Migrant Workers In Washington -- Fruit Pickers' Summer Of Squalor

Fearing tougher regulations, many growers refused to provide even minimal housing for seasonal workers this year. The result? Fruit pickers and their families lived in Third World conditions while harvesting one of the richest crops in years.

As Washington's $1.7 billion tree-fruit industry booms to record harvests, the state is losing ground in the battle for decent housing for tens of thousands of farmworkers who bring in the crop.

It would be easy to blame the growers, who rely on seasonal labor to deliver a fruit harvest that has become the apple-cheeked darling of the international market.

But farmworker advocates and growers alike say state laws - confusing, cumbersome and hard to enforce - don't help and may even make the problem worse.

The state is a world leader in the production of apples, sweet cherries and pears, and pioneers cutting-edge agricultural practices. Multimillion-dollar packing plants can grade fruit in a flash and controlled-atmosphere storage can keep an apple fresh as long as a year.

Yet when it comes to living conditions, Washington's unlicensed farmworker camps are right out of the Third World.

Washington has been slow to enact economic incentives for growers to build or maintain farmworker housing. Inspections are spotty and enforcement is lax. Authority is tangled among several layers of state and local government.

Experts say what's needed is an expensive and politically gutsy

solution: a combination of emergency shelter, temporary-harvest tent camps, on-farm labor camps and low-income housing in rural communities.

Until and unless that happens, code enforcers and inspectors in Washington are left to choose between enforcing the law and evicting people with nowhere to go.

"While we are going through this laboriously slow process of what to do, trees are going in the ground right and left," says Kevin Barry, environmental-health director of Grant County. "The need for labor is growing exponentially.

The demand for housing is pervasive through all seasons and all crops.

But it is never more acute than during the state's world-class cherry harvest, when 20,000 workers must bring in a lucrative crop within a few short weeks.

It takes five times more hand labor to pick cherries than apples. Yet, because of their brief, mid-summer harvest, cherry growers have the least economic incentive to build housing for their workers.

And this year, the state is threatening to regulate cherry tent camps - long winked at under the law - with more stringent standards. That has prompted more and more growers to abandon their on-farm camps rather than begin upgrading in anticipation of tougher rules.

And that has left workers - many of them illegal migrants - scrambling for shelter in the woods or their cars.

"It's so frustrating to know it's going to get worse before it gets better," Barry says.

`WE SUFFER TO MAKE MONEY'

Gray light seeps through the pines as first one car door, then another, creaks opens. It is barely 4 a.m. as this encampment awakens. Families yawn from cars and tents, and stumble amid piles of beer bottles, clotheslines strung with raw meat and grocery sacks stuffed with clothing.

The morning fills with hasty rituals of ablution: feet shoved into shoes damp with dew, a toothbrush stuck in a stump to keep it out of the dirt; the rustle of bushes pressed into use as a bathroom.

A nearby stream serves as kitchen sink, laundry, shower and, sometimes, toilet for the 60 or so migrant pickers camped here for the brief cherry harvest.

"It's part of the battle of life," says Eloisa Alonzo, 56, groggy after a poor night's sleep in the back of a car.

The camp, perched on Department of Natural Resources land outside Wenatchee, empties within minutes as the workers head for the cherry trees on Stemilt Hill. There they will provide the delicate, arduous labor needed to harvest some of the most profitable orchard land in Washington.

As they leave, Alonzo goes to work in her woodland kitchen - under a blue plastic tarp stretched atop a length of irrigation pipe. She shreds cooked chicken meat, left unrefrigerated overnight, into a vat of chili. She leans to her elbows in the red sauce, stirring with her hands, making the first of hundreds of tamales she hopes to sell in the orchards that day.

For seven years, Alonzo and her mobile tamale kitchen have trailed the harvest, from crop to crop, while the men in her family pick the fruit - oranges in California, then cherries and, finally, apples, in Washington.

They travel together, a family of seven spanning three generations. Alonzo's 6-month-old great grandson stays tucked in the tent, his stuffed animals lying outside in the dirt

"It is very hard like this," says Alonzo. "You see us, how we walk around on the earth like pigs? It makes me feel embarrassed for you to see how we live."

Her family shares a rental house in central California. But their real home is in Mexico. They, like many in the camp, are not here legally, and seem unafraid to say so.

"They want us to work but they don't want us," she says.

Alonzo's granddaughter, Rosa Guerrero, 21, picks up a broom of pine boughs and twine and does what she can to sweep the debris from the kitchen's dirt floor. But there is nowhere to store the plastic jug of milk, the package of hamburger, the baby bottle, the tamale press, the pink plastic tricycle, the diapers, the toilet paper.

"We suffer to make money," Guerrero said.

This year they suffered more than before.

For years, most pickers working Stemilt Hill were welcome to stay in temporary tent camps pitched on the growers' land.

The camps, licensed and inspected by the state of Washington during the short cherry harvest, included hot showers, portable toilets, clean drinking water, coolers with ice for food storage and trash bins.

But, fearing tougher regulations from the state, many growers closed their camps this year.

State law does not require growers to house farmworkers. But if they do provide shelter, it must meet certain standards. And the standards being considered for cherry tent camps would require upgrades costing as much as $2,000 per farmworker bed.

When Alonzo's family showed up at the grower's camp they had used for several years, they were rousted by the foreman. They hunted until well past midnight before they found this encampment in the woods.

Bewildered and exhausted, they joined thousands of migrant workers in Washington who sleep under bridges, along irrigation ditch banks, or by the dozens in trailers, shacks and shabby apartments.

"You come to Mexico and we are happy to see you," says Javier Gonzales, Alonzo's son. "But here nobody wants us. They want us to pick and then they want us gone."

THE `DIAMOND OF FRUIT'

Washington leads the world in the export of sweet cherries - a crop known among growers as the "diamond of fruit."

It is the most profitable crop in Washington's vast tree-fruit industry. Last year's cherry crop was a near-record harvest of 90,000 tons, worth $129 million when it left the farm and far more on the retail market.

This year's harvest, which ends this month, will set new records for yield and value.

Much of Washington's $5.8 billion agriculture industry - which employs more people than any other economic sector - is mechanized. But the booming tree-fruit industry relies on hand labor, driving up the demand for pickers.

An estimated 150,000 seasonal workers bring in the range of Washington's crops each year; only Florida, California and Texas employ more farmworkers. More than 62,000 of the pickers in Washington - not quite half - are migrants, according to a 1996 state Department of Health study.

But as the tree-fruit industry continues to expand, and with it the demand for labor, Washington growers are providing less licensed, on-farm housing than they did 30 years ago.

In 1969, 697 farms had licensed labor camps - with beds for 22,441 workers. By 1996, only 182 farms provided licensed camps - with beds for 9,600 workers.

That leaves the state short at least 40,000 beds for migrant pickers, and that doesn't include beds for their dependents.

TOUGH LAW NEVER ENFORCED

As the nation's economy soars, the plight of migrant workers is stuck in the Depression: Poor and thousands of miles from home, many of them live in shocking conditions they have little clout to protest.

The reasons are many:

-- Government and private-sector efforts to build farmworker housing have not kept pace with the demand for labor. The U.S. General Accounting Office estimated the national agricultural-field work force at 1.6 million people in 1995. And the Housing Assistance Council in Washington, D.C., estimates about 800,000 farmworkers lack adequate shelter.

-- The work force itself has changed, from U.S. citizens to itinerants from Mexico and Central America.

The GAO estimates that at least 40 percent of the nation's migrant workers, or 600,000 people, are here illegally. In Washington, it is estimated to be at least 50 percent.

-- Attempts to enforce stricter seasonal housing standards have largely backfired. With no obligation to house workers, many growers will bulldoze camps rather than pay to upgrade.

Washington's cherry harvest offers a prime example.

A 1969 state law set standards, equal to federal minimum standards, for temporary worker camps - tents on platforms with 7-foot high sidewalls, electricity, mechanical refrigeration, an approved septic system, cooking facilities and bathrooms.

But the standards have never been enforced during the short cherry harvest, when, growers say, they can't justify the expense.

To encourage growers to offer basic sanitation and health facilities, the state in 1995 enacted a provisional cherry tent-camp program, allowing growers to provide camps that did not meet state and federal regulations.

The growers could guarantee their harvest by providing on-site camping for pickers; in return, the state inspected the camps to ensure they met minimum public-health needs.

Many growers applauded it as the first sensible seasonal-housing policy enacted in years. Altogether, they provided an additional 2,000 migrant beds than they'd had before, with toilets, showers, safe drinking water and food storage.

But farmworker advocates argued that the program was a form of apartheid, consigning migrants to substandard and illegal living conditions. In the words of Guadulupe Gamboa, director of the Washington office of the United Farm Workers of America, the program was "discriminatory and morally repulsive."

The advocates sued last winter, and won, forcing the state to dust off its 29-year-old law.

The state Board of Health will meet Aug. 12 to recommend a timeline to enforce those tougher standards.

Meanwhile, Washington's apple harvest, the nation's largest, is just weeks away. It, too, is expected to set records this year, and will draw 47,000 workers to state orchards by October.

In Mattawa, in Grant County, the orchard boom has doubled the base population in less than 10 years, from 940 people in 1990 to 1,820. Many of the farmworkers there are year-round residents. They live in squalid, makeshift housing, and the city couldn't afford to install a sewer system until this year.

"Raw sewage on the ground is a common thing in Mattawa," says Kevin Barry, the county health inspector.

Mattawa's population will swell to 5,000 during the peak of apple harvest. With migrants camped by the hundreds on the banks of the Columbia River, it has become the poster child for the migrant-housing crisis.

The state is bracing for the harvest as if for a natural disaster. An emergency tent camp is being built, and a service center will dispense public-health essentials such as diapers and water purification tablets.

GAMBLER'S CROP

The state's reputation as a world-class tree-fruit producer is earned one orchard at a time, on places like C&S Orchards on Stemilt Hill. Nick and Susan Fox manage this orchard, an immaculate patch of green high above the Columbia River.

The orchard has been in their family for three generations. And the camp they have long maintained for their pickers is one of the most prized in the area: It has shade trees.

But it is closed this year. Fox says it would cost him more than $750,000 to bring the camp up to the 1969 standards affirmed by the the state.

Cherries remain the gambler's crop, offering the highest profit per acre but posing the highest risk. The per-acre investment runs about $6,500, with a gross return of $10,500 - if everything goes right.

The lure of that return has prompted Washington growers to plant more cherry trees every year. Commercial orchards the length of the West Coast are sold out of root stock for the next three years.

Washington acreage planted in cherries has increased from 12,200 acres in 1978 to 18,600 last year, with an average orchard size of 10 acres. Growers also are planting their orchards more densely, packing as many as 2,000 trees to the acre, training them on trellises like grapes.

Cherry harvesting is delicate work done on ladders. The fruit is small, and easily bruised. It takes deft fingertips to pluck the fruit from the trees and fast, but gentle hands to lay it in a bucket worn around a picker's neck.

It can take a skilled worker an entire day to pick one tree.

The fruit must be picked at perfect sweetness, while still crunchy. Cherries won't ripen if picked green. Once ripe, they must be stripped off the tree within days or they will go soft.

Picking starts with first light but usually halts by noon, when the temperature climbs above 80 degrees; working hot cherries pulls the stems off.

A passing rainstorm can ruin an entire crop. A ripe cherry is so turgid with sweet juice that rainwater will swell the fruit and split the skin. Growers will pay $30 an acre to have helicopters blow-dry their orchards.

Hail can wipe out a crop in minutes.

The cherry grower's rule of thumb is to plan on making money about half the time. One of six years can be a disaster.

Those high-stakes economics prompted Nick Fox to close his pickers' camp rather than pay to upgrade to the state standard - a decision he says still rankles.

"When things you'd like to do for people get taken away, it doesn't feel good," he says. "The people who think they are helping have taken away my ability to actually help them."

At a nearby orchard on Stemilt Hill, Martin Gutierrez lives with several other men at a licensed cherry tent camp that remained open this season. There is a makeshift shower with hot water. Wooden crates wrapped with wire keep animals and flies away from the pickers' food. Portable toilets and a trash bin keep the place somewhat clean.

The camp suits Gutierrez fine, and he says he is eager to pocket $4 for each box, or lug, of cherries he picks. That's top dollar on Stemilt Hill this season. Each lug takes him about 20 minutes to fill.

A good picker can make about $100 a day, or $10 to $12 an hour.

"It's not hard," Gutierrez says. "And it's just for a short time - maybe eight days. For the short time we are here this is fine. We are not charged. And my family needs the money more than I do here."

But Fox and many other growers say they are weary of the waves of inspectors, union organizers, public-interest lawyers and journalists who cruise their on-farm camps.

In one week in July, cherry grower Hal Lyons of Wenatchee was visited by inspectors from the state departments of Health and Labor and Industries; the entire Board of Health; a television news crew; both of Seattle's daily newspapers; a team of lawyers; and a labor dispute from workers who, with TV cameras rolling, decided to picket for higher wages.

Lyons called the county sheriff to keep the press at bay as the afternoon wore on. Grass seeds popped in the heat, and the conflict evoked a medieval tableau, with the workers huddled like peasants in the shade of a metal shed.

The next day the disgruntled workers collected their pay and left. Lyons easily replaced them and finished the harvest.

Then he bulldozed his camp.

"It's just not worth it," says his wife, Sylvia Lyons.

LOTS OF TERRITORY, FEW INSPECTORS

Authority over farmworker housing is a bureaucratic tangle; A citizen advisory board writes the rules; one department controls public-health concerns while another regulates worker safety.

The state Department of Labor and Industries (L&I) has just 12 inspectors to cover the central region, where most of the state's fruit is grown. Those inspectors also monitor nonagricultural work sites, from construction projects to manufacturing plants.

Temporary worker housing has been a low priority for the agency, says Reuel Paradis, L&I's administrator in Central Washington. It lacks the urgency of industrial work sites where workers can be electrocuted, dismembered or killed.

As it is, statewide, L&I inspectors reach only about 2 1/2 percent of all employers each year.

Many of Washington's 4,000 apple growers and 2,500 cherry growers will never see an inspector. Unlicensed migrant camps have drawn little attention over the years.

To monitor the camps, L&I inspectors rely on tips, or conduct random cruises by road or air. In recent years, the agency recently has stepped up monitoring and enforcement.

In 1997, using a surveillance plane, inspectors spotted an illegal camp run by W. Bradley Carlson Ltd. of Pasco, in Franklin County. The grower was fined more than $30,000, the department's largest fine ever for a farmworker-housing violation.

Also using the spotter plane, they found an illegal camp at KBN Corp. of Royal City in Grant County, and levied an $8,000 fine.

Inspectors said conditions at both camps were unhealthy, with people living in cardboard boxes, under plastic tarps and among overflowing garbage cans, with portable toilets badly in need of emptying and servicing. Food preparation and storage facilities were primitive or nonexistent.

The increased vigilance came after a 1996 Health Department report noting that, in the previous seven years, only three growers had been fined a total of $3,675 for violations of farmworker-housing standards.

But oversight needs to be better still, Paradis of L&I says. The agency's goal this season is to visit 100 orchards.

Camps licensed specifically under the provisional cherry tent-camp program are monitored by the state health inspectors weekly. Other on-farm, temporary-worker housing is visited by health inspectors at least once a year; temporary-worker housing with a good track record is visited on a less-frequent schedule.

But the department has just two inspectors to cover the entire state. And, until this year, it lacked much enforcement clout. While the Health Department can fine growers for operating unlicensed camps, it has to refer specific violations to L&I.

Farmworkers who rent housing off the farm rely on local governments for enforcement of housing codes and health-and-safety regulations.

Over the years, some of the most acute abuses have been found not at grower camps but in the surrounding rural towns, where housing is scarce and demand is extreme.

The 1996 Health Department report found migrants living in the crawl space of a trailer, using insulation for bedding; 14 people squatting in an unheated, unfinished garage; 29 people sharing a single-wide mobile home; and mattresses laid wall-to-wall for 24 people in a trailer. Sewage bubbling up to the surface of overtaxed septic systems was not uncommon.

But health and building-code officials face a difficult reality: If they enforce the laws, farmworkers will be evicted and forced into even worse conditions.

"When we enforce the rules we don't improve things, we merely displace people," says Barry, of Grant County. "We won't improve them until there is as much housing as there are farmworkers. And that's going to take a long time."

Lee Hargroves, Yakima County's only code enforcer, last month closed a three-bedroom farmhouse in Wapato, Yakima County, which was being rented to five families - a total of 26 people - for $400 a month for each family. A family of eight was living in a windowless cellar. The house had only one legal bathroom.

The house was discovered when a state Child Protective Services worker investigated a tip that a child had fallen down the stairs.

Efforts by The Seattle Times to contact the house's owner, Riley Wallace, were unsuccessful.

"There's no way to know how much of this is going on," Hargroves says. "The part that really gets to you is the attitude the landlords take, that they are providing a service, instead of having people living in their cars."

SOLUTIONS TRIED HERE, ELSEWHERE

The pattern is repeated throughout the country - desperate migrant workers, scarce and shabby housing, inflated rents.

"Renting garages without electricity or running water is very common," says Mark Meuter, an attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance in Salinas. "A 400- to 600-foot place with six, eight, 10 people in it will be renting for $500 a month."

And in Oregon, state inspections of farmworker housing are rare, according to a recent published report.

But if Washington is not alone in facing a farmworker-housing crisis, it lags behind in attempts to find remedies. Laws here are more complex and regulations less certain. The state also has been slow to come up with financial incentives for growers to build farmworker housing.

In 1996, Washington made its first stab at an incentive program by offering a sales-tax exemption for labor and materials used to build, improve or decorate farmworker housing.

Oregon has provided a hefty income-tax break for every dollar invested in farmworker housing since 1989.

Oregon also has offered a relaxed building code for construction of temporary-worker housing since at least 1973, something Washington didn't adopt until this year, and won't have on the books until January.

In Oregon, regulation, licensing, and inspection of farmworker housing is consolidated in one state agency. Advice on construction, materials, building plans and tax credits is available through that same agency. The rules have been relatively stable, changing little in 30 years.

But in Washington, regulation and oversight of farmworker housing is scattered among L&I, the state Department of Health, the state Board of Health, and local government.

And the rules keep changing. For example, the rules governing cherry tent camps have been either unenforced, or in flux, leaving growers confused and reluctant to make further investments.

In the past five years alone, substandard tent camps have alternately been banned, allowed for the cherry harvest under relaxed standards, scheduled to be phased out - and now hover in regulatory limbo, awaiting the Aug. 12 Health Board action.

"Until there are other options developed, you need to hold onto what you have to help these people," says Kirk Mayer of the Washington Growers Clearinghouse, a grower advocacy group. "What about the people you are evicting? How come the state can run a campground like these and it's OK, but if a worker stays there it is unhealthy?"

Leadership on the issue also is in flux. The state Health Department has been without a director since spring, and half the members of the Board of Health, including the chairman, are at the end of their terms.

The issue continues to defy political solutions.

Gov. Gary Locke made a personal commitment last spring to get more farmworker housing built. But how much money he can pry from the 1999 Legislature remains to be seen.

"No one wants to touch this with a 10-foot pole," said Rich Nafziger, who advises the Democratic governor on farmworker housing. "It doesn't touch that many people who vote. It gets you in trouble with labor and gets you in trouble with agricultural interests, who are extremely powerful.

"The governor has a 1-year-old kid and he's a pretty compassionate person," Nafziger continues. "He's personally appalled these conditions exist. But the more political people in his office say, `This isn't a winner - stay away from it.' "

Lynda Mapes' phone message number is 206-464-2736. Her e-mail is lmapes@seattletimes.com