photo: Wonderlane via Flickr

Carly Fiorina Right About Environmentalists And California Drought Woes, Farm Group Say

Carly Fiorina Right About Environmentalists And California Drought Woes, Farm Group Say

By David Knowles and Alan Bjerga, Bloomberg News (TNS)

The water wars have begun.

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina is blaming “overzealous liberal environmentalists” for the water shortages caused by California’s ongoing drought. In a radio interview earlier in the week with Glenn Beck, and in a Tuesday op-ed in Time, Fiorina made the case that the water rationing instituted by Governor Jerry Brown could have been avoided. The problem, Fiorina says, is that the state has allowed environmental activists to influence policy.

“Specifically, these policies have resulted in the diversion of more than 300 billion gallons of water away from farmers in the Central Valley and into the San Francisco Bay in order to protect the Delta smelt, an endangered fish that environmentalists have continued to champion at the expense of Californians. This water is simply being washed out to sea, instead of being channeled to the people who desperately need it,” Fiorina wrote in Time. “While they have watched this water wash out to sea, liberals have simultaneously prevented the construction of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades.”

Environmental groups staunchly disagree, saying weather patterns are to blame. “We simply don’t have rain or snow pack and are suffering the worst California drought since water agencies and weather trackers started keeping records,” Kathryn Phillips, director of Sierra Club’s California chapter, told the Huffington Post.

Yet many California farm groups agree with Fiorina, tracing their woes to 1992 federal legislation meant to protect endangered species and landscapes that permanently reduced their water allocation. Since then, lawsuits have further eroded farmer water rights, they say, slowly turning off the tap in the name of environmental goals that may or may not be met.

“That’s why this is worse than the droughts of the 1970s and early 1990s,” said Ryan Jacobsen, executive director of the Fresno County Farm Bureau. This year, between December 20 and Jan. 15, about 318,000 acre feet that could have supplied his region was pumped out to protect endangered species. That water, had it been available, would have allowed for a bare-bones federal water allocation that would have kept alive trees that now will be bulldozed, he said.

“We’ve had a large rededication from ag and municipal use to the environment, and it’s been chewing away at us. It dramatically hurts the flexibility of California to deal with these circumstances.”

Activists intentionally distort agriculture’s use of water to further anti-farming arguments, said Joel Nelsen, chief executive officer of California Citrus Mutual, which represents growers of oranges, lemons, grapefruit, and other fruit.

For example, an oft-quoted number that farms handle 80 percent of the state’s water use intentionally leaves out about half of the supply, the part earmarked for environmental protection, he said. Add that in, and farming uses about 40 percent of all water, he said.

The California Department of Water Resources, which tracks use, agrees. “The farmers are right,” said agency spokesman Doug Carlson. From 2001-2010, average net water use in California, counting environmental purposes, was about 47 percent environmental, 43 percent for farming and 10 percent city use. Take out environmental water as a category, however, and farming jumps to almost 77 percent of usage, with city use rising to one-fifth, according to state statistics.

That’s the sort of spin Nelson said unfairly singles out farmers, who already have reduced their “crop per drop” in response to less available water, as villains in the water crisis. “What bothers me most about the environmental community is its incredible hypocrisy,” in which activists oppose everything except what makes their own lives more convenient, he said.

“They won’t go after the dam at Hetch Hetchy because that supplies water to San Francisco,” he said, referring to a century-old federal project that devastated an ecosystem to supply municipal water. “They go after agriculture because it doesn’t affect them. Well, we produce the food that people eat. That seems like a pretty good use of water to me.”

Environmental groups like Sierra Club reject the notion that the blame for the state’s water conservation problem lies with the decision to not build new dams and reservoirs.

“The fact is that over half the water that falls in California is diverted for human-industrial consumption. That means that half of natural water flows get to enter the rivers and streams and estuaries that support the salmon industry and the aquifers that are actually tapped by farmers,” said Michelle Myers, director of the Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter. “In this time of extreme drought, I think we need to be smarter consumers, with better irrigation techniques, while making communities more resilient by capturing storm water and actually recycling the water that they use, rather than investing outrageous sums of money on infrastructure projects like dams.”

Photo: Pacific Southwest Region via Flickr

The Best Thanksgiving TV Show Ever Is Not What You Expect

The Best Thanksgiving TV Show Ever Is Not What You Expect

In May, 1961, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow referred to television as “a vast wasteland” full of vapid sitcoms, game shows, private eye melodramas, cartoons, and loads of westerns. But just six months earlier there appeared an oasis: a serious network news documentary, perhaps the most powerful ever aired.

On the night after Thanksgiving 1960, millions of viewers who tuned in to CBS in prime time didn’t see an entertainment program. Instead, they saw a bleak cold opening: black and white images of black men in shabby clothing milling about a hot, crummy-looking parking lot as slightly-better-dressed black men shouted out job offers. Lots of quick cuts from one part of the crowd to another, from one shouter to another. Then the solemn voiceover:

This scene is not taking place in the Congo. It has nothing to do with Johannesburg or Cape Town. It is not Nyasaland or Nigeria. This is Florida. These are citizens of the United States, 1960. This is a shape-up for migrant workers. The hawkers are chanting the going piece rate at the various fields. This is the way the humans who harvest the food for the best-fed people in the world get hired. One farmer looked at this and said, ‘We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.’

The voice was Edward R. Murrow’s, the TV series was CBS Reports, and the documentary was Harvest of Shame, a stunning exposé that revealed the appalling conditions endured by the men and women who picked the fruits and vegetables enjoyed by Thanksgiving-stuffed Americans. Produced by Fred W. Friendly and David Lowe and written and narrated by the iconic Murrow, in the decades since its debut, the film has lost none of its power to inform, sadden, and horrify.

Following the trail of migrant laborers as they traveled from Florida to New York during the harvest season, the film showed in raw detail the dangerous buses and trucks they were jammed in, the filthy and crumbling housing camps they lived in on farms along the circuit, the minuscule wages they were paid, and the pitiful amounts of food they ate.  At one point Murrow refers to the situation as “a modern Grapes of Wrath;” these were people who worked in the fields all their lives, from early childhood until death, and for whom the Great Depression was eternal.

Particularly moving are the interviews conducted by the driving force behind the program, producer David Lowe, a child of immigrants who himself grew up poor. None of the interviewees smile except in embarrassment about having to go to the bathroom in a tin pot or in the woods. To a man, to a woman, when asked if they have any hope for a brighter future, every one of the migrants says a despairing “no.” They have no minimum wage, no health insurance, no sick leave, no unemployment insurance, and, for the most part, no school for their children. Where there is a school, the children express hope to be a dentist, a teacher. But their own teacher tells Lowe that their poverty, their large families, and the necessary traveling mean that those dreams cannot be realized.

In an interview with Murrow, the head of a farmers’ lobbying group opposes any kind of federal regulation of the migrants’ working conditions because that would be too expensive for consumers and would deprive the migrants of choice — a familiar conservative argument half a century later. An individual farmer questioned by Lowe says the migrants actually enjoy the freedom of the vagabond life, but admits that they make “a poor living.”  That poor living then was $900 a year — $7,200 in today’s dollars.

To modern viewers, the most surprising interview is with James P. Mitchell, the secretary of labor in the Eisenhower administration. He was called “the social conscience of the Republican Party,” and he proves it. Talking with Murrow, he advocates federal regulation of migrant labor and the unionization of the workers based on the model of garment workers. Republicans were different then.

Harvest of Shame was a sensation in its time.  Middle-class Americans had never before confronted such poverty right in their living rooms. Most of the migrants shown were black, but some were white (one man whose family lived in the woods was a World War II veteran), and almost all were U.S. citizens. This not only could happen here, it was happening here.

And mostly, it still is. While some reforms have been made in the wake of the show — migrants must be paid a minimum wage (but only if the employer is large enough), their transportation and housing conditions must meet federal and state safety standards, and there must be rest and shaded areas in the fields — the farm lobby effectively railed against the program and blocked major federal regulation. So even over half a century later the conditions are still squalid. Unlike the European-American and African-American workers in the show, most migrants today are Latinos, and many, because they are undocumented, are ineligible to receive benefits or afraid to claim them. One of the children interviewed in the show was still a migrant laborer when a newspaper visited him in 2003. The current annual income for a migrant today is just $14,000.

Unusually for a network TV news program of its era, and even for today, Harvest of Shame makes no pretense of being objective about the people who make our Thanksgiving possible. Murrow concludes the show by looking straight into the camera and making a strong and urgent call for the audience to take action. On this Thanksgiving, we still must.

You can watch Harvest of Shame in full here. And you can see a 2010 update from CBS here.

Screenshot: CBS/YouTube

Upside-Down Tea Party Dogma in Arkansas

Upside-Down Tea Party Dogma in Arkansas

When we moved to our Arkansas cattle farm, a friend lent us a book titled A Straw in the Sun. Published in 1945, Charlie Mae Simon’s beautifully written memoir of homesteading here in Perry County, Arkansas during the 1930s was long out of print—maybe because the hardscrabble life it depicts is too recent for nostalgia.

Like much of the rural South before World War II, Perry County was essentially the Third World. So was Yell County, immediately to the west, home of U.S. Senate candidate Tom Cotton. Except for a lot of wasteful government spending he affects to deplore, it would still be.

Cotton’s campaign against Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Pryor reflects everything upside-down about Tea Party dogma and the tycoons who fund it—a local story with national implications.

Originally featured as New Yorker essays, Simon’s book wasn’t intended as social protest. Even so, many forget that millions of Americans lived as subsistence-level peasant farmers within living memory.

Simon and her neighbors grew their own food and slaughtered their own hogs; they cut firewood, dug wells, built outhouses, made candles and fermented corn liquor. Electricity and telephones weren’t available; cash commerce all but non-existent. To file her essays, Simon walked hours to the general store or hitched rides on mule-drawn wagons along dirt roads that became impassible in wet weather. The simple life proved terribly complicated.

During the same period, writes historian S. Charles Bolton in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, roughly 1/3 of black and 1/5 of rural white Arkansans emigrated to places like Chicago or Los Angeles. Others found work in town. Today, large parts of Perry and Yell counties are in the Ouachita National Forest. They had more residents then than now.

But here’s the thing: Contrary to Tea Party fantasies, it wasn’t plucky private entrepreneurs that paved the roads, strung the wire, saved grandpa from penury and made organized commerce across the rural South possible. It was federal and state investment.

Even today, such prosperity as Yell County enjoys—it’s the 64th wealthiest of Arkansas’s 75 counties—derives from timber cutting and the proximity of three scenic lakes built and maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Not to mention, of course, agricultural price supports from the 2014 Farm Bill that Rep. Cotton voted against.

But enough history. There’s plenty of strictly contemporary reality that self-styled “conservatives” also ignore. In TV commercials, Cotton depicts himself as the dutiful son of a “cattle rancher” who taught him farmers can’t spend money they don’t have.

Cotton’s father does run a small cattle farm near Dardanelle. However, it’s also a fact that Len Cotton retired as District Supervisor of the Arkansas Health Department after a 37-year career. The senior Cotton has also served on the Arkansas Veterans Commission, the Tri-County Regional Water Board, etc.

The candidate’s mother Avis taught in public schools for 40 years. She retired in 2012 as principal of the Dardanelle middle school. Career government bureaucrats, both, bless their public-spirited hearts.

So I’m guessing Len Cotton raises cattle for the same reasons I do: because it’s an absorbing hobby with considerable tax advantages.

Meanwhile, the thing about the Farm Bill that urban liberals often don’t get, and that a poser like Tom Cotton’s being disingenuous about, is this that it’s damn near impossible to farm without risking money you don’t have.

The largest recipient of agricultural subsidies in Arkansas is Riceland Rice—a member-owned co-op representing 5,800 farmers.

Farmers who have to pay for seeds, fertilizer, and diesel fuel to pump water; also to finance tractors and combines more costly than the land. Farmers who borrow every spring in the hope of turning a profit in the fall. And who risk losing the entire crop to pests, floods, drought, tornadoes, to cheap soybeans from Brazil, etc. If there’s fraud and waste, cut it out. However, it’s in the national interest to keep agriculture strong.

But let’s head back to town, shall we? One of the fastest growing GOP strongholds in Arkansas is the college town of Conway, just across the Arkansas River. Tom Cotton’s sure to do well there.

And why does Conway prosper? Basically, government largesse. Located along Interstate 40, it’s the home of the University of Central Arkansas, a growing state school. It’s got a brand-new, federally-funded airport, two private colleges supported by state scholarships funded by the Arkansas Lottery, and an excellent non-profit hospital (Medicare, Medicaid), etc.

The city’s biggest private employers are Internet-oriented Acxiom and Hewlett Packard. (Pentagon researchers created the Internet.) Furthermore, everybody in Conway receives electricity, water, sewage, cable TV, Internet and telephone service from the Conway Corporation—a city-owned co-op begun in the 1920s, as efficient an example of municipal socialism as you’ll find this side of Stockholm, Sweden.

Dogma notwithstanding, all successful modern economies are mixed economies.

No politician who tells you differently is your friend.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr