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Migrant workers struggle to survive, some with family states away
By
CORY FROLIK
WILLARD,OHIO -
Clad in T-shirts with superheroes emblazoned on the fronts, a pair of
children, no older than 6, play in the dirt lots beneath the windows of
their one-story housing unit near massive fields once full of
vegetables.
One child tosses a plastic toy to the other, who fiddles with it for a
few moments before tossing it back.
Back and forth it goes. The toy appears as a colorful blur to the boys.
The dust the kids play in is littered with empty beer bottles and food
wrappers.
Behind them, stained bed sheets hang from the windows of the small
housing unit.
The inside of the home is dark, except for a faint glow emanating from
the screen of a small television set, playing a cartoon with the volume
muted.
Hanging sheets serve as dividers, creating private sleeping spaces.
Two entire families call the cramped, two-bedroom living quarters home.
In the front, a group of young men are huddled around a grill, which
spews black smoke.
The trio hold beer bottles and swap stories and jokes in Spanish.
A man emerges from a nearby unit to remove from a clothesline a sheet
and towel, which he crumples into a ball, tucks beneath his arm and
carries back inside his home.
As he closes his screen door, a dog barks from somewhere inside the
darkness.
Chickens roam, pecking at tiny dots of food scattered on the ground.
The scene could be happening in some remote corner of
It's Sunday afternoon in rural Willard, and residents of the migrant
camp on
Nickel-and-dimed living quarters
Several migrant farm workers lounge indoors on their beds or sit on
hard-backed dinner chairs with the lights off.
Some listen to music. Others watch movies. Others just hang out around
card tables, smoking generic cigarettes.
Some are out playing soccer at a field provided by Wiers Farm.
At agricultural camps, lounge space is limited.
The living quarters at farm work camps are notoriously tiny and cramped.
"It's a tough life because they have to live in little rooms and they
don't have their own bedrooms," said Elena Glyda, Sandusky County Job
Store bilingual customer service representative. "Two whole families
live in two-bedroom homes."
And that's just the families who migrate together.
Single men will often sleep five to eight in one room, Glyda said. In
many cases, the more people per room, the less each tenant has to pay to
stay there.
State law requires agricultural camps to meet health and safety
requirements.
The walls must be weather resistant, and there must be adequate
facilities for clothes to dry.
The Ohio Department of Health and the Ohio Department of Job and Family
Services are charged with inspecting the camps.
Although state officials claim great strides have been made to improve
agricultural labor camps, Mark Heller said the progress is overstated.
He said while times have changed, living conditions have not.
Heller, managing attorney for the migrant farm worker and immigration
program with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, said his organization
regularly files complaints against and sometimes even sues farm
operations for failing to keep their camps up to code.
"We see a lot of problems there because a lot of the units are really
old," Heller said. "It's all pretty primitive -- especially considering
how hard people have to work all day."
Across the state, migrant farm workers are forced to live in camps that
lack hot water, fail to properly empty toilet facilities and let trash
dumpsters overflow with garbage that attracts disease-spreading pests.
"Flies, mosquitoes, bugs and things like that," Heller said.
According to the 2008 annual report of the Ohio Migrant Agricultural
Ombudsman, which Lucio helped prepare,
There were 15 fewer camps in
Part of the problem is employers do not have the incentive they once did
to improve living facilities.
About half of the licensed camps in the state at some point received
Ohio Department of Development grant money to upgrade the camps or
expand them.
The program, which provided $250,000 annually, was discontinued in 2003.
The ombudsman report recommends the state reintroduce the grant program
to ensure employers are able to attract farm workers in the numbers they
need to handle their harvests.
The report states this would help maintain
The report also recommends the state provide gas vouchers to migrant
farm workers to help them with travel costs.
As any migrant farm worker can attest, getting to
The long haul
The ombudsman report estimates many farm workers travel 1,400 to 1,500
miles from their homes in
Anecdotes from local workers bear this estimate out.
But Glyda said as many as 75 percent of farm workers in this region
originally hail from
Some workers say they spent a few nights in the cold and unforgiving
desert to make it onto
Wiers Farm crew leader Sevy Hernandez was born in
It wasn't hard to find here.
In
The same kind of work in
Some migrant workers end up making much more than minimum wage, based on
their level of output.
"Everybody here can make more than $100 per day -- the good workers can
make $150-$180 per day," said Hernandez, who's 39, wears a Jim Beam
baseball cap and radiates friendliness. "I make pretty good money here."
The pay may be much higher than the prevailing wages in
According to the American Farm Bureau, only 15 million Americans -- less
than 5 percent of the total population -- have jobs that pay less than
farm work.
The piggy banks back home
Making money on the farm takes working hard, but not spending the money
also takes discipline.
Some costs are unavoidable.
Farm workers must eat, so they buy groceries from local stores and pick
up lunch and dinner from food trucks that park near the fields.
They also pay for rent, utilities, cell phone bills and beer.
As the hundreds of Bud Light caps littered in the camps show, many farm
workers enjoy their one full day off each week swigging booze like
tailgaters, as if trying to drink away the lingering harshness of their
lives.
Almost all pay for cell phones to call home and keep in touch with their
loved ones, who they left behind to chase the harvest.
Some farm workers like owning nice things and spend their money on new
threads, electronic toys and new vehicles.
Some trek into downtown Willard to visit a Hispanic business called La
Azteca, which sells Mexican groceries, hats, soccer jerseys, work boots
and Spanish DVDs and CDs.
But a great many farm workers keep expenses minimal.
They do this so they can send as much money as possible to their
families in
Although many families migrate together from state to state -- following
the harvest from
Many of the men working in the fields at Wiers Farm, Buurma Farm and the
others have not seen their families in years, yet they still send home
the bulk of their paychecks.
Some will send home all but $20, which they use to scrape by.
Glyda said she spoke with a migrant farm worker in
His exchanges with his children and wife are limited to phone
conversations and the occasional letter.
Despite this, he still sends home most of his paycheck.
"He calls his family and he wants to see them, but he's afraid," Glyda
said. "He said, 'Once I go, I can't come back."
He fears if he visits them, he will not be allowed back into the
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