Thread: OH: Farm labor demands minimum wage, too

http://www.dispatch.com/news-story.php? ... A1-06.html

PROMISED LEGAL FIGHT
Farm labor demands minimum wage, too
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Alan Johnson
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Angry that farmworkers, many of them Latinos, are excluded from Ohio’s new minimum-wage increase, a labor group yesterday threatened to launch a constitutional legal challenge.

Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland will be in its corner.

Spokesman Keith Dailey said Strickland wants to revisit the minimum-wage issue. Before he took office, Strickland urged Gov. Bob Taft not to sign the law implementing the constitutional amendment passed in November because of what Strickland considers unfair exclusions.

"He felt they undermined the will of people who passed the mini- mum-wage amendment," Dailey said.

The message at a Statehouse rally was pointed.

"We are not beggars, nor social parasites, and we are not asking for a handout, but rather a fair day’s pay for a fair day of work," Baldemar Velasquez, head of the AFL-CIO Farm Labor Organizing Committee, said yesterday.

Velasquez said House Bill 690, approved by the Republican-controlled General Assembly late last year to enact the amendment, continues a "tragic heritage" of discrimination against farmworkers, particularly Latinos.

The union group, along with church leaders and other organizations, will "pursue means to overturn this meanspirited legislation," he said.

An estimated 4,000 to 5,000 farmworkers, most of them in northwestern Ohio, are affected, he said. They earn $4,000 to $8,000 apiece, depending on the length of the growing season.

The voter-approved constitutional issue upped the minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.85 per hour effective Jan. 1. However, the enabling legislation, which kicks in at the end of March, excluded farm, home health-care and amusement-park workers from coverage.

GOP lawmakers said the exclusions mirrored those in the federal wage-and-hour law.

Lupe Williams, who teaches sociology and Spanish in the workplace at Ohio State University, asked bluntly, "Was this legislation passed to discriminate against Latinos? "

Williams said she has visited Ohio migrant-worker camps, including those on chicken megafarms.

"The chickens live cleaner and better than the workers," she said. "I cannot be quiet anymore."

She said Strickland will support the cause of the farmworkers because "he knows how it is to be poor."

Strickland was one of nine children reared in poverty in Appalachian Ohio.

Nazario Mendoza, head of the Immigrant Workers Project in Canton, was a migrant worker from age 11 to 17. He said he and his family traveled from Texas to Illinois, Iowa and other states to pick crops, including corn and asparagus. Some of the other states cover farmworkers under minimum-wage laws.

Excluding Ohio farmworkers from the minimum wage is "a crime, in my eyes," Mendoza said.

Just 10 short days ago Baldemar Velasquez was president of North Carolina's Farm Labor Organizing Committee. Now he's head of the AFL-CIO Farm Labor Organizing Committee.

Haven't these jokers ever heard of the H-2A program? I believe visa holders in NC get at least $9 per hour now, housing, free medical & dental care along with weekly trips to town. Who knows what else.

If farm workers want the minimum wage, they can give up free housing and medical and dental care. Of course if the farmers are going to pay minimum wage with benefits, there are Americans that want the jobs. The illegals can go home if they don't like the conditions in america.