RALEIGH NEWS & OBSERVER

August 29, 2005

Guest workers note progress

Labor contract has brought changes

By KARIN RIVES, Staff Writer

Nearly a year after the N.C. Growers Association signed a historic union contract with Mexican guest workers, many of those workers say conditions at farms are improving.

Victor Martinez Calderon, 33, came to North Carolina from the coastal city of Veracruz for the third year in a row this spring to pick tobacco at a farm in Randleman. He was impressed to find a new mobile home with air conditioning and other amenities awaiting him. This year, he shares his quarters with only three men; last year they were seven.

"There's less pressure on the job now," Calderon said in Spanish, echoing the sentiments of other farmworkers who met Sunday at a work assembly organized by the union.

About 400 farm employees represented by the AFL-CIO's Farm Labor Organizing Committee traveled to Raleigh to attend the first meeting of its kind held by the Ohio-based labor union. Shuttled in private cars by the union's extensive network of volunteers, the workers crowded into an auditorium at Southeast Raleigh High School to vote on a list of lingering concerns.

Among them were:

* A request to negotiate Mexican Social Security benefits for men who spend six or nine months a year working in North Carolina.

* The need for union-sponsored life insurance to protect families of workers who die on the job.

* A request to the union to put pressure on the U.S. consulate in Mexico to speed up visa applications.

* An appeal to change the system in which workers must pay up front for their visa and travel costs, leaving many in debt.

Under the union contract, dues-paying union members have preference to jobs in North Carolina. That has helped boost union membership for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, which says that nearly 5,000 of the 8,000 workers now covered by the contract are members.

Signed last September, the union contract ended a five-year boycott of Mount Olive Pickle Co. over conditions for guest workers at the Wayne County-based company's farms. Almost all workers in the contract are recruited in Mexico and offered temporary visas to spend six or nine months on North Carolina farms.

Leticia Zavala, FLOC's North Carolina organizing director, said many workers are taking advantage of the union's grievance process. In less than a year, the union has received and addressed more than 1,000 official worker complaints over unsafe working conditions, hiring practices, housing and other problems, she said.

Adrián Briones, 28, is among those who say they feel more confident speaking up.

This spring, Briones approached his boss at a Clinton tobacco farm to leave a car in the migrant camp in case somebody gets sick. He also suggested that the farm reschedule certain duties to keep workers out of the sun during the hottest part of the day.

His boss agreed, on both counts.

"We don't have the black list anymore," Briones said, referring to a list the N.C. Growers Association allegedly maintained to keep certain workers from being invited back under the temporary H-2A visa program.

Some workers claimed in years past that they landed on the list after complaining about employer abuse, injuries and other problems.

Now, employers show more respect, agreed Castulo Benavides, 43, who works at a Christmas tree farm in Watauga County. When he recently needed to see a doctor, his boss offered to drive him.

"That wouldn't have happened before," he said.

Like many guest workers, Benavides left a wife and young children behind for a chance to earn money he could never dream of in Mexico. The workers covered by the FLOC contract typically earn $8.25 to $8.50 an hour, many times what they earn back home.

A construction worker, Benavides says he hopes to return for two or three more years, until he has earned enough money to build a home on land he has bought with North Carolina wages.

With 8,000 workers under contract, the union is only beginning its work in North Carolina, said Baldemar Velasquez, its Toledo, Ohio-based president. "The problem is, at all the non-union farms, there's nobody there to hold their feet to the fire. We are now soliciting memberships at those other farms."