Since Cesar Chavez’s passing in 1993, Arturo Rodriguez has been the president of United Farm Workers of America, the nation’s largest farmworker union. During his time at the helm of the organization, Rodriguez has negotiated provisions for agricultural workers into an immigration reform bill passed under the Obama administration, won union contracts with major growers and pushed California legislation, making it the first state to afford farmworkers the right to overtime pay.
The Texas native has also played an important role in passing California heat-stress and contract negotiation legislation, making working conditions safer for farmworkers and bargaining with their employers easier.
Street Roots spoke with Rodriguez in advance of his visit to Hood River on July 25, where he gave a keynote speech at CASA of Oregon’s annual Farmworker Housing Conference. Portions of this interview appeared in a print-edition Street Roots article about the challenges facing farmworkers in America, and in Oregon. (Aug. 3, 2018 “The hands that feed us.”)
Emily Green: This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which granted overtime pay to all workers – except for agricultural workers, who arguably, work some of the most back-breaking jobs in America. Two years ago California became the first and only state to grant overtime pay to ALL workers. What effect has this change had on the farming industry?
Arturo Rodriguez: We had to do two things: Delay the implementation until 2019, and secondly, we had to scale it so that California agriculture would be able to cope with the increase, as they were coping with the state’s minimum wage increases at the time.
Lots of different employers and industries have reached out to us, saying that it’s going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, and they’re not sure how they’re going to do it yet, and haven’t figured things out. But throughout the years, always, inevitably, anytime we try to change and improve the economic situation for farmworkers here in this state – or any state, whether it’s Washington, Oregon, because we have contracts in those states as well – the first thing that we hear is that “This is going to impact negatively on us, it’s going to destroy us, we’re not going to be able to survive, we can’t afford to pay these kind of rates,” and on and on and on. And agriculture, at least in the state of California, has continued to thrive throughout the years. I think it’s a $47 billion industry now. Somehow they figure out one way or another.
E.G.: Why is it so important that agricultural workers be included in the Fair Labor Standards Act?
A.R.: Agricultural families, and there are all kinds of statistics on this, are one of the lowest paid groups of workers here in the United States, and they continue to work hard, but in most cases, it’s seasonal work, so they don’t get a chance to have a wage coming in all year round. Simultaneously, they’ve got to sustain themselves – we know at least here in California, and I’m sure there are locations there in Oregon as well, and many of these agricultural communities, like Oxnard, Calif., and Salinas, Calif., and up in the wine grape country, in Napa and Sonoma, and all these places, the cost of living there is incredible. Agricultural families have an extremely difficult time being able to cope with all the economic necessities that they’re faced with as a result of the fact that they’re very low-paid jobs. At the same time, not everybody can work in agriculture. It’s highly skilled; it requires somebody that knows how to do it that can tolerate the working conditions that you have to work in. You can’t just walk out there and know how to cut the wine grapes, or how to harvest the crops and so forth, because you’ll end up destroying the plant and not being able to harvest quality fruit, and certainly not being able to do it at the rate that the employer requires in order to meet the quotas that they have to meet for the retailers.
We need to elevate the economic situation for farmworkers in this country, or else we’re not going to have agricultural workers. Right now, we hear throughout the state of California and the state of Washington the same thing, and I would imagine in Oregon it’s the same thing too because we’re experiencing it where we have our contract companies out at the dairies and at other places, that there definitely is not the number of workers that used to be available to harvest the crops and there’s no surplus anymore, and employers are really having a difficult time finding confident and willing people that can go out and do the work. We see constantly that now, finally, the wages and some of the benefits are beginning to go up because growers are experiencing this real shortage of labor.
E.G.: How much of that shortage would you attribute to the economic status versus current immigration policies?
A.R.: It’s a combination. Where growers before, they always had surplus labor, so wages and working conditions and benefits and all that stayed very low because they always felt that they could say, “Well, if you don’t want the job, there’s somebody else waiting to get this job,” and that was truly the case.
Today, with what’s happened with immigration, yeah – there’s much fewer people that are coming across the border. When the worker gets done with the season, so they can survive, they used to go back to Mexico in order to be able to not have double rents and double costs of living. Well, they can’t do that anymore, so wherever they go, they’re probably not coming back. Immigration has had a huge impact. There is no doubt about it. Secondly, the whole economic situation – you can’t survive on minimum wage in most of these agricultural communities. If a worker can go work in construction and start at $15 an hour versus $11 an hour wage rate, and after a short period of time they start to get benefits and those types of things, that’s extremely beneficial and helpful to that worker so obviously they’re going to go over there and work in the construction industry, or do something else where they feel like they can make more money and they can sustain their family as a result of that.
E.G.: If farmworkers are getting paid fairly and their working conditions are improved, won’t that make food too expensive for many low-income families?
A.R.: There’s been lots of studies done on that throughout the years. I remember when head lettuce used to be a commodity that was very important and critical to agriculture, now everything has changed with salads and things of that nature, but they did constant studies in regards to the increases of workers’ wages. They said if the workers’ wages doubled, that would impact on the head of lettuce less than 15 cents a head or something like that – it was ridiculous, the impact that it was going to have; same thing with berries and so forth, because the big thing is volume. Are you familiar with what a tray of strawberries is?
E.G.: Like a cardboard flat?
A.G.: Yeah, it holds a dozen of the little pints that you buy in the store, and the good workers will – the ones that are really top-notch – they’re picking 125 to 150 of those boxes a day. So when you have that kind of volume. Just think about it. They’re picking 150 boxes, that little pint of strawberries normally sells for what in your area?
E.G.: If they’re in season, about $2.99 or $3.99 a pint.
A.R.: That’s what I was thinking, about $3. So $3 times 12 equals $36 on one flat that that worker picks. Then let’s just say they pick 100 flats. Begin to multiply and look at what the grower and the retailer make – and the retailer takes a lot of it. There is no doubt that what the consumer pays for it, that is nothing in comparison to what that worker was paid for it that day.
E.G.: Yeah, 100 flats would be $3,600.
A.R.: Exactly, so the economics are definitely in favor of the retailer. So I don’t think that’s going to be the issue, really if you got down to it, lots of things could be done in order to make it economically more favorable for the worker.
E.G.: I recently sat down with Ramon Ramirez, the former director of PCUN…
A.R.: Ramon and I are very close.
E.G.: I thought you might know each other. He’s looking at some consumer driven ways of pressuring the industry to start treating workers more fairly and he had talked about some different labeling efforts that were going forth – and I just wanted to ask you the same question I asked him. How, as a consumer, can I make sure that I’m buying products from farms where workers are paid fairly and treated humanely?
A.R.: Our organization has been for years now, looking for different ways of how we can improve the standard of living, of working, the economic conditions of farmworkers. Obviously collective bargaining is a model that we’ve utilized throughout the years, and it’s been successful, but we also know that it’s extremely laborious, and it requires a lot of resources and time and energy and so forth, to be able to get collective bargaining agreements with employers. So we’ve begun to search for other ways to ensure that consumers do have a choice as to what they’re going to purchase. One of those has been a program that we initiated here in the last 10 years is called the Equitable Food Initiative (EFI), and it is a certification program. This is completely separate from the United Farm Workers. The work that they do is extremely important because they have a board comprised of retailers, growers, farmworker organizations, environmentalists and so forth, and they went through a long time to come up with this set of standards. We’re working very closely right now with Costco and their vendors in order that their vendors look at this as a possibility. Then they label the products that those growers that are part of the program actually harvest at their farms. And it’s working. It’s working and as time goes on, we want to expand it and continue to grow that kind of program.
We think that is another model that can be utilized in order to be able to demonstrate to consumers that yes, you can get affordable agricultural products at a particular retailer that gives you a good indication that these have been harvested in a humane way and that workers are being taken care of and they’re being provided with conditions that are much more satisfactory than what they would find in other places.
E.G.: You’ve been at the helm of United Farm Workers since the early 1990s, taking over for Cesar Chavez upon his passing. How would you say the issues facing farmworkers have changed since 1993, and how has your approach to organizing farmworkers differed from that of your predecessor?
A.R.: Immigration has become much more challenging today than it was back in 1993. We’ve fought hard since 2000 to get immigration reform, and we’ve failed every single time because of the fact that the Republican administration has been unwilling to make this a priority and unwilling to deal with it in their own caucuses, in an effective way, to be able to get something that would work.
In 2013, we sat down with Sen. Dianne Feinstein from California, and brought the agricultural industry together, along with us. There were 11 presidents of different grower associations throughout the United States, and we hammered out an agreement that was incorporated into the immigration reform bill that was negotiated among the senators during that particular time, and the House refused to take a vote. That has made it extremely difficult for workers to come in, for families to participate, but more importantly, people are just totally living in fear right now.
They’re worried about ICE raids, they’re worried about the way that the immigration systems are treating them and dealing with them, and people are just extremely scared. Children are scared that their parents won’t return home. Parents are scared that they’re going to get picked up and they won’t be able to do anything with their children – on and on and on.
That has made it a real priority for us, but extremely difficult for farmworkers, and extremely difficult for farmworkers to want to think about even wanting to try to do anything that might put them in a position where the grower takes some type of reprisal against them – like organizing or trying to improve the wages or working conditions or getting medical benefits or anything of that nature.
That has complicated everything for the work that we do for farmworkers and their families and the communities they live in and that type of thing. That has made it extremely difficult. And then the hostility toward immigrants as a whole. The reality is that probably 95 percent, if not more, of the workers today in agriculture are immigrants. That wasn’t the case back in 1993, and the reality also is that they don’t have access to legal status. And that number just continues to grow, and it becomes more and more difficult for farmworkers without legal status to be able to survive here.
I would think those are two of the key things, and we’re living in a very, very hostile with a hostile administration right now and they have done nothing to help out agriculture in any particular way. The negotiations that are taking place with NAFTA, the impact that’s going to have, the other trade deals that have been discussed. The first thing this administration did, that impacted agricultural players, was the situation with Cuba. That was already a big agricultural export area. Then the trade wars right now with China, that’s impacting on agriculture, Canada and Mexico – that’s complicated things a lot at this point in time. So I would say those are some of the major issues.
We’ve had to be much more creative in terms of trying to figure out different ways of doing things. The organizing work – it’s always important to reach out to workers that want to improve their lives and are willing to take that risk, but you gotta be straight forward with them. It’s a huge risk. They could very well find themselves with an ICE raid or something else that they didn’t anticipate. I think the biggest thing, because of the situation and environment that we’re in right now, we are trying to look for alternative ways of collective bargaining with employers to try and figure out what other kinds of organizations or programs do we design and develop that can be helpful in improving the lives of farmworkers.
For example, the UFW Foundation. We have a woman, Diana Tellefson Torres, who is the executive director. Now it’s in its 11th year, and it’s grown to be a powerhouse in terms of being able to provide immigrants with the benefits that they need with access to immigration services by competent people who are not going to rip them off in any particular way. We are looking at how can we utilize legislation, how can we use politics, how can we use the immigration services program we have through the UFW Foundation, how can we develop programs like the Equitable Food Initiative that certifies products, and how we can utilize these things to change and improve the lives of farmworkers.
E.G.: Here in Oregon, a safe jobs coalition that focuses working conditions of immigrant workers has recently formed. One of Safe Jobs Oregon’s main focuses is heat stress. In 2015, California enacted laws addressing this issue with much support from the United Farm Workers. Have the reforms in California made real a difference for workers out in the fields?
A.R.: Yes, definitely, it has made a difference for workers. In fact, when I drive up Highway 99, which is one of our major corridors through the agricultural areas, it goes through the San Joaquin Valley all the way from Bakersfield up to Sacramento, which is about 300 miles, and the same thing on Highway 5 – when you go by now, often times I will see, because farmworkers are working near the freeways, you’ll see they’ve built trailers that have a table and benches and they’re covered, so it’s more than just a tarp that’s out there in the fields, with chairs for folks to sit around. It’s really neat to see that.
It’s changed in the sense that farmworkers know the protections they need in the event that they should feel exhausted or faint, or anything of that particular nature.
And the number of deaths – this has been an extremely hot summer already, and we have had 100-degree temperatures all last week in the San Joaquin Valley and the Coachella Valley, this week it will be the same thing, and thank goodness we have not heard any stories or any information about any heat deaths occurring. Whereas before, with a summer like this, we’d already probably already experienced, one, two, three different deaths.
We’ve worked closely with the state to increase the number of inspections and increase the response time, and the training that needs to go on for supervisors and foremen and ranch managers at different companies.
We’ve done a lot to educate the workforce in regards to this. One of our sister organizations, the Cesar Chavez Foundation, has it as part of their organization’s Spanish-speaking radio station called Radio Campesina. In fact, I was on it earlier this morning talking about heat stress. It has stations in Arizona, throughout California and Washington, and those are three major agriculture areas where the heat is hitting hard in the last few weeks.
The other tangible thing that’s happened, growers, after all the pressure we put on them, and lawsuits and everything else, they are starting workers earlier in the morning and letting them off earlier in the day so that they won’t be exposed to the heat of the afternoon heat which is the hottest.
And tomorrow, we are joining a coalition of groups that we’ve helped spearhead to help introduce national heat stress standards with Congresswoman Judy Chu (D-Calif.), who is the author of the original legislation that we proposed here in California. She will be the principal author in the House – the person who will work with us to help move things on a national scale, because we’re investigating a heat death in the state of Georgia right now that took place in the last week and a half, and we’re investigating some other ones that transpired in some other different areas, so we feel like this is something that we want to do not only here in California and Washington state, but also to do across the country.
E.G.: Do you have any advice for Oregonians who are pushing for further heat-stress regulations? What can they learn from the work that California has done?
A.R.: We went to the victims themselves, the families of the victims, and inevitably, after the mourning took place, their immediate response was, “We want to make sure that this does not continue to occur with other workers, and that families don’t have to go through the situation we are right now.”
There was one in particular, a young Oaxacan woman, Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, and that one I will never forget. This transpired about 10 years ago. She was a young, 17-year-old woman, who was pregnant. She had just been here a few days, and she went to work with her uncle at a California wine grape company, and it was extremely hot during that particular period of time, and she was working really fast and hard because the foreperson was pushing her hard to get more boxes. She had to meet her quota, otherwise she wouldn’t keep the job. She needed the job because she was staying here to help her mom and her siblings to sustain themselves in Oaxaca, and so she felt that pressure. In the afternoon, she collapsed, and the foreman took no action, except drug her underneath a tree, and then at the end of the day they put her in a van that had been out sitting in the sun all day long – in the back of the van – and the van had no air conditioning, so by the time they got her to a clinic, that afternoon, her body temperature was already 108 degrees and she passed away (two days later). I never knew her uncle beforehand, and he was not connected with the union in any particular way, but I called him and spoke to him, and shared our condolences. But asked him, “Are you willing to fight in order to ensure that this does not continue to happen?” And his immediate response was that, “I do not want her death to be in vain. I want something to happen as a result of Maria Isabel’s death.” And so we worked extremely closely with that family to bring attention to the issue itself. The family was participating, and we did marches and we did press conferences and other types of demonstrations, and meetings with legislators. The Vasquez Jimenez family were very much engaged in all that work.
So I would very much encourage folks to work with families of heat victims and to get them to engage in the process, because they can tell the story better than anybody else, and share the emotions that people go through – and the loss that they suffered – as a result of people just not respecting and caring about the men and the women that harvest our fruits and vegetables.
E.G.: Oregon recently adopted rules that require farmworkers and their families to either shelter in place in a sealed building or leave the 100-foot area around where pesticides are being sprayed. While worker advocates say this is a step in the right direction, many also say it does not go far enough – and that as long as workers are working with toxic chemicals, there will be exposure and negative impacts to their health. What are your thoughts on balancing the role of pesticides in farming with worker health?
A.R.: It’s a tough issue in the sense that agriculture has changed. Maybe not as much in Oregon, but certainly here in California, I mean it’s factory farms to a large degree. These big operations, they don’t follow the practices that used to be in terms of changing crops, rotating crops, and all those different kinds of things. The culture, the industry and the way that they grow agricultural products today requires the use of pesticides.
We took a stand early on when we first began the work that we’re doing, the movement that we’re a part of, in the 1960s, in regards to the issue of pesticides. We have fought for the stoppage of the use of any cancer and birth defect-causing chemicals. In our first contracts that we got in 1970, in the fresh table grape industry here in California, we were able to ban the use of carcinogens that were used at that particular time. It was DDT, and DDE and dieldrin.
Throughout our history, we have always fought to make sure that we know what kind of chemicals are being utilized on the crops. We fought for that within our contracts, and we set up a workers’ safety committees so that workers would be knowledgeable about the types of chemicals that they were being exposed to, and then we fought hard for legislation on reentry periods, depending on the toxicity of a particular chemical. It would be a longer reentry period before workers walked back into those fields.
The very last major fast that Cesar Chavez did before he passed away was in 1988, and that was a 36-day fast, and that was around the whole issue of pesticides, particularly how pesticides impact children, because what we were finding is that here in the San Joaquin Valley, which is the richest agricultural region in the United States, there were these cancer clusters developing in towns and communities like McFarland Calif., and Earlimart and Fowler and so forth. They really couldn’t figure out what was causing these cancer clusters, and our belief all along was all these communities were surrounded by agriculture. We felt it had to be related to the agricultural products that were being grown there, that these pesticides had penetrated the soil and gone into water supplies. Because children can’t be exposed to as high of levels of pesticides as adults can, they were the ones impacted. That was the focus of Cesar’s last fast, was to curtail the use of cancer and birth-defect-causing chemicals that were being used on, particularly table grapes, and other agricultural products grown in the San Joaquin Valley region.
We’ve had a long history on this particular issue, and we’ve fought it hard. And minimally, we believe that there is no use for cancer- and birth defect-causing chemicals to be utilized in agriculture, regardless of how much it’s needed. Some other way has to be figured out. Because inevitably, the folks that are going to suffer the most are going to be the ones that are out there harvesting the crops and unfortunately, their families get affected as well because they don’t change their clothing there in the fields. They come home, and that clothing has to be washed, and so it’s mixed up with everyone else’s and their children get exposed to the chemicals, inevitably, in some particular way at some particular level.
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.