08/17/2014 Trip to Farmworker Camps in Yuba City to Provide Food, Clothes and Legal Advice Sessions

Went to Yuba City with CCLP and Western Farm Workers Association to Provide Free Legal Advice Sessions and Consultations

My name is Sean Olender and I am lawyer practicing immigration and employment law. On Sunday August 17, 2014 I traveled to Yuba City, California with the Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals San Francisco Operations Manager Michele Hays to meet with the Yuba City office of the Western Farm Workers Association to provide assistance in the farmworker camps in Yuba City.  We met Ingrid Devore, her coworker Juan and volunteers and traveled to two camps, Richland, which is a California State owned camp and after that a privately owned camp called the Juan Acosta Camp, which is sometimes called the River Ranch Camp.

The state-run camp was in good condition and the privately owned one was dirty and without basic living requirements like clean bathrooms, showers and kitchens.

I provided a free legal advice session at each camp and then free individual private legal consultations.  I warned the farm workers and their families that there are a limited range of options to obtain legal immigration status in the United States and that those options were available to only a few people - most do not qualify for any type of immigration benefit or defense to deportation.  I always stress this during free legal advice sessions because farmworkers and their families are vulnerable to pitches selling false hope of a way to get US residence. I also informed them about the 100% free legal services provided through CCLP.

The Western Farm Workers Association distributed free food and clothing to the farmworkers and their families. CCLP San Francisco and CCLP Sacramento organized the legal advice sessions and free individual legal consultations.

It was a good day, but hot with midday temperature about 97 degrees. It was also a LONG drive, but Michele patiently listened to my long stories, so the time passed quickly... for me.

The Law Treats Farmworkers Differently

California's Fair Labor Standards Act was enacted in 1938.  The law provides a minimum wage, overtime at 1.5 times the regular rate for each hour over eight worked in a day or over 40 in a week; the law mandates employer recordkeeping.  The FLSA excluded farm workers until the State Assembly amended the law in 1966 to apply the minimum wage and recordkeeping rules to farm workers.  California farm workers are entitled to overtime only if they work more than 10 hours in a day or 60 hours in a week.

Before Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association in the 1960s and worked to organize farm workers, most workers lived in unclean and dangerously dilapidated housing, went without clean water, were exposed to dangerous levels of cancer-causing pesticides without proper protective gear, and suffered impossibly low wages.  On September 15, 1965, Mexican Independence Day, NFWA voted to join a Filipino farm workers association called AWOC and begin the famous five year strike against California grape growers in the Coachella Valley.  The coalition became the United Farm Workers (UFW) and won a contract with the grape growers on July 29, 1970.

In August 1975 Antonio Orendain, one of Cesar Chavez's associates who was frustrated with UFW's progress, established the Texas Farm Workers Union (TFWU).  UFW was not as extensively involved in Texas as it was in California - the UFW never signed any contracts with growers in Texas, but did persuade Texas lawmakers to enact laws providing workers compensation, minimum wage increases, toilets in the fields and unemployment compensation for Texas farm workers.

On May 26, 1975 a supervisor of the El Texano Ranch in Hidalgo, Reynosa, Mexico fired on TFWU union organizers during a confrontation, which resulted in a strike that spread throughout Texas.  In 1976 Orendain led TFWU activists on a 420 mile march from Hidalgo to Austin.  The following year he organized a 1,600 mile march to Washington D.C. to the Lincoln Memorial.  President Jimmy Carter refused to meet with the TFWU marchers.

While living conditions at the Richland camp, funded by the State of California, appeared generally good, it was next door to an orchard that was aerially sprayed with pesticides. The field was no more than 30 feet from dense apartment-like housing and the workers who lived there reported illnesses as a result of the spraying.

The privately run River Ranch camp was dilapidated and unclean as shown by pictures that I took during the volunteer trip.

It seems that little improvement has been made in farm worker living conditions. Minimum wages for farm workers are one important improvement. But some of the living conditions I witnessed on this volunteer trip were less comfortable than the ones enjoyed by Tom Joad's character in the 1930s as portrayed in the movie The Grapes of Wrath.

If you're curious to see what life is like for farm workers in California, take a drive up to Yuba on a Sunday and visit the Richland and River Ranch camps and see for yourself.