Every year, thousands of West Indian contract workers fly on chartered jets from Kingston, Jamaica to mainland Florida. They travel late at night to be greeted at the airport by the Meranda Company of Miami, whose business it is to arrange the flights, house the arriving workers and finally disperse them by commercial buses to the farms, fields and orchards of the eastern United States. These workers come primarily from Jamaica, and to a lesser extent from other West Indian islands such as St. Lucia and St. Kitts. They come from rural areas, where some of them own small plots, ply rural trades such as fishing, carpentry and mechanics, or tend small stores. Others are jobless, since unemployment in Jamaica chronically hovers around 25 percent or higher. Unable to get by on what they earn at home, and lacking access to welfare or social security programs, these workers have little choice but to become migrant workers. West Indians have been employed in almost every region of the United States during the past 35 years. They have picked cherries in Washington and Wisconsin, tended shade tobacco in the Connecticut Valley, picked apples from Virginia to New Hampshire, cut sugar cane and harvested citrus and winter vegetables in Florida, and picked peas in California. This year they are being employed only in the Florida cane fields and the apple orchards of Appalachia and New England. Nevertheless, the number of workers annually entering the country has remained steady for the last fifteen years, ranging from ten to fifteen thousand per year. West Indians are no longer the emergency supplemental work force that the U.S. government first imported during World War II. Rather, they have become a regular part of the farm labor force of the United States. Fred Sikes, of the U.S. Sugar Corporation in Florida described the origins of the contract program as it now exists: In the summer of 1947, we- that is the nation- wide group of agricultural employers using off- shore labor-learned that the War and Food Administration was closing down. We were concerned that even though the war was over we would not be able to find sufficient American labor to harvest the crops. So we began to explore ways to continue the program on a private basis…. Exploring the situation further, we found that extreme unemployment problems existed throughout the Caribbean and that Jamaica, where unemployment was particularly severe, was interested in seeing the off- shore farm labor program continued. I These growers succeeded in signing government-to-grower contracts for Jamaican and other West Indian workers. This part of the Report examines the role of West Indians in harvesting Florida’s sugar cane, the conditions they endure and the effect of their employment on domestic workers. Our analysis of the program’s present operations serves as a warning of the perils awaiting farmworkers. The temporary foreign contract labor program, as it is currently run, provides growers with unique powers of control over farm- workers, and they use them freely at the expense of foreign and domestic workers alike. THE MARK OF CANE Over one-third of all the sugar cane in the United States is grown in Florida, making it the largest cane-producing state in the union. Most of Florida’s sugar cane is grown in the rich “muck” soil near Belle Glade, which be- came arable in the late 1940’s when the Army Corps of Engineers constructed an extensive canal system and drained the swamps around Lake Okeechobee. The recovered lands were first used to grow sugar cane after the U.S. government imposed an economic blockade on Cuba and stopped the importation of Cuban sugar. Sugar cane is now grown on 450 square miles of the southern part of the state, with an an- 1112 NACLA Report Peak Number of West Indian Agricultural Workers By State, 1960-1976 Total Conn. Fla. Me. MDMass. Mich. NH NJ NY VT Virg. WV Other 1960 13,629 1,533 8,997 – 17 – 281 32 674 300 – 102 – 1,693 1961 13,773 1,567 9,663 – 16 – 172 33 875 310 – 261 – 876 1962 15,471 1,565 11,668 – 20 – 144 29 693 456 – 369 – 527 1963 15,937 1,628 12,727 – 8 – 218 39 451 299 – 564 – 3 1964 16,841 1,845 13,020 – 8 – 211 21 629 300 – 804 – 3 1965 15,265 777 13,099 – 7 – 1 – 577 247 30 524 – 3 1966 10,135 50 8,762 – – 25 – 17 – 647 60 374 200 – 1967 11,401 89 9,056 – – 56 – 150 – 910 147 665 328 – 1968 10,602 96 8,711 – – 80 – 52 – 802 145 440 276 – 1969 10,909 89 8,230 – – 140 – 60 – 1,044 124 756 466 – 1970 11,887 303 9,319 1 – 88 – 22 – 944 165 638 407 – 1971 12,244 92 9,050 40 – 188 – 210 – 1,105 234 492 833 – 1972 11,425 86 8,276 51 – 218 – 238 – 1,154 237 720 443 2 1973 12,837 103 8,639 105 182 286 – 309 – 1,595 213 887 515 3 1974 12,582 104 8,224 176 124 334 – 289 – 1,788 323 759 458 3 1975 12,813 93 8,427 206 184 345 – 228 – 1,570 303 927 526 4 1976 10,958 76 8,052 224 – 305 – 269 – 996 233 473 326 4 Source: British West Indies Central Labor Organization. nual yield of about 10 million tons. 3 In recent years, most of this cane has been harvested by eight to ten thousand West Indian contract workers. In the cane fields, workers confront a virtually impenetrable jungle. The variety of cane grown in Florida tends to be very tall (twelve to fourteen feet) and exceptionally thick. Because of their height and weight, many stalks are bent over to the ground, with leaves and stalks intertwined. To remove the leaves, which have no sugar content, the fields are burned before they are cut. The burning also helps to drive out insects and other pests. Growers tell workers not to kill the snakes, however, because the snakes eat the rats. Cutting cane is hard, dangerous and dirty work. Swinging two-foot, razor-sharp knives, the workers must bend to cut the stalks off at the ground, gather the stalks into the cut pile, and trim off the tops. To protect themselves from the knives, workers wear awkward foot, shin and hand guards, made of metal and reminiscent of medieval armor. Despite the guards, cutting accidents-often meaning loss of a finger or toe – are common. By the end of the day, cane cutters are covered with sticky, black ash and cane fiber that cause the skin and scalp to itch. For protection they must wear hats and long- sleeve shirts-despite the humid, 80 degree weather. A cooling breeze is only partly welcome, however, since it blows the fine soil and ash into dark clouds that invade the workers’ eyes and mouths. Even under these conditions the companies demand that a worker cut a ton of trimmed cane every hour. Few domestic farmworkers cut sugar cane. The problem is not so much that domestic workers are reluctant to take on such dirty and dangerous work, as the growers claim, but rather that they refuse to be driven at the required pace for such low pay. As a result the growers discourage them from applying for the jobs. “The real reason the growers don’t want us,” said one North American who was refused employment, “is that they can pay those wetbacks (sic) less and they dog them around. Those Jamaicans don’t stop cutting; they run all day. If they stop running, they are sent back to the islands. The growers know they can’t dog Americans around like that.” 4 In large measure, the ability of the growers to “dog” the West Indians is derived from the nature of the contract labor system, and the specific character of the West Indian contract. PARTIES TO THE CONTRACT: WORKERS UNINVITED The West Indian workers have no say in negotiating the contracts they work under for one to nine months each year. From the beginning the program has been controlled by government officials and growers who write the contracts to serve their own interests. In annual negotiations the West Indian governments are represented by the British West Indies Central Labor Organization (BWICLO) and the growers by associations organized on the basis of crops and regions. The policies of BWICLO reflect the goal of the Jamaican and other participating West Indian governments: to promote labor emigration as a means of neutralizing social ahd political tensions which result from unemployment. That BWICLO functions to serve this end is determined by the organization’s directorate, the Central Labor Board, composed of high ranking government officials: the Jamaican Secretary of Labor, Undersecretary of Finance and Solicitor General, the Barbadian Secretary of Labor and the Prime Minister of St. Lucia. The only board member representing labor is the head of the National Workers Union of Jamaica, but the union is closely linked to the party of the current prime minister and can be depended upon to represent the government’s policies. BWICLO maintains liaison officers in the United States to negotiate and enforce the labor contracts. In both functions, we shall see, the liaison officers are led to compromise the economic needs of the workers in order to ensure the possiblity of employment in the United States. In their negotiations to contract West Indian cane cutters, the sugar cane growers are represented by two associations: the Florida Sugar Producers Association and the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association which together represent a dozen companies which hire foreign contract workers. Three of these companies, the U.S. Sugar Company, the Okeelanta Sugar Division of the Gulf & Western Food Products Company and the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida hire about two-thirds of the contract workers. Not all the companies which hire West Indians are as large as these, but the smaller companies are dominated by the giant sugar milling and refining companies that purchase their cane. Regardless of their size, the labor needs of the cane growing companies are equally well served by the contracts. THE CONTRACT The laborcontractsstipulatethe obligations of the workers, the growers and BWICLO. The major requirements placed on the Before cutting starts the cane is burned to remove the leaves. 13NACLA Report workers are so vague that they allow growers a free hand in their interpretation. Each worker must “diligently and faithfully perform the duties of an agricultural worker,” which in this case is to cut sugar cane. They must also “obey and comply with all the rules and regulations of the employer.” These rules must be approved by BWICLO, but the only specific limitation put on them in the contract is that the workers cannot be forced to work for more than eight hours a day for six days a week-what the contract defines as full-time work. The obligations of the employers take up seven times more fine print than do those of the workers. In the end, however, they do not require as much. Growers must pay the workers’ round trip transportation from the islands. Presumably to assure that the workers do not take advantage of the free ride and skip off, the growers are allowed to deduct the transportation costs from the workers’ wages during the first half of the employment period. During the second half they must repay the workers. Once the workers are in Florida, the growers are obliged to provide them with free housing. The growers must also supply the same medical care and compensation for work-related injuries and diseases that are required for domestic workers by state laws. If a worker dies, the company is supposed to provide a “suitable burial” or pay to have the body shipped home. How much the growers must pay a worker for “diligently and faithfully” fulfilling his obligations is laid out in complicated clauses which establish an hourly wage rate, a minimum number of hours of work, and wage deductions. In sum, the growers must pay the workers the hourly or piece rates which prevail for similar workers in the region. The hourly wage rate is the adverse effect wage rate set by the Department of Labor. Piece rates are not stipulated in the contract, however, and this omission, as we shall see, provides the growers with the means to avoid paying what the contract requires. By the time the contract expires, growers must have provided full-time work at these wages for at Workers of U.S. Sugar Corporation line up for their bi-weekly pay. 14Nov.I Dec.1977 16 least seventy-five percent of the contract period. Before a worker receives his bi-weekly pay, the following deductions are made: three percent of his wages are given to BWICLO to buy the workers life insurance or to pay for “expenses reasonably incurred on behalf of the worker in any emergency,” a clause which gives BWICLO discretion over large sums of the workers’ earnings. Another eighteen percent is given to BWICLO as forced savings to be sent home to the workers’ dependents. Up to $150 of these savings, however, can be kept in escrow to pay off any outstanding debts if the worker’s contract is cancelled. Finally, the growers are allowed to deduct the cost of meals. Intotal, about one-third of a worker’s earnings is deducted from his pay check before he receives it. Although BWICLO liaison officers are supposed to enforce the contract and look out for workers’ interests on the mainland, none of these duties is written into the contract. The contract does not create any grievance procedure for the workers to follow if their rights are abused, and BWICLO is not required to take any remedial action on the workers’ behalf. These omissions become crucial in light of a contract provision that gives the growers the right to terminate a worker’s con- tract virtually at will. If either the grower or BWICLO decides that a worker is “unwilling to work in accordance with the terms of this agreement or determines that the worker has committed an act of misconduct or indiscipline” then the grower can terminate the contract immediately and repatriate the worker at the worker’s expense. THE PRODUCTIVITY SQUEEZE Minimum hourly wages for cane cutting have risen from $1.15 in 1964 to $3.23 in 1977. To counter the increasing cost of labor, growers have made sure that workers produce more for their money. Contract cane-cutters are paid piece rates, according to how many rows or fractions of rows they cut per day. The standard row of cane in Florida is a quarter of a mile long, and one row corresponds to the average worker’s daily “task.” Tasks are assigned to each worker every morning by the lead man who also tells the workers how much the company will pay. Task payments often vary from field to field and even from row to row, depending on the estimated number of tons per row. How willingly the workers accept the task price is determined by factors which affect the difficulty of cutting quickly, such as the thickness and tangle of the stalks and how closely they are planted together. Outside rows, or “Charlie Franks,” are usually the most tangled and difficult to cut. Historically, piece rates have been used by employers to speed rip the work process and maximize the output of each worker. In the case of contract workers, piece rates are especially effective when combined with a minimum work quota that every worker must achieve or be sent home. Domestic workers in industries paying piece rates constantly bargain over the rate and frequently strike because of it. For contract workers that option has rarely worked. In the mid-1960’s, West Indian workers struck in protest over low task rates on the average of once a month. The field reports of the BWICLO officers describe how the protests were typically “resolved”: … Fifteen men were sent home for agitating and inciting others to strike. … The men returned to work the following day after five men were removed. … Since repatriation of one worker who was deemed the ring leader, work has progressed smoothly. The growers’ methods have definitely been effective. According to a U.S. Department of Agriculture study of the sugar industry, 2.4 labor hours were required to produce a ton of Florida sugar cane in 1963. A decade later, workers took only 1.6 hours to harvest a ton, an increase in productivity of 30 percent. 6 OVERWORKED AND UNDER- RECORDED According to federal regulations, cane cutters paid at a piece rate must earn at least the equivalent of the minimum hourly wage as stipulated in the contract. A Department of Labor investigation found, however, that 65% of the workers were paid even less. The growers tried to hide this fact by systematically mis-recording the number of hours cane cutters worked. Although workers eat in minutes, they are marked down for a full half hour. Timekeepers in the field typically recorded starting time only after the last worker had been assigned a row; they marked half an hour for lunch even when workers took short lunches to earn more; they recorded a worker’s quitting time as the last time they saw him in the fields or, in order to “simplify records,” just rounded quitting time down to the last hour. The Atlantic Sugar Association was not so creative. According to investigators, “The daily hours of work appear to have been simply reduced by whatever amount of time was needed to show daily minimum wage compliance. Overall it was discovered that during the 1973-74 harvest, workers, who for their part were whipping themselves to make every minute count, were being short changed at least one and a half hours a day, or 20% of their earnings. 7 Fearing that a strict enforcement of the contract might detract from the contract program’s appeal BWICLO and other West Indian officials do little or nothing to make sure that the few legal rights contract workers do have are respected. This situation is illustrated by BWICLO’s ineffectiveness in correcting grower disregard for the safety of their employees. For years, cane companies illegally transported cutters to and from the fields in trucks with standing room only. Before the 1973 harvest began, the Department of Labor ordered growers to provide trucks with fixed seating for each worker as required by law. Gulf and Western chose to ignore the directive. One of its trucks, over-crowded and top heavy with standing passengers, went off the side of a road. Thirty-six workers were hospitalized with broken bones, bruises and lacerations from flying cane knives. BWICLO took no effective action. Three weeks later another Gulf and Western truck skidded off the road and rolled over. All 86 passengers were injured and hospitalized, and one died. Gulf and Western was fined $1,800 by the U.S. Department of Labor. 8 Shortly after the accidents, Jamaica’s Ambassador to the U.S. visited the Florida camps. When asked about the growers’ trucking practices, he replied: “Yes, it’s a problem. But if a man came to me and asked my personal opinion of what he should do-the choice is not working- I think I would have to tell him: Risk the truck.” The Ambassador took a similar position with regard to wages: Cutting cane is hard work…worth more than $2.15 an hour. I know I would not cut cane for $100 an hour… But we fight for increased wages for our workers every year, and maybe we will get up to $5 an hour. But, then maybe Americans will want to cut cane and the Jamaicans will not be allowed to come anymore. So then the program ends. 9 UNIONIZATION: IT’S NOT IN THE CONTRACT If the supervisor sees us talking to a white man, we get sent home. We complain about the food here, we get sent home. We say we want more money for the cane, we get sent home. Anything we do the supervisor don’t like, we get sent home. Growers never hesitate to exercise the pow. er of repatriation, granted by the contract, or to remind workers that they have it. As a result, strkes by contract workers have been consistently smashed, and strike leaders, or “village lawyers” as the growers call them, have been quickly removed from the scene. In one season alone, 600 out of the 5,200 cane cutters employed by the Florida Sugar Producers Association were sent home for “breach of contract”. ‘1 These breached workers are then “u-listed,” which means that their chances of returning to the United States on contract are permanently blocked. This control over the work force- an inherent feature of the contract system-has also been a barrier to unity between foreign agricultural workers and domestic farmworkers. West Indian contract workers have either been used as scab labor, or punished by deportation for their support of farmworker struggles. Two examples tell both these stor- ies. In 1972, the United Farm Workers were organizing sugar workers at the Talisman Sugar Corporation in South Bay, Florida. Talisman both grows sugar and operates one of the largest mills in the nation. Some 150 truck drivers at the mill went out on strike for union representation by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. When the company fired the striking workers, the UFW set up picket lines. One UFW supporter, Nan Freeman, was killed on the picket line by a truck. Ultimately, the strike was lost. Workers claimed that the company maintained production during the strike by using contract workers from Jamaica. The company admitted that Jamaicans had been employed, but said they were U.S. residents. I” The UFW was convinced, however, that the contract program would have to be stopped before organizing efforts could succeed among sugar workers in the state of Florida. The union brought, and lost, a suit before a U.S. District Court Judge, asking for a restraining order against the importation of foreign laborers to harvest cane. Eliseo Medina, in charge of the UFW in Florida at the time, argued to no avail that growers were keeping conditions so bad that North Americans would not apply for the jobs. “It’s a classic example,” he said, “of the poor people of one country being used against the poor of another.” A different scenario developed at the Moore Haven Sugar House in 1976. Workers at the mill and refinery, owned by the Glades County Sugar Growers Cooperative, went out on strike over company efforts to revise the seniority system to avoid promoting black and latino workers into predominantly white departments. At the time, the Growers Cooperative employed some five to six hundred West Indian contract workers. These workers supported the strike-and every single one of them was promptly repatriated.” The debilitating effect the Jamaican contract program exerts on unionization efforts and direct struggles for better working conditions resides in two factors: the inherent powerlessness of a deportable worker, and the chronically depressed economy of Jamaica, which makes its government beholden to such a program in the first place. Of these, deportation is the real club, evident in the remark of Fred Sikes of the U.S. Sugar Corporation: “If I had a remedy comparable to breaching an unsatisfactory worker-which is allowed under the West Indian contract-that I could apply to the American worker, then he might work better too.” The difficulty growers face in maintaining such strict control over domestic laborers, even those who work under similar contracts, is illustrated by the history of the Puerto Rican contract system. THE CANE CONTRACT: WEST INDIANS IN FLORIDA 1. NACLA interview with Harold Edwards, Chief Liaison Officer of the British West Indies Central Labor Organization (BWICLO), September 1977. 2. Kramer, The Offshores, 3. 3. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, The Sugar Industry’s Structure, Pricing and Performance, Agricultural Economic Report No. 364, 1977, 95. 4. Philip Shabecoff, “Florida Cane Cutters: Alien, Poor, Afraid,” New York Times, March 12, 1973. 5. Kramer, The Offshores, 50. 6. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Sugar Policy Options for the United States, Agricultural Economic Report No. 351, 1977, 33- 4. 7. Department of Labor, “Wage Survey for 1973-74 South Florida Sugar Harvest,” reprinted in Subcommittee on Agricultural Labor, Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, Oversight Hearings on Department of Labor Certification of the Use of Offshore Labor, 94th Congress, March 20, 1975 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), 209, 253. 8. Palm Beach Post, December 18, 1973, January 8, 1973; Barry, Marshall, “Conventional Wisdoms in Florida Agriculture,” in Leo Sandon, Jr., (editor), Florida’s Farmworker…Toward a Responsible Public Policy, (Talahassee, Florida: Institute for Social Policy Studies, 1977), 30. 9. Palm Beach Post,January 24, 1974. 10. Kramer, The Offshores, 51. 11. Miami Herald, February 24, 1972. 12. Miami Herald, September 24, 30, 1972; New York Times, September 24, October 10, 1972, March 12, 1973. 13. Kastner, Marti, and I.C. Van Buskirk, “In South Florida Sugar Workers Strike,” The Guardian, March 24, 1976.
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