Thread: Thai farm workers seek equity in strange land

http://www.yakima-herald.com/page/dis/284428733615422

Published on Sunday, October 9, 2005

Thai farm workers seek equity in strange land
By LEAH BETH WARD
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC


BRIAN FITZGERALD/Yakima Herald-Republic

A view of Green Acres Farms on Thursday.

Tong sits cross-legged on the floor of the residence he shares with several other men from Thailand who have come to pick apples in the Yakima Valley this season.

Their temporary U.S. home is clean; the
dollar-store furnishings Spartan. A 150-pound bag of rice rests against a wall in the living room that doubles as a bedroom. A hired driver takes them to buy groceries once a week, so they must stock up.

Creature comforts are few, but the living quarters are far better than last year, the workers say. Last year, they were packed into a motel room, cooked on the floor with hot burners plugged into overloaded circuits and washed dishes in the bathtub.

Mostly they worry about whether there will be enough work picking apples and whether they will get paid what they are owed on time. Last year, some were sent home after three months.

"All we want to do is work and get paid," Tong, a common Thai nickname and not this worker's real name, said through an interpreter. None of the workers agreed to be identified; they said they fear anything they say would be used against them and prevent them from coming back next season.

This is the narrow space that is the world of an imported farm worker in a strange land. In nearly every practical sense, from food to transportation, Tong and his co-workers are dependent on the Los Angeles-based labor contractor that brought them more than 7,000 miles from home on temporary visas.

But they are glad to be here, because at $9.03 an hour, the pay is kingly compared to the $4 a day they would make in northeastern Thailand, if they could even find jobs.

"Our families are poor and there are no jobs," said Tong. "We fight to make a living. We are farmers. When I heard the U.S. was opening the door, I went to a recruiter."

The men, in their 30s and early 40s, leave
behind wives, children and large extended families to take care of their subsistence farms. Thai recruiters with connections to U.S. labor contractors, they said, are easy to find.

To win a seat on the plane bound for the United States, Tong said he and the some 90 other Thai workers paid up to $2,000 apiece to a Thai recruiter, roughly equal to a year's pay in Thai currency, the baht. Most said they borrowed the money, pledging their homes or land as collateral to Thai banks.

"If I have no property, I am not allowed to come," said Kai.

He said some workers without property "rent" a deed to land from neighbors or relatives, deepening their indebtedness.

Global Horizons, the labor contractor, prefers workers who own land because it reduces the risk they will flee in violation of their visas once they get to the United States, according to the company's president, Mordechai Orian. Global Horizons uses various recruiters in Thailand to find workers, but Orian said the company does not pay them.

Economic desperation is the hallmark of a long-established history of farm-worker migration to the Yakima Valley and the Northwest. Workers of Hispanic descent, seeking to escape hardscrabble lives in Mexico and Central America, are only the most recent chapter.

"Not too many years ago in the Northwest, we had Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos, so the Thai angle is not entirely new," said David Sonnenfeld, professor of community and environmental studies at Washington State University Tri-Cities.

As a sociologist specializing in Southeast Asia, Sonnenfeld has traveled extensively in Thailand studying development. He said workers from the northeast part of the country â€â€

I hope they get their payment promptly as intended but wonder about bringing in fruit pickers when Oregon has one of the five highest levels of unemployment among states in the US.