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Workers often face dangerous working conditions.

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Workers often face dangerous working conditions.

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Working illegally or legally, immigrants often face unsanitary and dangerous living conditions when working and living on farms. With the growing fear , however less workers on the fields mean immigrants now can demand better conditions since farmers are desperate for the labor. Immigrants are now even reporting employers who violate their rights.

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The U.S. Department of Labor is accusing an Arizona farm of housing about 70 Mexican farmworkers in dangerous and unsanitary conditions and paying them illegally low wages, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court last week.

Santiago Gonzalez, the owner of G Farms in El Mirage, Ariz., housed workers in school buses and trailers without any windows, in violation of federal safety regulations, officials said.

The workers were brought in under the federally supervised H-2A visa program, which allows U.S. growers to import seasonal laborers from abroad. Employers who use the program are required to pay a minimum wage set by the government and provide the guest workers free transportation and housing, which must include 50 square feet of sleeping space per person.

Regulators have ratcheted up scrutiny of the agricultural guest worker program in recent years, as employers increasingly rely on it to fill a labor shortage caused in part by a dramatic drop in immigration from Mexico. But federal investigators have uncovered cases of employers shorting wages, soliciting kickbacks, illegally deducting rent and holding workers hostage to their visas.

After investigators confronted Gonzalez, he moved the workers into two hotels. But one of his employees called the Labor Department last week and reported that Gonzalez was charging the workers to stay in the rooms, and for their food and transportation.

The department has asked for a temporary restraining order to force Gonzalez to pay workers what they are owed and "to ensure that these workers are kept safe from life threatening conditions."

Stephen Barr, a spokesman for the Labor Department, declined to comment. Gonzalez did not respond to requests for comment.

Kristina Espinoza, a labor department investigator who recently visited the farm, described a "makeshift labor camp" that was "dangerous" and "unsanitary," according to court documents.

When Gonzalez applied for H-2A workers this year, he pledged to house them in a nearby hotel. Instead, he had them living in four yellow school buses and two trailers, where they had less than a foot of space between each bed, Espinoza said.Federal standards require three to four feet.

The trailers didn't have windows, and workers in the buses had nowhere to put their belongings, so their items were strewn across the trash-filled sleeping quarters, Espinoza said.

Gonzalez had workers shower in nine stalls inside a cargo container; there was no functional sewage system, so wastewater accumulated underneath the container, Espinoza said. The electrical cord used to light the facility was exposed to standing water, posing a risk of electrocution, according to court documents.

The workers shared one toilet in the trailer and had access to port-a-potties.

Each of those conditions is an apparent violation Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations for labor camps, which apply to H-2A workers.

Growers in Arizona last year recruited 6,205 guest workers, up from 2,091 in 2011. The vast majority of them were employed around Yuma, where many of California's produce companies operate during winter months. Arizona ranks eighth nationwide in recruitment of H-2A workers, according to the data; California ranks fifth.

G Farms was approved to hire 70 laborers to cultivate and harvest potatoes, watermelon and onions for standard 40-hour workweeks, from April 2 through July 31, according to federal records. Gonzalez's application, dated Jan. 31, was approved at a $10.95 minimum hourly rate.

Instead, Gonzalez paid $0.13 to $0.70 per bag, Espinoza said.
natalie.kitroeff@latimes.com geoffrey.mohan@latimes.com

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Arizona farm accused of abusing Mexican migrant workers

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The U.S. Department of Labor is accusing an Arizona farm of housing about 70 Mexican farmworkers in dangerous and unsanitary conditions and paying them illegally low wages, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court last week.

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A 2015 report by The National Milk Producers Federation found that a complete loss of immigrant labor would cost the U.S economy 32.1 billion dollars in output and cause the prices of milk to rise 90% (Loosing immigrant workers on dairy farms).

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Americans don't want the jobs that the majority of immigrants are taking.

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Americans don't want the jobs that the majority of immigrants are taking.

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Arnulfo Solorio's desperate mission to recruit farmworkers for the Napa Valley took him far from the pastoral vineyards to a raggedy parking lot in Stockton, in the heart of the Central Valley.

Carrying a fat stack of business cards for his company, Silverado Farming, Solorio approached one prospect, a man with only his bottom set of teeth. He told Solorio that farm work in Stockton pays $11 to $12 an hour. Solorio countered: "Look, we are paying $14.50 now, but we are going up to $16." The man nodded skeptically.

Solorio moved on to two men huddled nearby, and returned quickly. "They were drug addicts," he said. "And, they didn't have a car."

Before the day was through, Solorio would make the same pitch to dozens of men and women, approaching a taco truck, a restaurant and a homeless encampment. Time was short: He needed to find 100 workers to fill his ranks by April 1, when grapevines begin to grow and need constant attention.

Solorio is one of a growing number of agricultural businessmen who say they face an urgent shortage of workers. The flow of labor began drying up when President Obama tightened the border. Now President Trump is promising to deport more people, raid more companies and build a wall on the southern border.

That has made California farms a proving ground for the Trump team's theory that by cutting off the flow of immigrants they will free up more jobs for American-born workers and push up their wages.

So far, the results aren't encouraging for farmers or domestic workers.

Farmers are being forced to make difficult choices about whether to abandon some of the state's hallmark fruits and vegetables, move operations abroad, import workers under a special visa or replace them altogether with machines.

Growers who can afford it have already begun raising worker pay well beyond minimum wage. Wages for crop production in California increased by 13% from 2010 to 2015, twice as fast as average pay in the state, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Today, farmworkers in the state earn about $30,000 a year if they work full time - about half the overall average pay in California. Most work fewer hours.

Some farmers are even giving laborers benefits normally reserved for white-collar professionals, like 401(k) plans, health insurance, subsidized housing and profit-sharing bonuses. Full-timers at Silverado Farming, for example, get most of those sweeteners, plus 10 paid vacation days, eight paid holidays, and can earn their hourly rate to take English classes.

But the raises and new perks have not tempted native-born Americans to leave their day jobs for the fields. Nine in 10 agriculture workers in California are still foreign born, and more than half are undocumented, according to a federal survey.

Instead, companies growing high-value crops, like Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in Napa, are luring employees from fields in places like Stockton that produce cheaper wine grapes or less profitable fruits and vegetables.

Growers who can't raise wages are losing their employees and dealing with it by mechanizing, downsizing or switching to less labor-intensive crops.

Jeff Klein is doing all of the above. Last year Klein, a fourth-generation Stockton farmer, ran a mental ledger, trying to sort out the pros and cons of persevering in the wine business or quitting. He couldn't make the math work.

Wineries pay Klein a tiny fraction of what they pony up for the same grape variety grown in Napa, and the rising cost of labor meant he was losing money on his vineyards. So in October, Klein decided to rip out 113,000 Chardonnay grapevines that once blanketed land his family has owned for decades. Now they lay heaped into hundreds of piles, waiting to be taken to the dump.

"I try to make any decision I make not emotional. When you're running a business, it has to be a financial decision," he says, sifting through the mangled metal posts.

Five years ago, Klein had a crew of 100 workers pruning, tying and suckering his grapevines. Wineries paid $700 for a ton of grapes, and Klein could make a solid profit paying $8 an hour, the minimum wage.

Last year he could barely get together 45 laborers, and his grapes sold for only $350 per ton. Klein knew his vines were done for when California passed laws raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2023 and requiring overtime for field laborers.

"There's not enough guys, and everybody is fighting for everybody else's guys," he says. "In Napa and Sonoma, they're getting $2,000 a ton [for grapes]. So, those guys can afford to pay $15. For me, I'm just trying to break even."

Although Trump earned Klein's vote, he worries that recent executive orders ratcheting up deportation plans and calling for a wall are putting a chokehold on an already tight pool of workers.

"That's killing our labor force," says the 35-year-old grower.

Already, fewer Mexicans had been willing to risk border crossings as security and deportations escalated under the Obama Administration. At the same time, Mexico's own economy was mushrooming, offering decent jobs for people who stayed behind.

With the grapevines he has left, Klein is doing what he can to pare his crews. Last year, he bought a leaf puller for $50,000, which turns the delicate process of culling grapevine canopies into an exercise in brute force. The puller hooks onto a tractor and, like an oddly shaped vacuum cleaner, sucks leaves from grapevines.

He used to spend $100 an acre culling the canopies, which allows the right amount of sunlight to hit the grapes and turn them into sugar balls. Now, he says, "It will cost me 20 bucks, and I can get rid of some labor."

Klein says he'll spend the next five years replacing his 1,000 acres of grapevines with almond and olive trees, which require a fraction of the human contact to grow.

About 80 miles west in Napa, growers aren't facing quite the same challenge. Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in Napa go for nearly $6,900 per ton, 10 times more than in San Joaquin County.

Leadin intro type: Benton Gothic Reg. 32/42 pt. #58595b Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Times analysis-Joe Fox / @latimesgraphics Napa farm workers are state's highest paid Areas like Napa County, where high-value wine grapes are grown, are luring workers from lower-paying areas like San Joaquin County.> $40,000$30,000 - $40,000$20,000 - $30,000$10,000 - $20,000 No data available Average crop worker wages, 2015

That's the reason that Napa County pays its farmworkers $41,940 a year, the highest in California, our analysis of federal data shows.

That's also why Leovijildo Martinez clambers into a van around 4:40 a.m. every morning to travel from Stockton to the Napa Valley.

By 6:30 a.m. he is on a Napa vineyard, and 12 hours later, he returns to his two-bedroom apartment.

"You get home, you shower, you eat a couple of tortillas with whatever is here," Martinez says. He gets to see his kids' faces and give them a hug before turning in at 9:30 p.m. They still complain about not seeing him enough.

"It's hard for me as a man and as a father," he says.

But the commute is paying off. A year ago, the 31-year-old from Mexico was earning $14.75 an hour doing the same work for a different Napa company. He joined Silverado in April and now he's making $19.50 working vineyards that produce grapes for a winery whose bottles go for about $300.

"Everything in Napa is different. They treat you differently there, they don't pressure you, and they respect the law," he says. "If you work here, in Stockton, you don't have enough money."

According to the economic theory behind Trump's immigration crackdown, Americans should be following Martinez's van into the fields.

"The law of supply and demand doesn't stop being true just because you're talking about people," says George Borjas, a Harvard economist and prominent foe of unfettered immigration. "[Farmers] have had an almost endless supply of low-skill workers for a long time, and now they are finding it difficult to transition to a situation where they don't."

Borjas believes the ones who reap the rewards of immigration are employers - not just farmers, but restaurant owners and well-to-do homeowners who hire landscapers and housekeepers. The people who suffer most are American workers, who contend with more competition for jobs and lower pay.

But Silverado, the farm labor contracting company in Napa, has never had a white, American-born person take an entry-level gig, even after the company increased hourly wages to $4 above the minimum. And Silverado is far from unique.

U.S. workers filled just 2% of a sample of farm labor vacancies advertised in 1996, according to a report published by the Labor Department's office of inspector general. "I don't think anybody would dispute that that's roughly the way it is now" as well, says Philip Martin, an economist at UC Davis and one of the country's leading experts on agriculture.

Indeed, Chalmers R. Carr III, the president of Titan Farms, a South Carolina peach giant, told lawmakers at a 2013 hearing that he advertised 2,000 job openings from 2010 through 2012. Carr said he was paying $9.39, $2 more than the state's minimum wage at the time.

" You don't need a deep analysis to understand why farm work wouldn't be attractive to young Americans " - Philip Martin, agriculture expert

He hired 483 U.S. applicants, slightly less than a quarter of what he needed; 109 didn't show up on the first day. Another 321 of them quit, "the vast majority in the first two days," Carr testified. Only 31 lasted for the entire peach season.

Borjas, the Harvard economist, says that it may just be that wages are still too low. "Believe me, if the wages were really, really high, you and I would be lining up," Borjas says.

Or perhaps farms are just not a place where native-born Americans want to work. The job is seasonal, so laborers have to alternate between long stretches without any income and then months of 60-hour weeks. They work in extreme heat and cold, and spend all day bending over to reach vegetables or climbing up and down ladders to pluck fruit in trees.

"You don't need a deep analysis to understand why farm work wouldn't be attractive to young Americans," says Martin, the agriculture expert.

If farmers upped the average wage to, say, $25 an hour, people born here might think twice. But that's a pipe dream, many argue.

"Well before we got to $25, there would be machines out in the fields, doing pruning or harvesting, or we would lose crops," Martin says.

Already, strawberry growers in Ventura are experimenting with robots that plant seedlings, and growers in Central Coast counties are culling, weeding and even harvesting heads of lettuce with machines. At the outer edge, engineers are trying to teach machines to pick fruit.

Brad Goehring, a fourth-generation farmer, is re-engineering his vineyards so they can be harvested entirely by machines.

The 52-year-old owns 500 acres of wine grapes in Lodi, near Stockton. He tends another 10,000 or so acres of vineyards that belong to several clients across Northern California.

Being the boss used to be fun for Goehring, but his labor problems are wearying.

In the last five years, he has advertised in local newspapers and accepted more than a dozen unemployed applicants from the state's job agency. Even when the average rate on his fields was $20 an hour, the U.S.-born workers lost interest, fast.

"We've never had one come back after lunch," he says.

For now, Goehring is betting his future on 10 floppy rows of Malbec vines. The vines, visible from the slender country road that borders Goehring's house, were among his first experiments in mechanization.

About five years ago, Goehring changed the wiring holding up parts of his vines so that no metal stakes exceed the height of the wire. The setup allows for a machine to prune the top of the vine, as well as both sides.

"I think we can eliminate, I'm just guessing, 85% of the labor on these new vineyards," he says, reducing pruning costs from $300 per acre, on average, to $80. He plans to keep spending more on machinery, like his $350,000 tractor-like vehicle that shakes grapes off the vine and catches them before they fall to the ground.

Now, he's replanting entire ranches for clients interested in machine-managed vineyards.

Goehring's long game is hundreds of acres of wine grapes harvested without ever touching human hands. If that doesn't work, he'd reluctantly replace it all with almonds.

"If we have to, we'd go there," he says. If filled with nut trees, his entire property could be managed, he says, by three employees.
Times staff writer Ben Welsh contributed data analysis to this report. The analysis has been published as open-source software.
More from the Los Angeles Times

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Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don't want the job

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Arnulfo Solorio's desperate mission to recruit farmworkers for the Napa Valley took him far from the pastoral vineyards to a raggedy parking lot in Stockton, in the heart of the Central Valley. Carrying a fat stack of business cards for his company, Silverado Farming, Solorio approached one prospect, a man with only his bottom set of teeth.

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Immigrants keep the cost of produce low, providing cheap labor.

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Immigrants keep the cost of produce low, providing cheap labor.

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Immigrants also have a positive impact on our society, such as winning Nobel prizes. 

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Immigrants also have a positive impact on our society, such as winning Nobel prizes. 

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"Immigrants in the United States are represented in all of the fields for which Nobel prizes are awarded. The percentage of U.S. prizewinners who are immigrants includes 26 percent for chemistry, 32 percent for physics, 31 percent for physiology or medicine, 31 percent for economics, and, perhaps surprisingly, 27 percent for literature,(National Research Council  p385).”

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Immigrant children often escape gang violence in their native country seeking asylum in the United States, only to be turned away and sent back to the violence they are escaping.