Striking for pay, pride

By CURTIS KRUEGER

© St. Petersburg Times, published December 19, 1999

IMMOKALEE -- It's half an hour before dawn in Immokalee, a town where you can hear roosters crowing a block off Main Street.

Gregorio Silvereo Ordas, a 50-year-old Mexican farm worker, stands in the littered parking lot of the Pantry Shelf, where a dozen converted school buses wait in the dark. He is nodding his head.

Yes, he says, he supports the farm workers who have gone on strike to demand more pay and more respect. Yes, he says, he is planning to join a busload of workers who were preparing to travel to Tallahassee to seek help from Gov. Jeb Bush. He wears a T-shirt that says Del Pueblo Para El Pueblo -- from the people, for the people -- one of the slogans of the striking workers.

But his family in Mexico is hungry. So he boards one of the school buses that will take him to a tomato field to work another day.

This is the challenge for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the group organizing a strike in this breadbasket town that helps Florida produce 90 percent of the winter tomatoes grown in the United States.

The group, which says it has more than 1,000 members, wants to force growers here to pay more than the roughly 45-cent per-bucket fee the farm workers earn. It says 75 cents would be fair. More than that, it wants to bring growers to the table to open an ongoing dialogue about working conditions.

But to continue the strike, which began Monday, the group must ask its members to stop picking tomatoes and look for other work. If they don't find it, they must survive on $7 per day from the coalition, plus a hearty lunch the group serves at its small headquarters across the parking lot from where the busloads gather.

Success for the strikers will be difficult. In spite of the work action, big diesel trucks loaded with tomatoes still are rumbling out of the farm country, about 140 miles southeast of Tampa Bay area. Strikers insist they are making headway, but the growers are ignoring them, at least on the surface.

On Friday, a contingent of about 50 workers went to Tallahassee to seek the help of the governor's office.

Ray Gilmer, spokesman for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, said the coalition behind the strike is "a self-proclaimed group of worker representatives, and we don't believe that it's in the best interest of the employees or the farmers to engage in this type of a confrontational dialogue."

The growing season that began this month will continue through January, and workers need to eat.

"It's very difficult to strike for six weeks," said Lucas Benitez, one of the founders of the coalition, "but not impossible."

Work hasn't stopped

Tomato pickers can race like track stars.

On a healthy, well-managed crew, workers run between rows of tomato plants while balancing 30-pound buckets of tomatoes, shot-put style, on their shoulders. In one fluid motion, they heave the buckets high to a worker standing on a truck who casts them over.

Green spheres arc across the sky and land in the back of a semitrailer truck. The workers return to the tomato rows, again and again, until dust coats their shirts and sweat bastes their skin.

For others, bending over hurts too much. To save his back, a man plants his knees in the dirt and picks that way. But he loses time and pennies. When rains come, the fields stay empty and no one gets paid.

Workers earn about 45 cents or so for each bucket they pick, sometimes a nickel more or less. That can work out to a range of $5.15 per hour to $9 per hour or more.

The per-bushel rate has stayed in the 40-cent range for about 20 years, although the industry has developed plants that yield more tomatoes and make the picking go faster, said Fritz Roka, an agricultural economist at the University of Florida's Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences in Immokalee.

The workers say that, considering inflation, the relatively stable per-bucket rate is grossly unfair. Last year, some growers granted a 5-cent-a-bucket raise, but there is no sign they are willing to grant another this year.

Benitez said it only makes sense for the growers to meet with the workers and talk about improvement. "We want a sincere, honest dialogue that will give us respect. Not machines or peons."

Instead, they say, the growers treat them as inferiors. There is a story making the rounds here, about the farmer who explained why he doesn't listen to his fieldworkers about their conditions. "The tractor does not tell the farmer how to run the farm," he says.

The story may well be mythical, but it illustrates how the workers feel about their bosses.

Hipolito Diaz Hernandez, 34, left his family in Mexico and says he has spent two years working in the United States, first in North Carolina, then here.

He is honoring the strike. How long can he last? Maybe a week. But for now, he wears a headband that says No soy tractor: I am not a tractor.

Benitez said he sees evidence that the strike is having an effect. He said the school buses are emptier than normal, by hundreds of workers. He says he has heard some growers raised their rates from 45 to 50 cents per bucket. And he says dozens of workers have found temporary work other than tomato picking, such as working the citrus or cucumber fields, or boarding day labor buses that come in from Naples.

To keep up the fight, the coalition is seeking support from groups such as Religious Leaders Concerned, with members in the greater Fort Myers area, and the National Farm Worker Ministry, which helped workers on mushroom farms in North Florida. Benitez said their support is critical.

But it's also clear the work hasn't stopped. In one field alone one day last week, seven huge tractor-semitrailers rumbled through the green fields, filling the air with the smell of diesel smoke, and filling buckets with thousands of tomatoes.

Growers point to Mexico

Gilmer of the fruit and vegetable association freely admits that picking tomatoes is hard, low-paying work.

"It's not intended to be a living wage if you understand that by its nature, it's called seasonal work. The work is only available when the harvest is ongoing."

Nonetheless, he says, by law the growers must pay at least minimum wage to the workers, regardless of how much they pick.

"The farming community recognizes that it is not a wage that allows people to live year-round on," Gilmore said.

So why not raise it?

Gilmer can answer in one word: Mexico.

The same country that supplies many farm workers to Immokalee also sends tons of tomatoes to the U.S. market. Since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, more than half the winter tomatoes sold in the United States come from Mexico, he said.

"If you raise the wages to the point of putting the (U.S.) farms out of business, then what's the benefit to the workers, much less the rest of the community?"

Roka, an assistant professor at the University of Florida's Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences, said it's an "absolute reality" that rising growers' costs -- by increasing farm workers' pay -- makes U.S. tomatoes more expensive, compared with the Mexican variety.

Roka said Florida's tomato industry has a difficult task -- growers need to find ways to produce tomatoes at a lower cost. And, at the same time, the industry must find a way to improve workers' well-being, such as finding better-quality, less expensive housing than is available in Immokalee now. He thinks simply raising the per-bucket fee "is not a very sophisticated answer." Benitez still believes increasing the per-bucket rate makes sense, and not just for farm workers. That would ensure experienced workers return to the field, which would boost efficiency.

"When a new worker begins to work, he kills the plant and bruises a lot of fruit. An experienced worker picks more and does a better job because he knows his work," he said.

He would like to bring this reasoning to the growers, by meeting together.

What if they don't come?

"La lucha no termina," he said. The fight does not end.

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