SCORE: Steinbeck--Migrant article
Migrant Workers in Washington
State:
a Boon to the Tree Fruit Industry
Photo by Harold A.
Laney,
courtesy of the Washington Apple
Commission.
Sons and Daughters of Dustbowl Migrants Pick
Fruit in 1970's (Part
1)
When I started picking fruit in 1970, I was amazed
that my fellow workers looked just like the folks Steinbeck had
described in The Grapes of Wrath.
I had thought these people had disappeared with
the end of the Great Depression, but here they were: large families,
often including half a dozen children, working together in the
orchard and living in trailers, campers, or tents in the orchard
camps. They seemed to be part of a vast migrating network of extended
families who picked the nation's fruit. Who were these people? Where
had they come from?
I learned that these workers were the sons and
daughters of the Dustbowl migrants that Steinbeck had written about
in his novel. Many of them had left the southern states with their
parents in the 1930s and had come west, mainly to California, where
work was plentiful picking cotton and peas, but also, later,
to the Pacific Northwest.
By the time I met them, some forty years after the
dust bowl migration, the Anglo workers who followed the harvest were
so proficient that it seemed they had been "fruit tramps" forever,
and were destined to remain Washington's primary work force. But by
the 1980s, the agricultural work force had changed radically, and by
the early 1990s, only a handful of "Okies" still followed the fruit
run. There had been other groups of orchard workers before them, and
there were to be others after them.
In the 1920's People Packed Their Own Fruit
(Part 2)
In the 1920's, when I was a kid going to high
school, quite often the school was shut down for harvest, and if
they didn't, a lot of the kids who lived on orchards stayed home
and helped the parents harvest. In those days, almost everybody
packed their own fruit," recalled Orondo orchardist Grady
Auvil.
Native Americans: One of the Earliest
Groups of Migratory Workers (Part
3)
One of the earliest groups of migratory
workers in Washington State, particularly in the northern part of
the state, consisted of Native Americans."The Canadian Indians
came with their horses and tents and buggies and camped down here
while they picked fruit," said Len Wooten, who remembered the
early days of orchard labor from his boyhood in Chelan,
Washington.
Indians came from Canada to the Okanagon every
year until the 1950s. Auvil, who worked as an orchard foreman in
1928, remembered that he was paid 75 cents an hour, while workers
received 40 cents an hour. But all that changed, Auvil said, after
the 1929 stock market crash. When the banks collapsed in 1932,
wages plummeted: Auvil's wages went down to 25 cents an hour,
while the workers received only 15 cents. "So, in order to support
ourselves, we worked on a road job that summer and got 50 cents an
hour," Auvil recalled.
Okies and Arkies Pick Crops During the
Depression (Part
4)
Wooten also remembered orchard work during the
1930s. "When the Great Depression hit, growers couldn't sell their
fruit, and north central Washington was declared a disaster area.
Growers were walking away from their orchards." Those who did keep
their orchards, could hardly afford to pay their help. Wooten
remembers being pulled out of high school and sent to work picking
apples forthree and a half cents a box.
Despite the hard times and the low wages, for
once, there was no trouble finding plenty of hands at harvest
time. There were thousands of people who were destitute and
desperate for work. These were the "Okies" and "Arkies," the names
attached to the Anglo migrants from the Great Plains, who came
from the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri,
or Texas. A
combination of factors, from mechanization to
drought, dust storms, and a depressed economy, had driven these
dispossessed families westward to seek employment
...What did these migrants do after the
harvest? "For four months, they follow the fruit and are
tolerated. But, as soon as the trees and fields become bare and
the harvest is done, they are told to move on," Blanchard wrote in
1940. "Local farm help is adequate to care for the fields during
the next eight months. Communities, moreover, do not want these
poverty-stricken wanderers settling down and becoming a drain upon
already sorely taxed school, health, and welfare
services."
Many Anglo migrants, as well as
Mexican-American migrants from Texas who worked in theYakima area,
traveled south for the winter months, to work and live in
California, Texas, Arizona,Florida, or other states. Yet others
did settle successfully in Washington. By 1941 and 1942, while
many migrants were leaving farmwork to work in the booming defense
industry of World War II,others were just coming to the state to
look for work in the orchards. "People came from Arkansas in '42,
'43, '44," said Auvil, "and in three years, our school went from
25 to 150, so we had to build new
schools."
WWII Labor Shortage Brings Braceros to Work in
the Fields (Part
5)
After the United States entered World War II,
everybody went to work in the shipyards and defense plants. The
demand for workers was so high that the government initiated a
program to recruit braceros--Mexican nationals imported temporarily
to work under contract in the fields.
Although the labor shortage of the 1940s and
1950s was difficult for the growers, migrants tend to remember
this period fondly. For workers who decided to follow the crops as
a way of life,everything improved after 1941. As the Depression
era's oversupply of labor faded from memory,wages rose and pickers
were once more in demand. They would leave the orchards of the
Northwest in the late autumn and travel to Arizona and California
to pick two major crops: cotton and peas.
Many of the workers I met in the 1970s
remembered this period with nostalgia. "I have some good memories
from that time," said Dale Jones, who picked cotton in California
as a child. "I remember when you could work anywhere. Wherever
cotton grew, there was work. You could make good money at
it."
Bad Experiences Remembered By Some
(Part
6)
But not everyone remembered the migratory life
so fondly. "Cotton was my worst experience," said Gladys Wilson,
whose family left Oklahoma in 1940 and picked cotton in Arkansas,
Mississippi,and California. "It was always so dusty. One time, Ma
made Jello, and it was all covered with dust... We had to travel
from town to town. That's why us kids never got much education."
Wilsonwas grateful when her parents started working in Washington
State and decided to stay. "We settled down and didn't travel so
much when we started picking apples and cherries. We could thin,
prop,and prune in the same area."
1940's and 1950's: Search for Seasonal
Labor (Part
7)
Now that there was no longer a surplus of
workers clamoring for jobs, growers had to become more resourceful
in the 1940s and 1950s to meet their need for seasonal labor. The
larger fruit companies regularly sent buses to Spokane, Seattle,
or Portland during the harvest season to recruit workers, not only
for picking, but also for packing, sorting, and grading the fruit.
They tried to make the jobs enticing. "We had our own cooks and
kitchens, and served lunches," said Wooten.
Still, despite the busloads of people brought
into the area, the labor problem was far from solved. Many of the
transient workers were alcoholics who couldn't handle the demands
of the work, and often the buses were almost as full on their
return trips to the cities as they had been on their trips to
orchard country.
This kind of recruitment continued into the
1960s. "When I came to this area in 1962, I was managing a big
orchard which needed a lot of labor," remembered Ing, "and we
chartered bus after bus out of Portland, and the Employment
Security Service sometimes helped us round people up,and sometimes
we'd send somebody down the night before and get them out of the
restaurants.
Early in the morning, we'd load the bus, at
four in the morning, and we also got some people out of Seattle.
Yakima didn't do that because Yakima is a big enough town that it
had a pretty sizeable casual labor group and a pretty good size
Skid Row. In fact, we hauled some labor out of Yakima sometimes.
People would say, 'Well, here comes another load of wine and
flesh.' Of course,sometimes these people were in really bad shape
and they couldn't work the first day, and they'd just stay in a
cabin, and then some of them became excellent workers, they'd stay
the whole season
and were just great people."
Hippies Worked in
Orchards(Part 8)
Ing also remembered a nearly forgotten--and
often maligned--source of labor: the hippies. They arrived at the
orchards in psychedelic painted vans and pickups with cabins built
on the back. "There were thousands and thousands of people that
went on the road in this country as a kind of a protest against
everything...and these kids were out on the road, and they did a
lot of work. A lot of them were quite able-bodied young people,
and they kind of liked to work next to the soil, and that kind of
thing. We got a lot of labor from them...they contributed to the
labor supply, and some people used them quite
intensively."
Mexicans Became a New Source of Labor
(Part
9)
By the late sixties, there were signs of a
significant new labor source: Mexicans. Since the end of the
bracero program, most workers from Mexico, and later from Central
America, came to the United States illegally. "Yakima, Toppenish
particularly, always had a Mexican-American population, people who
had immigrated from Texas, and along the border, so there was a
large group there who worked in orchards and hops, etcetera," Ing
said.
"But the people we have now, the Mexicans that
were mostly illegal, started coming about in the late sixties and
early seventies...and I remember the transition. I was managing
Mount Adams orchard, a big operation here locally. Well, we ran a
cookhouse, and we fed the people, the Skid Row people that we
brought in, we had as many as 250 people at a time, and anyway,
there came a time then that we had a greater percentage of
Mexicans, and so we quit running the cookhouse, and the people
cooked for themselves, and there was a transition there all
through the industry, where Mexicans became the principal labor
force. It started in the late sixties, but it was probably 1980
before the labor force was mostly Mexicans."
Undocumented Latinos Replace Previous
Workers (Part
10)
For the Okies, the people I worked with
throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, the influx of undocumented
workers from Mexico and Central America spelled the end of a way
of life. Suddenly, they couldn't find work in the orchards they
had worked for years; they had been replaced. When they could find
work, wages were low, families could no longer work together
because of child labor laws, and it seemed that employers no
longer valued them as much as they
once had.
Additionally, mechanization of many crops had
made the life of a migrant far more difficult. Cropslike cotton,
peas, and beans no longer required hand labor; even fruit crops
like juice oranges were being harvested mechanically. Pickers had
become more reliant on fresh fruit crops, but now, with the deluge
of workers from Mexico, there were few jobs available. Discouraged
and disheartened,many of them left the orchards for other kinds of
work. "Most of the Okies and Arkies gave up a long time ago," said
Bill Wilson. "There are not many places a white family can work
anymore."
But what was bad for the pickers--a surplus of
labor--was good for the growers. The new workers--most of them, at
first, males--were eager, and sometimes desperate for employment
and money to send back to their families. And by the late sixties,
more workers than ever were required to pick apples.
Research Changed Labor Practices
(Part
11)
Researchers had discovered that fruit wasn't
being picked at the optimum time, and this, said Wooten, caused a
change in labor practices. Once workers picked apples into
November; now a grower had only about five days from the time the
fruit was ripe to get it off the trees. This meant that a larger
supply of pickers were needed for a shorter period of time. Anglo
migrants grumbled,but workers from Mexico and Central America, who
welcomed what work they could find, proved efficient and
cooperative at a critical time. They became the workers of choice.
"It would be very difficult if it weren't for them," Auvil
said.
More Changes, More Workers Needed
(Part
12)
As the composition of the labor force was
changing in the 1980s, so the requirements of labor were once
again changing. With the varietals, there was more year-round
work, blossom thinning,limb-tying, and color picking orchards
several times. The demand for labor was higher than ever, and the
employment opportunities began to extend beyond the basic four
months. "We hire more people than we ever did now," said Auvil.
"We hire as many as we possibly can year-round. A good share of
our people work most of the time, anywhere from eight to ten
months. You do a better job
growing fruit if you have a plentiful supply
of good labor."
As different varieties of apples extended the
harvest season and required more hand labor, more workers have
been encouraged to settle permanently in orchard areas. Since many
foreign workers have been granted temporary or permanent residence
status under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, male
workers who formerly came north alone began to bring their
families, and Latino workers became a more stable force in
Washington State's orchards. Like the Anglo migrants before them,
they began to establish themselves in the tree fruit
industry.
"Many orchard workers can do pretty good,"
said Auvil. "These people all have families, good cars, and a good
living. A lot of Mexican orchard workers are doing very well, and
some of them are going into business for themselves, the same as
did the people from Arkansas."
Many Things Had Changed Since the 1920's
(Part
13)
In 1992, picking cherries next to a family
from Mexico, I realized how much things had changed. The people I
worked near now were no longer from Arkansas and Oklahoma, and the
children under16 were no longer allowed to help their families
pick fruit. Instead of migrating to California,Arizona, or Florida
to pick fruit in the winter, the family that worked next to me
returned to Mexico each winter to visit their relatives. They were
able to collect unemployment during periods without work --an
advantage most Okie migrants never experienced. And they were more
settled than most of the people I used to work with: this family
had bought a mobile home in East Wenatchee, and the father found
enough work in the area to keep him employed for eight months of
the year.
Some Things Were Still the Same
(Part
14)
But in other ways, things had stayed the same.
Like the workers I talked to 20 years before, the Latino workers
liked the outdoor work and the ability to be near their families.
Too, they preferred the piece-rate system of payment that rewarded
them for working hard, and the seasonal work that provided
variety.
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