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February 11, 2008
Fight is personal for Farm Workers' director
BY CHRISTINA HOAG
When Evelia Menjivar was a child growing up in Puerto Rico, her mother
would come home from her job picking tomatoes smelling of the pesticide
sprayed in the field, her skin bright red and raw. It was a memory that
would haunt Menjivar.
''They sprayed the pesticide right next to the workers. They would get
it all over them,'' Menjivar recalls. 'I would say to her `Why don't you
complain?' She did complain, but she was ignored. This was in the
mountains of Puerto Rico. They didn't even know how to read or write.''
So when a job arose with the United Farm Workers nine years ago,
Menjivar jumped at it. ''It was meant to be. I wanted to work and fight
for these workers, especially the undocumented ones,'' she says.
Menjivar is now the Florida regional director and national vice
president of the UFW, the California-based organization founded by
activist César Chávez in the 1960s.
From her base in Quincy in northern Florida, she travels the Sunshine
State tracking down agricultural workers, trying to organize them and
monitoring their labor conditions.
Sadly, Menjivar says that many of the same problems her mother
encountered in the tomato fields all those years ago still exist.
Q:
What is the biggest challenge migrant workers are facing today?
A:
We're still working with this immigration issue. If the immigration laws
stay the same, we're going to have a lack of workers to pick fruit. The
growers are trying to obey the law by not employing undocumented
workers, but a lot of the documented ones are moving to construction,
which pays better. So some fruit is going to just sit there.
We're in favor of legalization of farm workers, a comprehensive
immigration reform for people who have been here for X amount of time
working in agriculture. We don't need temporary visas to bring people
in. We want to fix the problem from the inside. We have people to do the
job, but they are undocumented. They still have to work. They have to
eat.
More than half the migrant workers are from Mexico. They're also from
Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. Florida has the second-largest
agricultural industry; California has the first. We need a lot of
migrant workers.
Q:
How are labor conditions on farms in general in Florida?
A:
We're still dealing with some unscrupulous growers. They won't provide
proper bathrooms, water, shelter. They abuse women. We still have some
of those.
The biggest complaint is that the growers terminate the workers, then
don't want to pay them. They say something's missing, or any excuse not
to pay them. We investigate the complaints and try to resolve them. If
you're dealing with a grower, it's easier. But if it's a labor
contractor, they just move on.
Without a union contract, the only thing we're able to do is find out
what's going on and go to the appropriate authorities. We work with a
lot of individual cases.
Q:
How many farms in Florida work with unionized
labor?
A:
Only one, Quincy Farms, the largest mushroom farm in the Southeast. We
have had a contract with them since 1999.
It's extremely hard to organize farm workers. If the grower finds out
that a worker is organizing a union, they immediately retaliate and fire
the worker. And it's hard because the workforce changes, especially in
citrus because they work only during the harvest season. In nurseries
and ornamental plant farms, they're year-round. Workers also get scared,
especially if they're undocumented.
It's really up to the workers themselves. They have to decide if they
really want it, things have to be really bad. There are usually four or
five workers who want to do it.
Q:
How do you get access
to
farm workers when most live on the farms?
A:
It's not easy at all. If they live on company property, we can't go
there. We go to supermarkets and stores where they go. We have to find
out where they are. At Quincy Farms, we do have a contract and we're
able to go in there.
Q:
What's on your current
agenda?
A:
Driver's licenses, that's a heavy issue. We need some kind of permit for
people to drive to work, to school, to take their kids to the doctor. We
have a lot of people out there driving without insurance. It's
dangerous.
Even though these people are undocumented, they have good records. They
have demonstrated that they're good citizens and have lived here for a
long time. I'll be working on this issue.
I have heard of some pesticide use. I have to investigate that. There's
also a couple anti-immigration bills being introduced in Tallahassee
that I have to look into. |