Harvest of shame - grape picking pays less than it did 40 years ago, before United Farm Workers

[Liberal_in_LA]

In the Coachella Valley, hope withers on the vine

Picking grapes in the Coachella Valley is still dirty and dangerous. In the region where the United Farm Workers' first table grape contract was signed, the pay is less than it was 40 years ago.\

By Mike Anton
June 23, 2009

Reporting from Mecca, Calif. -- An hour before dawn in the camp of last resort. Dozens of men and a few women are asleep in the beds of pickup trucks, in the back seats of cars or on flattened cardboard boxes in the dirt behind the Toro Loco market. The air is cool, but the terrible sun is close at hand.

Martin Zavala is wrapped in a blanket, his head resting on a Scooby-Doo pillow, a pack of Marlboros under his neck. Thieves prowl at night and will snatch what is not secured. Drunks and meth-addled tweakers tease the dozing grape pickers, poking them with knives or guns. Zavala, his brother and four friends positioned their vehicles to form a protective perimeter -- modern-day covered wagons on a wild frontier.

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Zavala's life is scripted by the harvests he follows: winter in Arizona picking lettuce. Spring in the Coachella Valley picking table grapes. Summer in the Central Valley picking more grapes. Home to Mexicali, where he has a wife and four children.

Repeat. Then repeat again.

"I'm poor. I'm uneducated. I don't expect this to ever change," Zavala says in Spanish. "But I'm doing it so my children may not have to."

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The work is hard, dirty and dangerous. It begins at dawn when the air is sweet and moist and stretches until midafternoon, when temperatures can top 120 degrees and the sun feels like a steel-toed boot to the head.

The pay is $8 to $9 an hour, less than it was 40 years ago when adjusted for inflation.

"Nothing changes," says Arturo Rodriguez, an attorney in the Coachella office of California Rural Legal Assistance. "It's the same harvest of shame."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-grapes23-2009jun23,0,6892712.story?track=rss

[Horse with no Name]

1. When I was a kid in Arizona

in the 70's, we were able to get jobs chopping cotton and that paid $10/hour. We were around 10-12 years old and work was 5 am to noon.
They hired mostly migrant farm families but were willing to let a few local kids join in.
I doubt that job exists today and I certainly know that the wages have not been adjusted for inflation and would even go so far to say that the wages are probably less than minimum these days.:(

[AllieB]

2. The food industry and agribusiness is shameful in its abuse of workers.

If you get a chance to see 'Food Inc' there is a segment that addresses how Smithfield Foods hires illegal immigrants, and then deports them to intimidate the remaining workers from organizing.

[Liberal_in_LA]

3. Havent' seen Food Inc yet. Looking forward to it.

[david13]

4. I think this is true of all actual wages or almost all after adjustment

for inflation. Not just grape pickers.
dc