When Food Workers Rebel | Strawberry Plant Workers in California | Part 4 in a Series
Moderator’s Note: Our continuing coverage of struggles by workers in
the food chain turns to the work by our esteemed colleague, David Bacon, who
has been documenting the working and living conditions of migrant farm workers
for several decades now. In this photo-essay, Bacon focuses on strawberry seedling
farm workers in California’s Tule Lake region. These workers do not produce
strawberries but rather strawberry plants – the seedlings bound for other farms
directly involved in berry production.
There
is more than bitter irony to the fact that this Tule Valley strawberry seedling
operation is located on the site of a former World War II internment camp where
Japanese Americans were imprisoned during the 1940s. We can take this as a case
of inadvertent symbolism or accept the fact that the conditions facing farm
workers today are as oppressive as the travails faced by the Japanese American
internees of WW II.
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| A worker picks flowers and fruits off a strawberry plant. All photos by David Bacon. |
Yesterday’s
Internment Camp – Today’s Labor Camp
David Bacon | Truthout
Report | September 18, 2013
In
Modoc County, farm workers do a job few people have ever seen. For eight hours,
they lie on padded platforms on each side of an elaborate metal apparatus,
suspended just inches above rows of strawberry plants. As a tractor slowly
pulls them through the field, the workers pick off the flowers and budding
fruit - not to harvest them - but to keep the plants from producing more.
The
plants they’re tending in this unique operation are seedlings. Eventually they’ll
be uprooted, the dirt will be knocked off their roots, and they’ll be sent to
cavernous warehouses. There, other workers will trim the roots to an even
length. Then the plants will be packed into containers and shipped to the
strawberry growers of Watsonville, California, or Mount Vernon, Washington, or
out of the country entirely.
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| Workers' homes on land that was formerly Tule Lake Internment Camp. |
Today
big commercial strawberry growers often don’t grow their plants from seeds. It
takes too long. In addition, growers formerly killed the nematodes that infect
the roots of young strawberry plants by covering fields in plastic sheets, then
injecting methyl bromide or methyl iodide into the soil. Those two extremely
poisonous chemicals are now being banned in state after state, because they
contribute to depleting the ozone layer, which protects life on this planet.
So
the seedlings are grown separately. Farm workers migrate from towns in more
populated areas of California into this county, at the far northern end of the
state, to lie on the platforms and pinch off the flowers. “It’s a good six
months of work,” explains Elpidio Gonzalez, one of the workers. “I can go back
to Stockton with enough money for the rest of the year, especially if I can
find a little work in the winter pruning grapes. The only disadvantage is that
there’s really no place to live here for migrants. I share a trailer with a
bunch of others, and we were lucky to find it.”
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| Older workers, with experience and skill, are needed for this job. |
Gonzalez
and his coworkers on the machine are Mexican immigrants, but most of them have
been living in the US for years. This industry, however, uses guest workers as
well. The county’s largest grower, Sierra Cascade, with 1,000 acres planted in
strawberry rootstock, brings laborers to Modoc directly from Mexico, using the
H2A contract labor program. In 2006, Sierra Cascade was sued by those workers,
represented by California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), over bad housing and
living conditions.
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| A tractor, carrying workers on a platform, moves through the field. |
Under
the H2A program, growers have to provide housing and give the workers a
contract that specifies the months of work they’ll get. Sierra Cascade began by
putting them into a warehouse on the county fairgrounds. There, life was grim. “During
the first two weeks, on many occasions, we would have a cup of coffee for
breakfast, a small portion of greasy tough meat with rice for lunch, and
cereal, coffee and bread with jelly for dinner,” Ricardo Valle Daniel recalled.
After the workers got in touch with the CRLA lawyers, the food got better. But
in the warehouse, couples were housed in a cavernous room where many men and
women were mixed together, despite company promises of family quarters.
These
workers had been hired under nine-week contracts to trim the root of the plants
after they’d been unearthed. The contracts specified they’d have to meet
production standards requiring them to process more than 1,000 plants per hour
- one every three and a half seconds. When some workers couldn’t meet the
quotas, even when they worked through their meal breaks, Sierra Cascade fired
them and put them on buses back to Mexico. Although the legal case eventually
improved conditions somewhat, a state court judge ruled that the production
quotas were legal. The workers had no way to keep the company from firing (and
deporting) them for not working at that rapid rate. Today Sierra Cascade
continues to bring in H2A workers for its root-trimming operation, and the
quota is still in place.
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| Each wing of the machine holds platforms for four workers |
Housing
the workers in the fairgrounds was more than ironic. The Tule Lake grounds is
home to a small museum devoted to the Tule Lake Internment Camp, where 18,000
Japanese-Americans, most US citizens, were imprisoned during World War II. The
museum preserves one of the hundreds of barracks that originally housed the
internees. Visitors can peek through plexiglas windows and see the austere
furnishings – military-style metal bed frames, unadorned table and chairs, a
plain chest of drawers.
The
warehouse where the H2A workers were housed in 2006 was not one of the original
barracks, and the fairgrounds itself isn’t the site of the internment camp. That
is in a huge empty plain, not far from the modern borders of Tule Lake itself,
in the tiny hamlet of Newell, seven miles south.
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| Farm workers on platforms in front of the tractor. |
Almost
nothing is left of the original camp. After the war, most of Tule Lake itself
was drained. The “reclaimed” land was auctioned off as farm homesteads to World
War II veterans. The internment camp was closed and residents were dispersed – none
wanted to remain in an area that held such bitter memories. The barracks were
cut in half, and each family that was awarded a homestead was given a half as a
home starter.
But
a few of the barracks were left in place in Newell. They’ve become housing for
low-income families, many of them farm workers. Over the years, they’ve been
painted in brighter colors, perhaps so they won’t immediately remind anyone of
their origins. But the poverty of the families who live in them can’t be as
easily disguised.
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| Houses like this one on the old internment camp, were originally barracks for internees. |
After
the war, a few growers in Tule Lake brought in braceros, under the contract guest worker program that was ended in
1964. That bracero program is the direct ancestor of today’s H2A guest worker
scheme. In the museum, there’s no mention where those braceros lived or how
many there were. Maybe some lived in the old transplanted barracks, too.
Eventually
Modoc County built a little housing for migrant workers - a group of cabins
called the Newell Migrant Center. They were built on the ground where the
barracks of the old interment center were. This year, no one was living in the
camp. The gates were locked, and it was closed. Migrants such as Gonzalez had
to find trailers or motel rooms on their own in Tule Lake, Dorris and Macdoel,
the farm worker towns of this valley.
The
empty cabins of the Migrant Center are a strange sight – empty homes surrounded
by a tall fence, topped by barbed wire. The old internment camp barracks also
must have been surrounded by barbed wire fences - perhaps even in the same
locations. Many internees were also farm laborers, not just before they were
imprisoned but even during their incarceration, when they grew the food
consumed by the camp’s residents. Internee farm workers even organized a strike
one year over abusive conditions, which turned into a general strike of camp
residents. Camp managers brought in other internees to break that strike,
housing them in another small internment camp a few miles away. Then the
government brought Italian and German prisoners of war to Tule Lake,
contracting them out to local growers for farm labor. And then, after the war
ended, growers brought in the braceros.
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| Behind the barbed-wire fence - the vacant cabins of the Newell Migrant Center |
Today,
Congress is debating bills that would make the H2A program look like small
potatoes - expanding the number of recruited workers many times over, possibly
even reaching the 500,000 worker peak of the bracero program in the mid-1950s.
The bill recently passed by the Senate, and other bills in the House, would
even lower the legally mandated wage that H2A workers receive. These bills
would eliminate the current housing guarantee, as miserable as that sometimes
is. These new guest workers would get instead a rent “subsidy,” putting them
into competition with traditional migrants like Gonzalez for the small trailers
of Macdoel or Tule Lake. Maybe the county would open and expand the Newell
migrant camp. Sierra Cascade undoubtedly would like that idea.
It’s
hard to travel through Tule Lake without thinking about the way people have
been dehumanized here because of their race, national origin and class. History
here is written into the soil beneath the old and new barracks, and under the
strawberry plants themselves. But Tule Lake isn’t some special case, and the
worst abuses of today take place far from here.
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| Residents paint bright colors on their converted barracks homes. |
When
war hysteria took hold with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, people from
the Middle East and South Asia were thrown into prison with as little regard
for their rights as there was for the rights of the Japanese half a century
earlier. Now there are camps surrounded by barbed wire for hundreds of
thousands of deportees, who can languish there for months and even years. The
hysteria that demonizes Mexicans who come across the border to work, especially
those that come on their own without papers, often forces them into brutal
living conditions that are worse than those of the braceros. And Congress’
answer is replicating and expanding contract labor programs, just as the
growers did after World War II or as Sierra Cascade does today. In Tule Lake
you can see what that reality looks like.
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| Workers lie only a few inches above the plants they're trimming. |
But
the internment camp gates did finally open, and people were freed. The old
bracero program did end - the year after the March on Washington we just
celebrated. Today you can see Mexican families coming out of the church across
from the fairgrounds and hear young people call out to each other in the soft
evening. If there’s a future for Tule Lake, they are it. Tule Lake could be a
good place for them to live, whether they’re here all year around or just come
for a few months work.
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