Farm-labor plan divides workers' advocates

The United Farm Workers and activists disagree about whether it will improve conditions in the field.

By Garance Burke, Associated Press

SANGER, CALIF. - In the 1960s, farm labor leader Cesar Chavez rallied field hands to speak out against a guest worker program that recruited millions of Mexicans to pick crops at low wages.

Today, farmworker advocates are throwing their weight behind a proposal in the current Senate immigration bill that would bring thousands of laborers to the country's most productive fields but offer them virtually no chance of putting down roots in the United States.

The United Farm Workers say it is their best shot at improving working conditions in fields nationwide, and especially in California, where 92 percent of workers are foreign-born.

Activists complain that immigrant farmworkers are sometimes underpaid, not paid at all, overworked, exposed to pesticides, given poor housing or subject to other abuses.

Some members of the last temporary-worker push -- the Bracero Program, which operated from 1942 to 1964 -- worry that the plan could repeat past indignities.

"If they're going to have braceros again, well, they need protection," said 82-year-old Agustin Oropeza from Zamora, Mexico, who picked oranges, lemons, lettuce and tomatoes in California in the 1940s and '50s. "They can't just leave them to sleep in the middle of the fields and drink from puddles, like they did with us."

The proposed AgJobs program brokered between growers and the UFW over the past decade would open the way to legal status for those who worked in U.S. agriculture for at least 150 days over a two-year period ending Dec. 31, 2006. The program would be capped at 1.5 million.

After that, new farm laborers would be brought to the U.S. under an existing guest worker program, but would be able to stay for only 10 months at a time. They would not automatically qualify for citizenship and would have to wait an estimated eight years just to get in line.

The AFL-CIO and the Laborers' union oppose the broader immigration bill, arguing that workers here on a temporary basis are more vulnerable to labor violations. The AFL-CIO contends some pickers will stay in this country illegally rather than go home when their time is up -- something that happened under the Bracero Program, too.

That program brought some 4.6 million Mexicans to the U.S. to ease the labor shortages during World War II.

Chavez spoke out frequently against the program in the 1960s, which he believed exploited Mexican workers and kept down wages for domestic farmworkers. At the time, about half of the farm labor consisted of U.S. citizens. Now the bulk of the force is foreign-born.