Farmworkers

Three decades ago, Dean Florez landed the perfect summer job in this sun-baked, Kern County farm town: filling burlap sacks with 50 pounds of potatoes, then sewing them shut with a steel needle and three loops of twine. It may not sound glamorous, but it was better than his previous job hauling irrigation pipe around rose and vegetable fields for 10 and 12 hours a day in triple-digit heat. Plus, the teenage Florez got to work under a roof, eat lunch in a refrigerated rail car and put in for overtime on long days.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — A 29-year-old farmworker was convicted Tuesday of the murder of South African white supremacist leader Eugene TerreBlanche, but his teenage companion was acquitted in the killing, which had sparked fears of racial violence. Chris Mahlangu was found guilty of killing TerreBlanche, his employer and longtime advocate of a separate state for white Afrikaners. Patrick Ndlovu, 18, who was 15 and present at the slaying, was found guilty of housebreaking with intent to steal.

In the last days of 2008, President George W. Bush's administration gave a parting gift to agribusiness: The Labor Department rescinded certain hiring regulations and lowered minimum wages for temporary foreign workers, undoing labor protections that had been in place since 1988. For two decades, growers had maintained that those requirements, attached to H-2A visas for guest workers, had hindered their ability to keep a steady, reliable flow of workers in their fields and orchards. By contrast, labor unions argued that the provisions, passed during the Reagan administration, provided protections against unfair competition for American workers while safeguarding a foreign population subject to exploitation.

Wearing jeans, green sneakers, a hipster straw bowler and a Buddhist symbol around his neck, the new poet laureate of California opened his weekly poetry workshop at UC Riverside with stretching and breathing exercises. "Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does," said Juan Felipe Herrera, 63. "People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe. " Herrera then launched into poems by Federico García Lorca and other 20th century masters and had students recite their own compositions for group critiques.

Saying he didn't want to damage California's agricultural economy, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday vetoed a first-in-the-nation bill that would have given farmworkers the same rights to overtime pay enjoyed by all other hourly workers in California. Applying the eight-hour day to agriculture would be burdensome to business and reverse longstanding labor practices, Schwarzenegger wrote in a veto message. As recently as 1999, state lawmakers approved a bill that specifically exempted farmworkers from the eight-hour day, he said, "recognizing that agricultural work is different from other industries: it is seasonal, subject to unpredictability of Mother Nature and requires the harvesting of perishable goods."

Farmworkers are the only hourly employees in the state who are not paid overtime after eight hours of labor in a standard 40-hour workweek, a special, discriminatory status that has endured for decades. Now California has an opportunity to right this wrong. State Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter) has successfully shepherded a bill through the Legislature that would give those who do the backbreaking work of picking fruits, vegetables and nuts equal status with other workers. Opposition to the legislation, predictably, comes primarily from the farm lobby, which maintains that the current rule granting overtime only after 10 hours in one day or 60 hours in a week is all the industry can afford.

It's not really news when a bill fails to become a law in Sacramento. In this age of partisan gridlock, plenty of good ideas are never enacted. Still, one bill that made it to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk last week, only to be killed by his veto, is worth looking at for what it tells us about how hard it is to clean out even antiquated moral rot, so long as powerful interests profit from it. The bill, written by San Joaquin Valley Democratic...

Reporting from Sacramento -- State lawmakers acted Thursday to make it easier for California farmworkers to unionize. The legislation would give farmworkers the option of unionizing without the usual petition, followed by a secret-ballot election. Instead they could submit cards signed by a majority of workers to state labor officials. The measure was approved on a 24-14 party-line vote by the state Senate and sent to the Assembly on Cesar Chavez Day, the state holiday recognizing the co-founder of the United Farm Workers.

Re "UFW: A Broken Contract," four-part series, Jan. 11 I was disturbed by this series. I am the daughter of farmworkers from the San Joaquin Valley. I started my career working in the fields on my summer vacations and winter breaks. I know about the injustices that farmworkers faced. I also attended marches and the meetings that the United Farm Workers had with my parents. I experienced the unity, representations we needed and the courage and pride that Cesar Chavez brought to farm laborers.

Shelley Davis, 56, who as deputy director of the advocacy group Farmworker Justice fought for the safety of workers, children and the environment, died of breast cancer Dec. 12 at Georgetown University Medical Center. A lawyer who lived in Silver Spring, Md., Davis represented migrant and seasonal farmworkers and their families on issues from health and safety to wages. Nationally known for her skill in immigration, environmental, health and safety, agricultural and housing law, Davis expanded the usual array of demands made on public-interest lawyers.

The trial of two black farmworkers charged with killing South African white supremacist leader Eugene TerreBlanche opened Monday, underscoring the racial tensions that persist 17 years after democratic election laid apartheid to rest. As the trial began after months of delays, the two defendants pleaded not guilty. TerreBlanche, 69, was found beaten to death on his farm last year. Prosecutor George Baloyi told the court the pair found TerreBlanche asleep on his bed and beat him to death with a steel pipe in a dispute over wages.

Here's a Hollywood pitch for you: Leading U.S. neurosurgeon started life as a struggling Mexican boy who made it from illegal-immigrant California farmworker to Harvard Med. Not buying it? You should. Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa was that kid and is that man -- associate prof, surgeon and head of the brain tumor stem cell lab at Johns Hopkins. His work puts him, passionately, on the cutting-edge of brain cancer research, and his life wedges him, reluctantly, into the immigration quarrel.

Cesar E. Chavez's California retreat has been added to the National Register of Historic Places. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the designation of the site in the Tehachapi Mountains where the labor leader lived and led the farmworkers movement the last 22 years of his life. Salazar, who called Chavez "one of the heroes of the 20th century," made the announcement at a gathering of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute in Washington on Wednesday night. The 187-acre Nuestra Senora Reina de La Paz in Keene, southeast of Bakersfield, served as headquarters of the United Farm Workers union and Chavez's residence from 1971 to 1993.

Reporting from Buttonwillow, Calif. -- At noon, when the morning breeze had faded and the temperature hit 95, a union representative walked into the sweltering field to check on dozens of farmworkers harvesting peppers. A middle-aged worker with a T-shirt placed under his cap to absorb sweat approached, whispering: "No hay sombra" (there is no shade). Only after the union man appeared did two foremen pull canopies out of their trucks and call the workers in for a break.

Two months after an acrimonious late-night standoff on a related issue, Gov. Jerry Brown and farmworker advocates have struck a deal to give state regulators new powers that could help agriculture workers unionize. The measure, introduced in the Legislature on Friday, would allow the state's Agriculture Labor Relations Board to certify a union if it finds that a grower has acted illegally to affect the outcome of a labor election. The legislation would also accelerate the mediation process for workers in disputes with their employers.

A toxic waste dump near a San Joaquin Valley community plagued by birth defects has agreed to pay $400,000 in fines and spend $600,000 on laboratory upgrades needed to properly manage hazardous materials at the facility, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday. The penalties were part of a consent decree that capped an 18-month investigation by the EPA and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control into the Chemical Waste Management landfill about 3 1/2 miles southwest of Kettleman City, a community of 1,500 mostly low-income Latino farmworkers.

What do you get when you mix farmworkers, Stephen Colbert, a stunt website and millions of dollars? A spotlight on those who toil in the sun. On Thursday, Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis announced more than $78 million in grants awarded to provide employment training and support services to migrant and seasonal farmworkers nationwide. California is the biggest recipient, with five grants totaling more than $20 million; 44 other states are due to receive at least one grant. The grants will be administered through the National Farmworker Jobs Program, a national organization that supplies job training and employment help for migrant and seasonal farmworkers.

Re "Farmworkers Reap Little as Union Strays From Its Roots," Jan. 8 It is truly tragic to read that the United Farm Workers is prostituting its name for political and economic gain. What does political support of tribal casinos and support of homosexual marriage have to do with the welfare of farmworkers, who still struggle to attain life's basic necessities? As an experienced educator who for many years has taught about the positive contributions of the UFW, it is with great dismay that I must now teach about the dark side of the union.

Gov. Jerry Brown, whose signature more than three decades ago gave agricultural workers the right to unionize by secret ballot, vetoed a bill Tuesday that would have made it easier for farm laborers to organize. The proposal has been the top legislative goal for years for the United Farm Workers, whose founder, Caesar Chavez, had strong ties to Brown. It would have allowed the union to bargain for employees without holding an election -- by simply collecting signatures from a majority of workers on cards saying they wanted representation.

Guatemalan authorities have arrested a man they say is a top leader of the drug gang blamed for last weekend's massacre of 27 farmworkers, President Alvaro Colom said Wednesday. The suspect, Hugo Alvaro Gomez Vasquez, is believed to have taken part in the killings in a northern province known as Peten, Colom said in his daily broadcast from Guatemala City. Colom called Gomez "one of the principal leaders" of the Zetas gang in Guatemala, which has served increasingly as a base for Mexican traffickers skirting a crackdown at home.