Immokalee workers get visit, promise of farm safety attention, from U.S. Labor Secretary Solis

By John Lantigua

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

IMMOKALEE — Farmworker leader Tirso Moreno says getting federal investigators to listen to worker complaints about safety or wages in recent years was like planting a tomato in frozen ground.

"You called and called all you ever got was the machine," says Moreno, executive director of the Farmworker Association of Florida.

"You didn't get anywhere."

The Labor Department of Republican President George W. Bush was criticized by labor leaders for constantly favoring the interests of employers over that of their employees.

But Monday Moreno didn't get the machine. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, fulfilling a promise made during the campaign of President Barack Obama, arrived in Immokalee, spent the day touring facilities and listened to complaints face to face.

She told dozens of locals gathered at the Immokalee Technical Center that the Obama administration had already added 250 workplace investigators nationwide and that she was planning other changes in the department.

Solis, a former California Congresswoman of Mexican and Nicaraguan descent, said that she also wanted to work with employers, but that the problems of farmworkers and other low paid laborers were not foreign to her and would get her dedicated attention.

"My father worked in the fields and my mother worked in a factory," she said, speaking in both English and Spanish. "I was the first one in my family to go to college."

In this farm town, where many of the workers are undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans, Solis said it was her job to protect them as well from unfair or unsafe labor practices.

"Federal law provides protection for anyone working in the U.S.," she said.

Lucas Benitez, executive director of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, told her local farm laborers were often afraid to complain about unsafe or unfair labor conditions, including the dangerous misuse of pesticides.

"They fear that if they make a complaint, the boss will fire them," Benitez said. "And even if they do make a complaint the process takes so long the worker will have moved on by the time it's dealt with."

Moreno said that both documented and undocumented workers were seeing instances where employers simply absconded with their pay and no one in government was helping.

"The workers loose wages for the week, two weeks, even a month," he said.

Attorney Greg Schell of the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project in Lake Worth told Solis that growers, and not farm labor crew leaders, need to be held responsible for workplace abuses on their properties and that fines need to be increased in order to end those problems.

Solis took it all in and told the crowd that the days when no one in federal government wanted to listen to them were over.

"Believe me, you will have a friend at the Department of Labor," she said.