YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

July 31, 2005

Chicken Little assertions won't solve farm-labor issue

The following guest commentary is by Jeff Johnson, organizing and research director for the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO, and Erik Nicholson, regional director for the United Farm Workers of America.

"One day Chicken Little was walking in the woods when - kerplunk - an acorn fell on her head. Oh my goodness! said Chicken Little. The sky is falling I must go and tell the king."

As the story goes Chicken Little joined by Henny Penny and others who believed her assertion, rush off to tell the king.

Yakima Valley grower John Verbrugge, has appeared in television commercials making Chicken Little assertions that there is a farm labor shortage and that state government is an obstacle to achieving enough labor. These commercials are a joint venture of Valley Fruit Orchards and Global Horizons Manpower Inc., a Los Angeles based labor-contracting corporation.

Playing Henny Penny to their Chicken Little, grower and state Sen. Jim Honeyford takes this assertion and concludes that without enough "legal" workers to pick, some crops will not make it to market and then "prices will skyrocket so that most of us can't afford to eat and won't be able to find domestically grown food -."

The problem with Chicken Little is that when assertion masquerades as fact, it masks what is really happening.

Global Horizons, despite 14 years of experience importing "guest workers" from other countries under the so-called H2A program, was found last year by Washington state to have repeatedly violated basic employment laws, misrepresented the terms of employment, made illegal deductions from workers' pay (including state income tax deductions), owe Thai and local workers over $200,000 in unpaid wages and fees, housed workers in substandard and unsafe housing, underpaid workers compensation premiums, and refused to accept the majority of local workers referred to them and instead imported hundreds of workers from Thailand to work for Valley Fruit Orchards and Green Acres Farm.

At the same time, the U.S. Department of Labor has assessed this company over $300,000 in back wages and penalties for its H2A activities in Hawaii, and has moved to disqualify Global from participating in the H2A program nationwide.

Thai interpreters gave reports of some guest workers in Washington state crowded into rooms with no drinking water, no washing facilities, no cooking facilities, and where workers routinely had to sleep on the floors. Workers also reported that they received less than the pay that they were promised, less than the 60 hours of work a week they had been promised when they were recruited in Thailand, and that they feared they would be unable to pay off the $6,000 to $8,000 fees they owed for getting these jobs. This is a heck of a way to treat guests.

According to farm worker advocates, there has been no general labor shortage in the Valley this year, and in fact there were scarce jobs at the beginning of the season because growers were anticipating drought conditions. Further, any grower willing to pay decent wages and treat their workers fairly will not go wanting for help. But any grower or labor contractor that treats workers like the Thai workers were last year will have great difficulty finding enough qualified labor. Workers, be they foreign guest workers or local workers, do not go to work to be abused.

Agricultural workers living in this country deserve far better. We have a critical need for significant immigration reform to facilitate those farm workers who are already living and working in this country, putting food on our tables, to gain legal status. We are working together with agricultural employers to win passage of the bipartisan AgJobs bill in Congress to address this need.

We need to work together on solutions not perpetuate Chicken Little assertions. All farm workers, both local and guests, deserve fair wages, decent housing, and the right to work legally in this country.