The Rural Proletariat of the Southwest

TO THE AVERAGE SHOPPER at his local chain store, those damn picketers are just another pain in the neck. It's below freezing, after all, and he just wants a can of cat food, or maybe a box of onion chips for the party that's starting in ten minutes. The next stores's three blocks down, and cat food's four cents more there, and he's not buying lettuce anyway. What difference can he make?

It's not lettuce alone that brings the United Farmworkers picketers with their leaflets and black eagles and "Boycott Lettuce" signs to the icy sidewalks and the icier stares of the produce manager; the real reaons begin the brown earth of the Southwest with the brown hands that cultivate it. They are not the hands of the small family farmer whose sturdy pride we romantically recall, nor do they hold stock in the huge conglomerates that employ them. The four million workers who cultivate our winter vegetables are a rural proletariat whose living and working conditions sound like passages from an outdated muckraking novel.

A man, woman or child who picks lettuce for a living begins work at daybreak and perhaps has a short rest period around 2 o'clock before finishing the twelve-hour workday. He uses a short-handled implement that keeps him bent over during that time, and while he picks he may be sprayed from above with pesticides. If he needs to urinate, he must find a place at the edge of the field, for normally there are no sanitary facilities provided. His two-room house might have electricity, but it probably has no sink, toilet, bath or shower. He typically receives $1.43 an hour without overtime, sick pay, unemployment benefits, or a medical plan, although he is far more susceptible than most other workers to accidents, disease, and unemployment. It is difficult for him to obtain social security, but that wouldn't help much--his life expectancy is 49 years.

Until recently, the farmworker has been powerless to improve these conditions. Antiquated conceptions of agriculture--which are now as much an "industry" as any factory assembly line--prevent him from receiving the benefits of labor legislation. When he and his co-workers have tried to organize, they have been intimidated with job loss or violence; or most recently, they have been "organized" against their will and without their voted consent under low-benefit "sweetheart" contracts between the growers and officials of established unions.

The United Farmworkers, under the leadership of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, are slowly changing all that. The grape strike and boycott of the late 1960s won contracts from all major California and Arizona table grape growers by 1970. But the other produce industries remain to be tackled, one by one, until the growers will agree to provide wages, security, working conditions and benefits that have been considered basic in most industries for decades, and more importantly, until they recognize the workers' own choice of union representation. That can only be done by putting consumer pressure on the non-union growers and on the stores and institutions patronizing them. That struggle begins and ends with people. The laws as they stand are useless at best, strikes are expensive, and the ultimate recourse of the worker in the field is the city-dweller on the sidewalk.

It's important for a guy to feed his cat. For the men and women who feed us, it's pretty hard just to feed their children. When you see the lines, walk on by.

Linda Roth lives in Boston and is an organizer for the United Farmworkers.