http://www.thetimesherald.com/apps/pbcs ... 60301/1002

Article published Jun 26, 2005
Migrant workers uprooted
Changing agricultural practices mean fewer jobs for farm laborers


By HILLARY WHITCOMB JESSE
Times Herald

Al Broughton remembers the days when dozens of migrant farm workers came to Deckerville.

They shopped at the IGA grocery store where he worked, buying foods the owner stocked only during migrant season, especially for them. Then a teenage Broughton borrowed the owner's station wagon and drove the workers back to the Sanilac County camps where they lived.

That was nearly 40 years ago, in the 1960s and early '70s. Today, Broughton is superintendent of Deckerville schools. He said the number of migrant farm workers who come to the Deckerville area has dropped so much that this year, only two families have come.

That's the story around Sanilac and St. Clair counties, areas that used to draw workers to care for the region's crops.

Migrant workers are few and far between, and people who've worked with them say the reasons range from changes in agriculture to canneries closing to workers choosing different jobs.

Declining numbers
The rush of migrant workers into Michigan started during World War II for the sugar beet and tart cherry crops, said Martha Gonzalez-Cortes, director of the state Department of Human Services' Migrant Affairs Office.

U.S. farmers asked for help getting their crops in during the labor shortage the war caused. The U.S. government partnered with the Mexican government, and the braceroprogram was born. Though the program itself ended in 1964, it started a worker migration pattern that still exists.

As with any employee, migrant workers, whether U.S. citizens or legal aliens, must fill out federal I-9 forms with either a Social Security number or another identification number assigned by the U.S. government, Gonzalez-Cortes said.

About 15 to 20 years ago, Gonzalez-Cortes said, the tart cherry industry was mechanized, making migrant workers unnecessary. The sugar beet industry is undergoing a similar change, as fine-tuned chemical sprays make hoeing weeds by hand unnecessary.

The state doesn't keep statistics of how many migrant workers work in each county because workers move from region to region as crops ripen.

Anecdotal evidence from social service agencies, farmers and other groups that interact with workers all tell the same story, though: The days of hundreds of migrant workers in Sanilac and St. Clair counties are gone.

"There's less available workers. People that used to be on these farms 10 years ago today are driving bulldozers, they're working construction," said Joe Pirrone, president of Mike Pirrone Produce in St. Clair County's Mussey Township.

Hoeing pumpkins
Several miles away at a Riley Township farm he owns, Pirrone pointed out the six young Mexican men he has hired as migrant workers.

"All they do right now is hoe, so six is plenty," Pirrone said. "We'll need 30 people once we start harvesting. The bulk of the workers aren't here. It's a little bit scary to hope they show up."

David Cruz, 19, is working for Pirrone for the first time. Speaking in Spanish, Cruz said he came to Romeo last year during the migrant season.

"We came (directly) from Florida," Cruz said of himself and his co-workers, "but I'm from Queretaro, Mexico."

He's here to earn money, he said, and he'll go back to Mexico for the winter.

A row of pumpkins away from Cruz, Roberto Martinez-Lopez, and Eric Lopez-Lopez, both 19 of Oaxaca, Mexico, concentrated on hoeing the weeds out from between the plants.

Speaking in Spanish, the two said they heard about the jobs in Michigan through newspapers and other ads back home.

Why travel so far?

"Because there's less work (and) less money" in Mexico, Martinez-Lopez said.

His workers are paid about $7 an hour, Pirrone said. He issues paychecks, but some local farmers said they pay day laborers in cash.

Changing agriculture
Vegetable farms are among the few places that still need migrant workers. Everything except green beans is harvested by hand, Pirrone said.

But St. Clair and Sanilac counties aren't known statewide for their produce. The big crops here include hay, cattle and soybeans that don't need strong arms.

Sugar beet farmers are using more advanced herbicides to kill weeds before hoes are required.

Pickle factories, which used to need a lot of workers at once, have spread the work around the year. They have moved from brine-cured pickles - made in the summer with local cucumbers - to refrigerated pickles, made all year with cucumbers from across the continent.

Today, all the workers at Gielow Pickles Inc. in Lexington are residents of the area, said Craig Gielow, executive vice president.

The lower numbers of migrant workers means fewer are in the area to hire as later crops start to ripen.

Pirrone of Mussey Township was starting to look for workers for his cucumber fields early last week. Zucchini is due to ripen in early July.

"You can't wait until the day you need them to hire them, because you might not be able to find anybody," he said.

During the rainy weather this month, it was too wet for his migrant workers to hoe the pumpkin and squash fields. Instead, he had them painting buildings so they'd stay occupied and not look for work elsewhere.

Closing work sites
In Sanilac County, Tillie Ramos said, the drop in workers is because of housing camps closing as the related canneries and factories closed.

"Farmers went into private housing that they would rent out to individual families," which were licensed as camps but were just houses, Ramos said. She's the daughter of former migrant workers and ran Croswell-Lexington schools' now-defunct summer migrant program for years.

Art Hulkoff, district sanitarian for the Michigan Department of Agriculture's Migrant Labor Housing division, has inspected labor camps for several decades.

Michigan started licensing migrant-worker housing camps in 1965. The law requires inspection and licensing for any site where five or more migrant workers will live.

Hulkoff said Sanilac County had about 15 housing camps in places including Croswell, Deckerville and Sandusky at the peak, 25 years ago. The list of licensed camps is down to five. St. Clair County has just one, behind the main office of Mike Pirrone Produce on Bryce Road.

"Primarily it's because the sugar beet industry's changed," Hulkoff said of the change in housing in Sanilac County.

Picking new jobs
Despite possible wages of up to $400 a week, Lexington's Gielow said, people don't want to pick cucumbers.

A Florida farmer he works with stopped planting them.

"His wages to pick the product have doubled in six years, and he still can't find a labor force," Gielow said.

Gielow said the people who used to pick cucumbers on those Florida and Texas farms have jumped into jobs in a construction boom down there.

Pirrone said he pays his workers wages similar to what they could earn in nursery or landscaping work, where they might be using machines instead of their muscles for work. Those jobs draw them out of the fields, he said.

He said people move up a sort of ladder of entry-level jobs, starting in agriculture because it's easy to do if you don't speak the language. Pretty soon, you get a handle on the language and the environment, and it's on to landscaping or construction work.

Pirrone said he's worried about what that means for the country's food supply: "Everything you eat in this country is a result of a migrant worker, somehow, whether it's meat or chicken or an apple or a zucchini. You name it, it's a result of a migrant worker."