San Diego Union Tribune, CA
Jan 23 2005
Migrant fieldworkers are losing their traditional livelihood to
mechanized pickers, global competition
By Diane Lindquist
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
PARLIER – For the past century, raisins in California’s Central
Valley have been harvested in exactly the same way: a monthlong
frenzy of hand picking that required more workers than almost any
other crop.
Last season, many raisin growers turned to machines to do the work.
Although they had long held out, they are now joining growers
nationwide in embracing mechanization to fend off global competition.
But the switch to mechanical harvesting is taking a heavy toll on the
Mexican migrants who fill most of the state’s lowest-paying farm
jobs. With machines picking more crops, the need for field hands is
falling sharply. Where 50 men once were needed to harvest a field of
raisins, five now suffice.
“I’ve been going all over the valley looking for work, but there
isn’t any. If I’m lucky, I get one or two days a week,” said Fidel
Rosales Rodrguez, who last spring paid smugglers $1,200 to sneak him
from Mexico into California.
Even legal fieldworkers say they have never experienced such a tough
year. There were more migrants, they complain, and jobs were all but
impossible to find.
Mechanization portends big problems for a region strained in the past
two decades by the arrival of impoverished rural Mexicans. They are
widely estimated to be coming to the United States at a rate of more
than a half million a year, with a quarter to a third of them
entering California.
The challenge of absorbing so many newcomers is taxing the economic
and social well-being of the valleys that produce fruits, nuts and
vegetables for markets worldwide.
“We’re adding a lot of poor people into what’s already a pretty poor
area. It’s a dangerous path,” said Philip Martin, a migration
specialist at the University of California Davis.
California, the setting for John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”
and Cesar Chavez’s historic farmworker union movement, is
experiencing the emergence of a worrisome strain of rural poverty. It
exists alongside the relative prosperity associated with the state’s
$25.7 billion agriculture business. If, for instance, the Central
Valley were a state, it would rank first in the nation in
agricultural production but 48th in per-capita income.
“People used to think California was divided between the north and
south, but it’s really between the wealthy coastal areas and the
impoverished interior valleys,” said demographer Hans Johnson of the
Public Policy Institute of California.
The sheer magnitude of the influx of Mexican migrants is prompting
tension and resentment that mirror anti-immigrant feelings in other
parts of the United States. California’s agricultural valleys have
become Balkanized as numerous ethnic groups have reshuffled into
separate communities.
“We risk falling into warring factions,” said Assemblyman Juan
Arambula, a former Fresno County supervisor.
Parlier, a small farming town 20 miles southeast of Fresno that is in
the heart of raisin country USA, typifies the dilemma that confronts
many rural California cities.
An unceasing arrival of migrants has transformed Parlier into one of
the scores of communities known as “Mexican towns” that dot the
Central Valley. Since 1990, Parlier’s population has doubled to
12,000. Every year when field hands arrive for the harvest, the city
has 4,000 more residents for a few months.
The community also is one of California’s poorest. Unemployment
hovers year-round at 30 percent. Per-capita income averages $5,300;
family incomes are slightly more than $24,000.
Some families are struggling on less than $3,000 a year, the average
wage in Mexico.
“We’re transferring rural poverty from Mexico to rural California,”
Martin of UC Davis said, “and we don’t have a game plan to get out of
it.”
The mechanization of the raisin harvest threatens to make the
situation even worse. State officials believe two or three migrants
are currently competing for each of California’s 400,000 to 500,000
seasonal farm jobs. If machines pick the raisins, agricultural
experts say, labor demand will drop to a tenth of the 40,000 to
50,000 workers typically hired today.
“I’m reluctant to say we don’t want any more (workers),” Arambula
said. “But to the extent we have more people than work, we need to
slow it down.”
The region is looking to U.S. immigration measures to control the
flow.
President Bush has put the issue back on his agenda, vowing that
Congress this year will implement a guest worker program and some
type of provision to legalize undocumented people living in the
United States.
Also expected is legislation that would increase border enforcement
and impose enforceable sanctions on employers who hire undocumented
workers.
Any immigration reforms could greatly affect the state’s farm picture
as well as areas nationwide that have attracted large numbers of
Mexican migrants and increasingly are coming to resemble rural
California.
Still, it’s uncertain whether new measures would help.
For example, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 spawned
unintended consequences that contributed to the economic and social
stress felt today. The legislation legalized 3 million undocumented
immigrants, a third of them under a special agricultural provision.
But it failed to halt illegal entries. Instead, it quickened the
flow.
Once legalized, Mexican men secretly brought their wives and children
across the border to join them. Meanwhile, fresh job seekers arrived
to replenish the ranks as the back-breaking work drove older workers
from the fields but not necessarily from California.
Such post-IRCA inflows have caused the population of farmworker
communities to grow twice as fast as populations elsewhere in
California.
Estimates of undocumented people living in the United States
generally vary from 9 million to 12 million, with Mexicans accounting
for about 5.4 million of the total.
“Every year, the numbers of undocumented immigrants flowing into the
United States is higher than the year before,” said Jeffrey Passel, a
research specialist at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan economic
and social policy research group in Washington, D.C. “The number in
the last decade is more than any other decade, and the statistics
might be low.”
Growers in Fresno County, home of the entire U.S. raisin crop, have
long relied on workers from Mexico to collect the dried, wrinkly
fruit they sell as a baking ingredient and snack.
“We couldn’t have gotten the crop picked without them,” said grower
John Pabojian.
But Pabojian has stopped hiring from among the migrants who arrive
each season. Instead of the 100 workers he once took on for the
monthlong process, he now has six year-round workers and a machine
that finishes the harvest in half the time.
The transition many of the state’s 5,500 raisin growers are making is
considered the most significant innovation in the raisin harvest
since the industry was established in 1873. It’s also happening
faster than anyone expected. Last fall, the amount of raisin acreage
picked by machine increased by more than 30 percent.
Harvests of most crops raised in California are already mechanized,
from beans to nuts and some citrus. And experts predict that machines
will soon pick more of the fruits and vegetables now routinely picked
by hand.
By eliminating so many jobs, the raisin industry’s mechanization is
dramatically changing the overall job market.
“For a very traditional industry that always has been in the lead of
fighting for hand laborers, it’s revolutionary,” said Martin of UC
Davis.
Raisin harvesting machines were developed in the 1950s, but growers
resisted them until economics forced the issue. They had argued that
only humans were capable of the painstaking work of cutting grape
clusters from vines, laying them on the ground in paper trays to dry,
turning them once, rolling them and, once they’ve become raisins,
collecting them.
Raisin growers, like those in the sugar and tomato industries,
invested much political capital to convince lawmakers they needed a
guest worker program to ensure an adequate supply of cheap labor.
And now that President Bush is promising one will be enacted, they
are not backing off.
“We’ve got to have a guest worker program,” said Manuel Cu×ha Jr.,
president of the Nisei Farmers League. The work force is rife with
fraudulent documents, he said. With tightened homeland security laws
and stricter enforcement, “it’ll be all over” if the fields are
raided.
U.S. immigration agents, however, routinely have refrained from
pursuing undocumented workers in California’s agricultural valleys.
Last summer, the Border Patrol closed its Fresno County office.
Nevertheless, Cu×ha said, legalization would assure growers an
adequate supply of stable, skilled laborers required for
mechanization and, at the same time, offer workers the opportunity to
move on to other, better-paying jobs.
For workers, mechanization and the drop in labor demand last season
hit without warning.
“I’ve been coming here for 25 years. Back then it was the place to
find work,” said longtime field hand Simon Martnez of La Paz, in Baja
California Sur. “This year has been the most difficult ever because
there’s been more people and a lot less jobs.
“I have to come back next year. My family is counting on it. I have
10 children, and I also help support my parents,” he said.
It’s too early to know how the permanent job cuts will affect the
flow of migrants from Mexico.
“The assumption is they’ll go someplace else to where there are
jobs,” said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center.
Labor issues are not driving the transition to mechanization.
Globalization is. Producers in Chile and Turkey are sending cheaper
raisins into an already saturated U.S. market. As a result, growers
in Fresno County are being forced to cut costs.
“The cause has been the basic economics of the industry,” said Bert
Mason, an agricultural economist at Fresno State University. “And
because of that we’ve seen a rapid change in attitude toward
mechanization.”
Competition has forced daunting decisions on California’s raisin
farmers, most of whom are Armenian or Japanese immigrants or
descendants of immigrants. Many are in their 60s and 70s.
While they once were able to make a decent living on less than 50
acres, foreign competition and four straight years of poor crops and
low prices have made such operations big money losers.
Some growers have put their grapes into table wine. Others are
shutting down. In the past two years, the amount of acreage devoted
to raisins shrunk to 200,000 acres from 250,000. The remaining
farmers have little choice but to mechanize.
“I’m going to switch over,” Garvin Lane said. “You’ve got to convert
or get out.”
Easing the transition has been the development of harvesting
machines, new grape varieties and planting systems. Professional
harvesters, with their own equipment and crews, have materialized.
Although methods vary, all allow the fruit to dry on the vine, rather
than on trays laid out on the ground. Machines fitted with big
brushes then advance along the rows, gently knocking the raisins into
bins. Because the fruit never touches the ground, the quality is
higher.
“It’s a huge challenge to learn how to do it,” Mason of Fresno State
said.
The shift is expensive.
A machine typically costs about $150,000. Even if growers hire a
professional harvester, the expense of preparing for mechanization –
planting vines, trellising and installing subsurface drip irrigation
– can run initial costs to about $4,500 per acre, or $2,500 more per
acre than conventional planting.
But yields more than double, boosting returns quickly enough to repay
the investment.
The biggest saving is in labor costs. Field hands are paid by the
tray, averaging 15 to 17 cents each, with workers picking an average
of 300 trays a day. Machines can cut that expenditure by 80 percent.
“Everybody was looking for ways to survive and cut costs, and that’s
the way they found to cut costs,” said grower Sohan Samran. “Even
though we’re mechanized, labor still is our biggest expense.”