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Harvest Time, Again

 

One of the most heated debates in the recall election centers on whether or not illegal immigrants should have California driver's licenses, with detractors of the plan already gathering signatures for ballot measure to overturn the legislature and governor's decision to grant the licenses to undocumented residents. In our local paper a recent editorial by columnist

Joseph Perkins the claim is made that "there are more than enough Americans willing to pick fruit and harvest produce", as he breezily dismisses the contribution of the hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers who's labor feeds this nation.

 

But what does Joseph Perkins know about farm labor? Probably not much, since if he did he'd likely be on the other side of the licensing argument.

On the North Coast the mobile illegals come through in two passes each year, in the winter during pruning season, and in the summer and fall for the harvest. The pruning done to the 2600-odd acres of pear trees in Lake and Mendocino counties is typical of the kind of work that the Anglo community is unwilling to do, with good reason. While pruning fruit trees is not as taxing as the franticly-paced harvests, it's still not for the meek.

Some campesinos can still do the job into their forties, but by middle age ladder work takes it's toll. Leaning off the ladder puts all one's weight on a single knee for hours at a time causing pain in the joint, while the steps put your entire body weight on the arch of one foot, causing additional chronic discomfort. The work is done during the wet-and-cold season, and in

Lake County the job oftentimes begins with the temperature hovering in the mid 'twenties. Each tree requires hundreds of cuts with the hand-snips, which by the end of the day curls your hand into an arthritic claw. To complete the picture add a thirty-three to forty-five pound ladder to tote around all day that usually has to be yanked out of the mud for each of the

four-to-ten ladder sets it takes to get around each tree, and you'll have an aching lower back to go along with your foot, knee, hand and frozen ass problems. Pay is on a per-tree basis, with the going rate between $3.00 and $3.50 per tree. A good worker can make $12 to $14 an hour on average, which even with sky-high local unemployment rates isn't enough to get white folks to spend their day scrambling up-and-down a sixteen foot ladder.

 

Pruning grapes is a good deal easier, so a fair amount gets done by women, unlike the pears, which are for the men only. The pay is less than the pears because no ladders are involved, and like pear pruning the key is to set a steady pace and be consistent and thorough. If the weather is good you can take an occasional moment to enjoy the beauty of the outdoors, but like the pears it all comes down to how far down the row you are at the end of the day, so the breaks are kept short in order to make the most of the precious daylight hours.

 

Harvest season begins during the peak of summer, starting with the Mendocino pear crop. Work begins as soon as it's light enough to see the pears in the trees, so that the crew can knock off before the hottest part of the day arrives. All the downsides of ladder work are there, along with the strain of having a forty pound sack of fruit hanging off your side as

you stretch to reach that piece of fruit that will save you one more precious ladder-set. By the end of the day a really good picker can put four tons of fruit in the bins and make well over $100, though on average a wage of around $14 or $15 bucks an hour is closer to the norm. Typically the work is done at a brisk pace with just one short midmorning break for lunch, so

the ranks of the picking crews are generally filled with young men in their late teens and early twenties, though the occasional thirty and even forty-something campesino toughs it out with the youngsters. It's all over in six or seven hours, but if the fruit is ripening the pressure to wrap things up can mean only Sunday will be set aside to recover for the next week.

 

With grapes the timing is frequently even more critical, and the pace is like nothing you'll ever see in the workplace of white America. The work day often beings with the temperature near freezing, and ends with it close to 100 degrees, the goal is to be able to knockoff by 2:00, or hopefully an hour earlier. Each crew of between eight and fourteen pickers works around

one tractor hauling a gondola behind it, as four rows are stripped of their

fruit simultaneously. The clearance between the tractor and vines is

virtually nil, and extreme care has to be taken by the driver to constantly

make sure all six wheels aren't about to crush someone's foot. About 10% of

the pickers are female, and are some of the toughest women you'll ever meet.

Each crew also usually has a counter and sorter, who are typically female.

The pickers shout out their assigned number as they heft each tub-full into the gondola, and the counter echoes back the number to confirm the tally of the worker's effort. The sorter stands inside the gondola and tosses out the leaves and other debris that ends up in the sticky, wet mess of grapes that quickly fills the huge metal box. It seems like one of the better jobs in the operation until you realize the person standing in the knee-high liquid is likely to wearing a grungy pair of sneakers, and is soaked in grape juice

even on the coldest mornings. But the pace and effort expended sorting is nothing like picking, which is as hard as it gets in any workplace. The work involves slashing the grapes from the vine with a hook-shaped razor sharp knife, making inadvertent wounds from the instrument a constant concern. One hand holds the knife as the other steadies the cluster and guides it into the tub laying on the ground, which is slid along the row with your foot. It sounds easy, but as the tub fills, it gets harder and harder to get it to slide over the dirt clod strewn ground underneath the trellises. You could bend over to move it, but since it needs to be moved every 18 inches or so, your back would be screaming by the end of the day. So the choice of tub-moving methods comes down to side-loading your knee or straining your back, but that's not the end of it. The tough part comes when the tub is full, and the trip to the gondola begins. If you're in the rows closest to the tractor you can just run up to the gondola and heft your load over the top, but the bulk of the crew isn't that lucky. For them it's a struggle to wiggle between the vines and the irrigation lines running halfway up the trellis, a space frequently no larger than 18 inches. Doing it while holding the 40 plus pounds of grapes in the tub is no small feat, especially for the guys on the furthest side of the outer rows, who have two sets of pipes and wires to slip between. But once you've made your way (at a trot, no less) to the gondola, there's one more hurdle to clear. The edge of the gondola is at shoulder level or higher, and after the first fifty loads you've heaved over the top you tend to lose some of your gusto. This is where the strong but short women have the hardest time, who hope a helping hand is nearby so they can keep up with the crew. The Hispanic reverence for women usually comes

into play here, and it's considered the gentlemanly thing to do to take the hand-off over the wires and save the gals the struggle of getting it over the top of the gondola. The action doesn't stop except for an occasional momentary break as another tractor pulls an empty gondola into position, lunch has to wait until after the work is done. Pay runs in the $12 to $14 dollar range, but a really good picker can pull down $100 a day. The ironic part is that the people picking the grapes in Lake and Mendocino counties aren't likely to be able to be able to afford the final product, though after seeing the dirt, bugs and other slop in the gondolas, they might not feel they're missing much.

 

The last part of the harvest is the walnuts, which are becoming more mechanized in recent years, though most of the local crop is still brought in with the hand-and-bucket method . The workers run the full range of ages, with plenty of women joining the effort. Pay is half of grape wages, but proceeds at a more sedate pace, and can be done sitting down. The big

concern with the walnuts is to get them in before the first heavy rains, which can make the job truly miserable. Lots of dust or mud is the rule, along with aching backs and cramped hands.

 

The basic truth of the matter is that the average American wouldn't last a day on any picking crew, and that if the pundits calling for the expulsion of the undocumented workforce spent a day in the vineyards and orchards of rural America we'd never hear them rant about illegals stealing our jobs again.

 

hellsbnd@pacific.net

 

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