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E-mail StoryThe onion harvest: Workers chase jobs throughout state
| Thursday, Jul 3 2008 11:57 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, Jul 3 2008 2:00 PM
The click of scissors rose above the onion field like a chorus of metal crickets.
Photos:
Jesus Lopez, a worker with 10 years experience cutting onions, works a Grimmway Farms organic field near Mettler early Saturday morning. Lopez sharpens his English shears once a hour and bags an average of 160 sacks of onions in eight hours work.
A burlap bag of organic onions is ready for pickup in a Grimmway Farms field near Mettler early Saturday morning.
Susana Arce dumps a bucket of organic onions into a burlap bag in a Grimmway Farms field.
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About 160 workers clipped roots and stalks off fat, fragrant bulbs southeast of Mettler last week, first dropping the white globes into plastic buckets and then pouring them into burlap sacks. Last year, 70,900 tons of onions were harvested this way — one 75-pound bag at a time — in Kern County.
It’s a harvest that, along with other ripening crops, swells Kern’s farm workforce by thousands each summer. This crew was gathering organic onions on Grimmway Enterprises Inc. land. Beneath a hazy afternoon sky, workers spoke of an irregular living, moving from vegetable fields to fruit orchards, chasing seasonal jobs through California and beyond.
“The work is sacred,” Bakersfield resident Mario Sanchez Martinez, 51, said in Spanish, translated by United Farm Workers organizer Juana Carbajal. When neither onions nor oranges are ready to pick, Martinez said, he collects cans to survive.
For nearly a decade, Martinez has picked oranges, cherries, onions, apricots and grapes. He’s bounced between Bakersfield and other farm hot spots: Quincy, Fresno, Tulare, Washington.
“Tomorrow we’ll go to another place,” Martinez said.
He planned to next follow Maui Harvesting, the El Centro-based labor contractor that was running the work site, to onion fields outside Lancaster.
“When we go to Lancaster, we sleep in the cars,” Martinez said.
A few rows over, out-of-town workers said they were doing the same thing.
“Two days a week, we rent a hotel,” 18-year-old Reyna Carranza said. The rest of the time, the high school junior from San Luis, Ariz., sleeps in the family car with her father and sister.
She wants to be a nurse. But, for now, summer means helping her parents in the field — one of a handful of women in a physically exhausting job.
HUMAN TOUCH
The annual farmworker migration, which starts to ramp up around this time each year, has been part of local farming for as long as Matthew Park, executive director of the Kern County Farm Bureau, can remember.
In an era of mechanization, Kern’s grapes, onions and oranges still need manual labor to reach market, Park said.
“Every onion is different,” Park said. “It still takes the human eye and the human touch to pick those things.”
In stores, onions average $1.99 for a three-pound bag, according to a weekly report issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Farmworker pay varies depending on the job. The Mettler area workers were earning $1.50 for each 75-pound sack, according to Maui Harvesting supervisor Teresa Castillo. Sometimes growers pay as little as 80 cents per sack, she said.
Benjamin Hernandez, 38, said the work pays enough to send about $300 home each month to his wife and two sons, who live in the Mexican state of Veracruz.
The money allows his children to go to school, he said. Hernandez left Mexico 10 years ago for Florida, where he picked Vidalia onions. He speaks to his family by phone once a week, but years pass between visits.
“It’s hard in Mexico,” said Hernandez, who farmed there in his father’s corn field. “We were poor.”
Dressed in a red plaid shirt and spotless cowboy hat, Hernandez still has the confident look of someone who might farm his own land.
He’ll work Lancaster’s fields next, he said, car pooling from Lamont each morning at 4 a.m., making the 85-mile drive and returning at dusk. Hernandez estimates he’ll make about $100 a day, and spend $80 a week on gas.
The constant commuting can add up, UFW organizer Armando Elenes said.
As can other expenses.
Several workers said they bought the scissors they used to trim onions. Paying for those tools is a labor violation, Elenes said.
It might seem like a minor infraction, but a pair of shears can be a serious investment for workers who may be making minimum wage, he said.
“The clippers are basically your job,” Elenes said. “If you don’t have your clippers, you don’t have a job.”
$4 BILLION INDUSTRY
Last year Kern agricultural commodities set a record with a gross production value topping $4 billion.
And nearly 24,000 more people were employed in Kern agriculture in July 2007 than had been in March, according to the state Employment Development Department.
Nationwide, 77 percent of hired farmworkers were foreign-born in the most recent National Agricultural Workers Survey research report by the U.S. Department of Labor. More than half lacked authorization to work in the United States.
Growers want “some sort of immigration legislation that would let these people stay and work and possibly become citizens,” Park said.
Finding enough people to do hot, back-breaking labor, Park said, is always challenging for farmers.
“I don’t see a lot of Americans out there doing that work,” he said.
NECESSITY
The workers in Grimmway’s field showed documentation proving they can legally work in the United States, Castillo said.
“Everybody’s showed their I.D.,” she said.
But several conceded they had entered the country illegally.
“Why lie?” asked 30-year-old Pedro Suastegui, who immigrated from Mexico.
“I wish I could go (back) tomorrow, but I can’t,” Suastegui said. He supports a wife and two young daughters, Dulce Maria and Yahari, with what he earns in the fields.
Asked why he came, Suastegui’s answer was concise: “Necessity.”
Slim and fast at his work, Suastegui hesitated to speculate on what the future might hold for his children.
“I have wishes,” he demurred. “But I don’t know.”
Pressed again, he offered a dream far removed from his reality in the dirt furrows.
“I wish one of them could be a doctor,” he said.