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October 26, 2000, Thursday, Late Edition -
Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column
1; National Desk
LENGTH: 1210 words
HEADLINE: Farm Union Takes Aim At a Big Pickle Maker
BYLINE: By SOMINI SENGUPTA
DATELINE: FAISON, N.C.
BODY:
Working the fields here the last 26 years, stooping over rows of cucumbers
or sweet potatoes or tobacco, Jose Pablo Carreon has occasionally had some of
his five children along.
He has brought them not to supplement the $70
he can earn piece rate in an 11-hour day by filling bucket after bucket with
vegetables, but to offer them a lesson: that working the fields should not be
their life. "I don't want them to go through this," he said as he stopped for
lunch the other day.
Mr. Carreon, 42, has hopes not just for his
children's lives, but for his own, too. He backs a drive by the Farm Labor
Organizing Committee to organize cucumber pickers, one of the few efforts ever
made to unionize agricultural workers in the South.
Rather than
negotiate separately with hundreds of farm owners resistant to the drive, the
union has been engaged in a boycott of the growers' biggest customer, the Mount
Olive Pickle Company, the South's most popular pickle maker. The campaign,
intended to get the company to bring pressure on the farm owners, has called
particular attention to a federal "guest worker" program and brought rare
scrutiny to labor practices here, from church groups, student organizations and
others.
Most of the harvesters are either illegal Mexican immigrants or
workers brought from Mexico under the guest-worker agricultural program, each
for a few months' work on one farm, harvesting tobacco leaves, yanking sweet
potatoes from the sandy soil, plucking cucumbers from waist-high vines. North
Carolina has become the largest user of these guest workers: a fourth of the
nearly 42,000 last year came to the state.
Without the same federal
protection to unionize that other workers have, farm workers are especially
difficult to organize, and North Carolina is famously inhospitable to unions.
Further, the illegal immigrants and the legal guest workers here fear causing
any trouble, making the task of the farm workers' union all the harder.
Mr. Carreon said he had watched a farmer belt-whip a worker who was too
slow. He has worked in cucumber fields with no portable toilets. He knows of one
novice guest worker who fainted on a tobacco farm last year and died. "Maybe,"
he said, "we are afraid to speak up."
Accounts like those have become
fodder for the union's campaign.
"They are all indentured," the union's
president, Baldemar Velasquez, said of the pickers. "They have to have the
ability to defend themselves, not be retaliated against."
The union
seeks a doubling over five years in cucumber-picking piece rates, which
currently range from 40 to 70 cents a bucket, and the creation of grievance
procedures for working conditions and for living conditions in the farm labor
camps like the one here in Faison, some 50 miles southeast of Raleigh.
Officials at Mount Olive, just up the road from Faison, say the union
has engaged in a misinformation campaign against the company.
The
company does not employ the farm workers but instead has contracts with
suppliers, who in turn have contracts with the farm owners. As the company
notes, then, it is not legally responsible for labor conditions on the farms.
But as the union sees it, Mount Olive is the chief beneficiary of the
labor arrangements, through lower prices than the cucumbers would command in a
unionized market.
"They can subcontract away their responsibility," Mr.
Velasquez said. "But the fact of the matter is, this exists for them.
"Bill Bryan," he said of the company's president, "understands the
necessity of cheap labor."
Although there has never before been a
similar boycott in North Carolina, the action against Mount Olive is a standard
farm organizing strategy. A boycott of the Campbell Soup Company by the Farm
Labor Organizing Committee ended in 1986 with union contracts for Ohio cucumber
and tomato pickers.
Mr. Bryan, whose company is privately held, declined
to discuss revenues. But he did say the boycott, now a year old, had not
affected sales, which he said had grown by about 10 percent a year in the last
decade, to 80 million jars last year.
Mr. Bryan's factory workers are
not unionized, but he said the farm workers' union had picked his company as its
target simply for its name recognition. "Our business practices are the same as
or better than anyone else in the industry," he argued. "We're all buying
nonunion labor in North Carolina."
And that is the way many farmers in
the state want to keep it. Not one of them has agreed to a union contract with
the cucumber pickers.
Frank Howell, whose 900-acre farm in nearby
Goldsboro has been in his family for generations, said he would rather give up
on cucumbers than bargain with the union.
"What can he do on my farm to
help my worker?" Mr. Howell said of Mr. Velasquez. "As far as the conditions in
the fields, he can't air-condition the fields. It's hot, dirty work."
On
a recent afternoon, Mr. Velasquez, 52-year-old son of migrant farm workers, led
a reporter through a labor camp tucked behind a hog pen at the end of a dirt
road on a private farm.
The rooms inside these tin-roofed, cinder block
cabins were lined with four or five beds each. Some of the mattresses had lost
their springy entrails. The laundry space was no more than a metal wash basin
outside. And the concrete floors were strewn with dirty boots left behind, and
brochures that promised dreams on these hot, bountiful fields.
"Your
dollars working in Mexico," a brochure from the North Carolina Growers
Association, a farmers' group that recruits laborers under the federal
guest-worker program, read in Spanish. It featured pictures of men building a
house in Mexico, or standing in front of a new truck. The brochure warned of
"enemies" of the workers: lawyers and union organizers who, the association
contends, want to shut down the program. Association officials have instructed
workers to get rid of legal-rights handbooks distributed by lawyers with the
federally financed Legal Services Corporation.
In a
report issued last month, Human Rights Watch found that visitors were prohibited
in some labor camps and that on occasion sheriff's deputies had arrested them;
they included union officials and supporters from the church-based National Farm
Worker Ministry.
It is not illegal to fire farm workers for union
activity. The National Labor Relations Act does not provide them that
protection, as it does other workers. Further, guest workers can be swiftly sent
home if their employer is dissatisfied; they cannot work for any other employer,
though in North Carolina a handful have fled, choosing to work elsewhere
illegally.
Still, Mount Olive officials point out, guest workers are
guaranteed prevailing wages. Their labor camps are required to pass state
inspection. Some of the unionized labor camps in Ohio are worse, the officials
say, offering photographs that show outdoor toilets and crumbling shacks.
Santos Sanchez, 36, a guest worker from Nayarit, Mexico, has heard the
growers' warnings. And while he is skeptical of their claims, he is not unhappy
to be here. He cannot imagine ever making this kind of money back home.
"In Mexico?" he asked incredulously, and laughed. The going rate for
field work back home, he said, is $6 a day.
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GRAPHIC: Photos: The Farm Labor Organizing Committee is
trying to unionize in the fields of North Carolina, long inhospitable to unions.
The campaign has called attention to a federal program involving "guest worker"
immigrants.; Jose Pablo Carreon, a farm worker who does not want his children
following in his footsteps. (Photographs by Jennifer Warburg for The New York
Times)
LOAD-DATE: October 26, 2000
