GREENSBORO NEWS-RECORD November 6, 2005 UNION GROWS IN THE FIELDS By Marta Hummel
Staff Writer Mario Elias Gervacio doesn’t work on an assembly line or hold a government job. He’s not even a U.S. citizen.
Each spring for the past five years, Gervacio has left his town of Senguio, Michoacán, Mexico, and come north to plant and pull tobacco on a Guilford County farm for almost six months. He rose from simple farmhand to crew leader.
This year, he had an added duty: union treasurer.
For the first time, the welfare of Gervacio and 4,100 fellow “guest” migrant workers is under the auspices of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO.
Gervacio and his brethren are card-carrying union men working in the depths of anti-union America.
While they are here, FLOC’s mission is to ensure that the temporary migrant workers are treated fairly, receive adequate quarters and get appropriate medical care.
For Gervacio, the union is an advocate, a watch dog. At a union meeting this past June, he told a story of being grabbed a few years ago by a man who questioned his immigration status when he was out doing errands.
“ 'I’m going to call the cops on you — how did you get over here,’ ” he recalled the man saying.
“I have confidence that they are working toward fixing these problems,” he said.
It is not that Gervacio and the others expect union representatives to be with them all of the time. But he would like people to know that not all Mexican workers come here illegally, and he hopes the union will publicize that fact.
But for some farmers and the N.C. Growers Association (NCGA), the union remains a nuisance and duplicative of their own mission to foster worker welfare.
“The first full year of NCGA’s relationship with FLOC has been a rocky one although we are optimistic that many of the problems we saw this year will be worked out,” Stan Eury, president of the NCGA, said.
Farmers have not appreciated that union representatives arrive without notice and that some are unfamiliar with housing and other regulations.
“The result is approximately 200 grievances, most of which are frivolous and time-consuming to address,” Eury said.
Robert Lewis and his son Brian, who run a Gibsonville farm, said they’ve had no problems with the union. Still, they’re not sure why it’s needed.
“The program is safe for the worker and grower,” Brian Lewis said, noting that the men are guaranteed hours, worker’s compensation for on-the-job injuries and exemptions from state or federal taxes.
Robert Lewis said it is not in anyone’s best interest if the men are ill.
“We don’t want nothing to happen to them,” he said. “We want them happy and healthy so they can work.” Seeds of a union The union’s role in North Carolina grew from a protracted management-labor dispute. This particular one involved a five-year fight between union organizers and the Mt. Olive Pickle Co.
Union representatives and human rights workers said the Mount Olive, N.C.-based pickle company’s suppliers had been subjecting guest migrant workers to low wages, poor living conditions and intimidation.
North Carolina’s agricultural industry has grown increasingly reliant since 1989 on bringing these workers from Mexico into the United States to do work at low pay that no U.S. citizen is willing to do.
Last year, the union, Mt. Olive and the N.C. Growers Association struck a three-way agreement that lifted a boycott of M t. Olive and allowed the union to represent the guest migrant workers.
Workers were recruited in Mexico by the union. And when the men returned to North Carolina this past spring and summer, part of their processing at the N.C. Growers Association office in Vass was learning about their new union. The men were entitled to become members and pay 2.5 percent of their weekly wages in dues.
Victor Calderon, the member president of the union’s Triad chapter, said he joined because FLOC “is working to legalize our status.”
In fact, many workers at the first union meeting in Winston-Salem for Triad farms seemed less concerned with living conditions than with winning permanent residence in the United States.
On an early September morning before heading for the tobacco fields, Gervacio echoed that wish.
“I want a green card so that I can do something else,” he said.
But even the legal temporary jobs are drying up. Fewer guest workers are getting called up to North Carolina because farmers are growing fewer acres of tobacco.
And some farmers are falling back on illegal immigrants, who they can pay less than the guest workers’ wage of $8.24 an hour.
That means Gervacio, who has worked for Gibsonville farmer Robert Lewis for five years, has little chance of securing his long-term dream. But he says giving up a portion of his wage makes sense for other reasons.
While his living conditions exceed most workers — he and the 10 other men in his crew have washing machines, satellite television and access to a van for errands — he supports the union’s pledge to lobby for social security in Mexico and life insurance from farmers, among other issues. Bridging differences State workers with the N.C. Department of Labor are supposed to inspect the 1,002 farms that received migrant workers this year. But with just four people to do those inspections, the state can’t visit every farm during the growing season, said Regina Luginbuhl, the bureau chief of the Agriculture Safety and Health division.
The task is an important one; the state last year cited 56 of the farms for safety and health violations.
That’s where union officials say they come in. Without their efforts supporting the field workers, they say, farmers would have little reason to provide basic needs .
Union representatives say they play the mediator between workers, the majority of whom only speak Spanish, and the state and the N.C. Growers Association.
Workers can call anyone in the union on their cell phone and find someone who answers in Spanish, including Leticia Zavala, the head of the union in the state. Not everyone is bilingual at the NCGA.
Lisie Montaño was one of two union workers assigned to the Triad for the season. The 24-year old from New York City, a former immigrant organizer, spent about 12 hours a day, six days a week visiting camps, she said. She visited up to four farms a day in a beat-up Honda Civic with a broken air conditioner.
On a day in mid-August that the News & Record spent with Montaño, she was called out to a farm in Stokes County where two workers said they wanted to go to the doctor.
Javier Sauza Cortes and Martin Nava Sebastian, both from Tlaxcala, Mexico, had been feeling nauseous for two weeks since they started pulling tobacco, and for two days they had been vomiting blood, they said. They tried explaining it to the owner of the farm but he did not understand, they said.
They wanted to go back to Mexico. But they wanted to leave with a guarantee.
“I want to come back,” said Cortes.
So did Sebastian, who couldn’t write out a statement saying he was leaving for medical purposes, which would give him the right to return. Montaño wrote it for him. An unintended union Eury, of the growers association, says the union’s work ultimately may be for naught.
Two hundred farmers dropped from the N.C. Growers Association rolls last year. And he expects a steady decline in coming years because of the high price of using the guest worker program compared to illegal workers.
In addition, Eury said, competition from abroad might mean neither farmers nor workers may have a job in coming years.
That could be a union no one wants to be part of.
“The workers and growers,” Eury said, “are really in a similar situation.” |