Apr 7, 2007

Farm Labor Crisis Has Hidden Dimensions

When countries are ill-governed or divided into strident factions, their citizens often vote with their feet and leave.

While the United States was forged in a melting pot made up of these dissatisfied ethnicities, and while globalization is fostering the movement of people, there is no doubt the world would be a better place if people would stay home. If the world were a better place, people would stay home.

When we see a country like Mexico that is exporting its poor citizens to other nations so they can find work and a better life, it is a sure bet the country has a systemic infection that is driving its people away.

We’ve always known that. Mexico is basically a nation composed of dispossessed Native American Indians subjugated by Spain and overlaid with a veneer of Spanish language, religion and culture. Most of the land is still owned by the families of the people who stole it originally, and land reform has been an issue in Mexico for 200 years. The country remains controlled by a class of feudal aristocrats who live off land rent and have failed as an entrepreneurial class to provide capital, enterprise and jobs.

Fruit and vegetable producers ought to know that as they lobby Congress for immigration reform and a guest worker program that allows Mexican labor to form the backbone of their farm operations.

Right now, growers see disaster ahead if our government proceeds with the current effort to close down the border to illegal immigration without putting a guest worker program in place. They have built their farm operations on a work force that hand-harvests the quality fruits and vegetables the citizens of this country have come to expect – and the growers believe they must provide that or lose their market.

It need not have been that way, nor does it have to be the template for the future. There are competing models and competing interests.

One model is mechanization. Back in the 1970s, U.S. government policy was to push for the mechanization of fruit and vegetable harvests. Social critics, including the farm workers’ organizations in California and their allies, lobbied hard to close down that effort and to organize farm workers to obtain higher wages.

The mechanization research was virtually closed down, but the influx of cheap labor undermined the effort to obtain better wages. The farm workers’ union itself has flip-flopped, one day wanting higher wages, the next wanting solidarity with its ethnic brothers from Mexico.

But no doubt, a good image for the future would be mechanical harvest, with sorting of product into fresh and for-processing fractions. Obviously, that works better for some crops than others, but we have mechanized tart cherries and cucumbers and have models for others. Growers would probably like having machines better than having to manage cheap labor, but the problem is mechanization is long-term and the crops need to be harvested now.

It should also be realized that not all farmers want cheap labor. Farmers who hire cheap labor want that, but farmers who operate small farms using family labor don’t want the value of their labor reduced. They don’t want their families to have to work for the level of wages paid to illegal immigrants.

For the most part, this has divided growers into two factions: Those who use direct marketing and all kinds of value-adding devices, like organic certification, to recover full value for their labor, and those who work the wholesale market and operate large acreages. So far, the two have co-existed because customers have supported both the Wal-Mart and the boutique mart shopping styles.

For the short term, the idea of a guest worker program authorized by Congress is probably the best one. For one thing, most Mexicans love their native land and would not leave it if they could find work there. Creating a program that allows them to cross the border legally and safely, to work here and live there, offers a compromise that the United States cannot make with many other countries.

If the Europeans could have cut a similar deal with the Muslims of North Africa, there would be a lot less turmoil there than currently exists. Remember, it was the Germans in the 1970s who, faced with labor shortages, brought in Turkish workers that, 35 years later, have failed to integrate into the culture.

Now, of course, the immigration issue is complicated by American fears about infiltration by terrorists. That further argues for a well-organized guest worker program that controls the movement but doesn’t stifle the basic need of poor people to find work their country isn’t organized to provide.