photos from the edge 45 - THE LABOR HISTORY OF SNOW PEAS

photos from the edge 45 - THE LABOR HISTORY OF SNOW PEAS
By David Bacon
The Bittman Project, 10/7/26
https://bittmanproject.substack.com/p/the-labor-and-history-of-snow-peas?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=175366&post_id=218968664&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=8mf9r&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Santa Maria, CA - Enrique Acuña works in a crew of Mexican immigrants picking snow peas for Bautista Farms.

Not long ago I pulled my car to the side of the highway when I saw a crew almost hidden in tall rows of vines, harvesting snow peas.  It was a small group, working for a small grower, Bautista Farms, in a field along that part of State Route 166 that begins as East Main Street in Santa Maria, and ends as West Main Street eight miles later in Guadalupe.
 
Marco Bautista and his father Berto Bautista, the owners of Bautista Farms, planted the field. Unlike many growers, though, they don't actually own the land under the vines.  Marco explained that the family rents three fields next to each other, each planted at slightly different times.  As one ripens, the workers go in to pick.  By the time they finish that field, the next one is ready.  And when workers have come to the last row in the last field, more snow peas are ready in the first field and the cycle starts again.  

In the season between April and October, Marco said, the crew will pick each field as many at least eight times.  Mark Gaskell, farm advisor for the University of California Extension, explains, "The best fields may be picked 15 to 20 times, with 3 to 5 days between pickings."  A good snow pea field can yield as much as 10,000 pounds per acre. In 2008 snow peas earned California growers $35 million.

According to Ann Lopez, author of The Farmworkers' Journey, "The protracted growing season requires an ever-greater labor force to grow and harvest specialty crops effectively.  California agriculture has thus become more dependent on migrant labor over the past few decades."  The crew of Mexican migrant workers in the Bautista field bore her observation out.

Snow peas are a rare crop in Santa Maria, among the miles of fields devoted to broccoli and lettuce on California's Central Coast. Each crop demands from growers its own cycle and system for planting and cultivation, but for workers the labor makes a constant demand - speed. They are paid at a piece rate, and to make any money a person must work so fast that the movement of hands becomes a blur.

Lopez argues that labor costs are not only up to half the cost of crops like snow peas, but that "they are critical as components of the process over which the grower has some control."  Their answer is often to implement a piece rate system, in which workers are paid according to the amount they pick.  "Approximately 30 percent of California farmworkers," she writes, "are paid on a piece-rate basis, which may be the source of increased injury because attention is focused on maximizing production."

Photographing these farmworkers, therefore, required creating images that get close enough to see the blur of hands or the determined expression on a face - images that that allow the viewer to imagine the weight of the filled bucket.  I can take the photographs because farmworkers are still educating me about this work.  
 
My education about farm labor began along this same Route 166 decades ago.  My teachers were workers like Luis Ayala and Paulino Pacheco.  Both were older men born in Mexico, who'd spent their lifetimes as farmworkers on this side of the border.  In Santa Maria they'd organized the big lettuce and row crop strikes of 1969 and 1970, and I met them just after I joined the United Farm Workers a few years later.
 
Luis and Paulino knew that workers often carry a big load of anger into the fields. Paulino remembered going to Delano, in the Central Valley, at the beginning of the great grape strike, and then coming home to Santa Maria determined to start the farmworker movement there.  He collected a few dead cockroaches (not hard in farmworker housing) and took them to work in his shirt pocket the next day.  As the morning grew hot he went to the water cooler, put his mouth under the spigot (no paper cups in those days) and then pretended to spit them out.  He yelled at the foreman that the water had bugs in it. People began shouting, and the strike in that crew was on.
 
Both men got blacklisted for their union activity, and worked in the union's campaigns in the valley for many years afterwards.  They and the small group of Santa Maria Chavistas (so called because they followed Cesar Chavez) were unreconstructed radicals.  On my first visit to the house of one family I saw a huge picture of Che Guevara on the living room wall. I felt I was home.

When I met Luis and Paulino I was a legal worker in the UFW office, my Spanish still too primitive to be effective as an organizer.  The education they offered began with correcting my bad Spanish. In the mornings they'd take me with them to visit crews working on the ten-mile stretch of fields between Santa Maria and Guadalupe.  

I learned something about organizing, but even more, about work.  As a city boy from Oakland, seeing the labor close up was a revelation.  I'd been a printer, so the repetitive motions of work in a factory were familiar.  But the pace demanded by work on the piece rate cutting lettuce or stripping snow peas from vines was something else again.
 
That road, where I found the snow pea harvesters, continues to be a school for me. Marco Bautista and the workers explained not just the cycle of work, but the impact of the plants on the soil, and on the people who will eat them.  At the end of the season these snow pea vines will be plowed under.  Snow peas concentrate nitrogen in their root nodules, so their fields can be rotated with other crops that will use what the peas put back into the earth. Growers like them also because they're hardy, and can survive the fall's first frosts, hence their name.
 
Picking snow peas benefits humans as well.  One cup fulfills the daily requirement for Vitamin C, so they're healthy both for consumers and the land.  And snow peas are delicious.  They can be eaten whole, and in fact are called "mange tout" in French, meaning eat-it-all.  In Chinese they're called "he lan do", or Holland pea.  We think of them as a common ingredient in Chinese dishes, but the fruit (because peas are fruits rather than vegetables) was first cultivated around the Mediterranean, and later adopted with enthusiasm by Chinese cooks in the 1800s.  From China the peas made their way to Santa Maria, where Mexican hands pull them from vines and pack them into boxes for restaurants, food co-ops and even Safeway.

Ivan Gallardo's hands have to work fast, grabbing a bunch of peas at a time, without damaging them.

Ivan Gallardo reaches into the vine to grab snow peas.

Ivan Gallardo has his cellphone by his ear under his hood, and laughs as he hears a joke told by a member of his family in Mexico.

The expression on the face of Pedro Gallardo, Ivan's cousin, reveals the concentration it takes to do this work.

Pedro Gallardo's bucket is almost full, as it hangs from his belt while he picks.

His bucket full, Pedro Gallardo slings it over his shoulder and carries it down the row to the weighing station.

Pedro Gallardo passes his cousin Ivan, who is still picking, as he carries his full bucket down the row.

Pedro Gallardo empties his bucket into a bill so that it can be weighed.

Sofia, a picker in the crew, stops for a moment with her full bucket.

Sofia manhandles the bin she's filled so that it can be weighed.

Alberto Vasquez, a young worker, empties his bucket into a bin.

Berto Bautista, owner of Bautista Farms, puts a bin of snow peas onto the scale to be weighed. Workers are paid by the amount they pick, measured by weight.

After weighing a bin, Berto Bautista carries it to the truck for sorting.

Jorge Ariza sorts and checks the harvested snow peas. He fills shallow boxes that won't crush or damage them, which are then stacked onto the truck taking them from the field.

photos from the edge 44 - WALKING THE STREETS, FIGHTING FOR TPS

photos from the edge 44 - WALKING THE STREETS, FIGHTING FOR TPS
Photos by David Bacon

SAN FRANCISCO - 9/26/26 - This is what you might see on any day walking through the city - from BART to North Beach, Chinatown and down to the Ferry Building.  Riders on BART. People working, fixing streets and sewers.  Artists playing music and asking for donations, or performing martial arts in front of the statue of Sun Yat Sen.

At the Ferry Building members of the Haiti Action Committee, the NorCal TPS Coalition and the Nuevo Sol Day Labor and Domestic Worker Center protest the Trump administration's efforts to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Salvadorans, and deport thousands of people. 

 

photos from the edge 43 - TINA MODOTTI, PHOTOGRAPHER AND REVOLUTIONARY

photos from the edge 43 - TINA MODOTTI, PHOTOGRAPHER AND REVOLUTIONARY
By David Bacon
Thanks to Brad Sigal's Get the Picture Podcast for excerpting this from a longer interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfCDPh-KoRo

All photos by Tina Modotti except the last.

Tina Modotti came from Udine, in northern Italy, and grew up in San Francisco's North Beach. Interested in drama, she acted in community productions and then, in the 1920s, went to Hollywood. There she met Edward Weston, one of the founders of modernism in photography. Together they traveled to Mexico City.

Weston taught Modotti the fundamentals of photography of that era - plate and sheet film cameras, the darkroom, and a very hands-on method of creating photographs. He was a master, and he taught her the craft. During those years, though, she quickly became very politicized. She joined the Mexican Communist Party, and became friends with Mexico's revolutionaries.

Her photographs were compelling. Both she and Weston explored a clear realist (even materialist) vision - modernism at its very beginning. Then she parted ways with him, and applied that vision to the politics of revolutionary Mexico.  By doing so, she produced images that made a crucial contribution to the development of socially committed photography. 

Yet it is the trajectory of her life itself - her relationship to the revolutionary movements in Mexico and beyond - that asks us to consider the balance between art and politics.  In the 1920s the revolution had just taken power. She and her political and artist comrades were exploring all the ways in which the arts could be used to push forward the goals of revolution. 

It was the era of the great muralists - Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco. They were painting the walls of Mexico City with brilliant images, showing what the past had truly been in real terms, and what the future held for people because of the upheaval and its profound changes. She began to use her photography in the same way, very consciously, to spread the new ideology. 

The Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union was taking place at the same time. She began to mix the symbols of communism and the Russian revolution with the symbols of the Mexican Revolution. In one series of photographs, she takes the hammer and sickle, the Soviet symbol, and Mexicanizes it by adding Mexican elements. She adds first the sombrero, then the cartridge belt, symbol of the peasant armies of Villa and Zapata, and the ear of corn, what the peasant rebellion was really all about.  Finally the guitar replaces the sickle. 

She's doing this with the intention of creating, through photographs, symbols that people can rally around, as part of Mexico's social transformation. But she's also trying to establish, in the minds of the ordinary people who will view these photographs, that the two revolutions have something in common.  They are the movements of the working people, and by extension, not just in Mexico CIty and Moscow, but everywhere.

Then she tries to show in another way what revolution means, and makes a photograph that foreshadows those that will be created by revolutionaries from then on, from China to Cuba to Vietnam. To survive, all revolutions have to mobilize their base - in Mexico, the campesinos and the workers. To involve them, a revolutionary process first has to teach people to read, and then it must provide newspapers, books and reading materials that explain its goals. 

Modotti creates a photograph of a group of people in sombreros and work clothes, gathered around, reading an issue of El Machete, the newspaper of the Mexican Communist Party. The photograph is a way of saying that people are becoming literate, they are becoming involved. The revolution is producing materials for them to read so they can participate effectively, and the photograph shows that process. It is not a neutral document.  It is very partisan, urging the workers to participate, to learn to read and to be part of changing their own world. 

She was skilled at creating photographs that combined emotional power with a clear political agenda.  Work worn hands on a shovel clearly state the importance of documenting those who make the revolution. As depression-era photographers did in the U.S., she juxtaposes a sign advertising the illusion of wealth with the gritty reality of a poor man sleeping on a sidewalk. A huge crowd moves through one image - the power of massed people. A rural hacienda, even after the revolution's gains, still shows the class division between the well-dressed hacendado and a family of peones.  She took photographs of workers in the tropics, and of the indigenous women who were Mexico's true majority and revolution's most important subjects.

Modotti used the modernist approach - the simplicity of these photographs and their directness - to move the revolution forward. She was so much a partisan that the Mexican government, as it turned conservative, deported her for her revolutionary activity. The last of her photographs that we know of were taken shortly afterwards, as she traveled through Berlin and on to Moscow. It was then that she decided there were things in life more important than photography.  

She went to work for the Communist International, and it sent her to Spain during the Spanish Civil War. She took charge of the relief efforts of the Socorro Rojo, the Red Aid. She worked without pause or rest to meet people's critical needs as Madrid was bombed by Nazi and Italian planes, while the defenders of the Republic struggled desperately to survive and continue fighting. Then, when the fascists won, she helped to get thousands of people out of Spain as refugees. She went back to Mexico after the civil war was over, and died there of exhaustion. 

Her life shows clear choices, in the way she saw the relationship between politics and photography. Her view contradicts capitalist notions of art, that say to photographers and artists, "the most important thing in life for you is your art. You must be passionate about your individual life above all else." Modotti would have said, that's a very bourgeois idea, because what's really important is changing the world. There are times when those things needed for change - revolution as she saw it - are more important than photography even. And she acted on that. 

Her life is particularly important to us today. It says to photographers and artists, yes, you have to think about the purpose of your art, and how it's going to be integrated into social movements. But Modotti also demands that you ask yourself, very honestly, is your art the most important thing in the world that you should be doing with your life, right now?

Most of the time we would answer yes. We have a role to play. Acknowledging art's function in social movements and acting on it, as she did herself in one period of her life, is very important. But, Modotti also would have said, don't forget what the end goal is. The end goal is social transformation. Sometimes its demands are transcendent, and they were with her.

Members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.  Photograph thanks to the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

photos from the edge 42 - A NEW SYSTEM OF LABOR THREATENS FARMWORKER POWER

photos from the edge 42 - A NEW SYSTEM OF LABOR THREATENS FARMWORKER POWER
By David Bacon
Barn Raiser, 9/17/26
https://barnraisingmedia.com/a-new-system-of-labor-upends-farmworker-protections/

Farmworkers began harvesting watermelons as soon as there was enough light to see, in a field near Arvin, California, in the San Joaquin Valley. The first people at work in this field are the cutters, who go down the rows looking for ripe melons. When they find one, they cut the vine and lift it above the leaves. Antonio Torrez, works as part of a three-person team.


Harvesting watermelons is brutally heavy work, done in extreme heat, but so coordinated that it’s almost a dance. First into a field come the cutters. They sever the vine and free each ripe melon from the plant, resting it on the leaves above the furrow. 

Then come the tossers. A tractor pulls a flatbed trailer carrying giant boxes down the rows. On each side are three workers. The outside man lifts a big melon off the ground and, with apparent ease, tosses it to the man in the middle. That worker catches it and at the same time picks up a melon at his feet, tossing both to the person on the inside. That third worker has to catch the flying melons while picking from his own row. He lifts them into the waiting hands of the loader on the trailer above, who catches them as they come, usually two at a time. Then the loader twists and carefully lays them into a waiting bin. 

The dance is performed (there is no other word for it) swiftly, but no one drops any of the giant fruits, which can weigh anywhere between 15 to 25 pounds. The tossers swing back and forth, catching and lifting and tossing. They’re almost running as they move down the rows. In the course of a day, they rotate positions so that each worker eventually does the harder and easier jobs in turn. They work so fast they’re never more than a day, two at most, in one place.

Behind the cutters, Jose Chavez and Martin Mendoza are part of a crew of loaders. They pick up the melons, often two at a time, and hand or toss them to men on the trailer, who put them into bins.


Until recently, this kind of labor gave workers the ability to bargain, and win, better wages and protections. But the rise of temporary farmworker visas combined with an increasingly mechanical harvesting process mean big change 

The crew I met at the peak of one summer’s heat was working in the south end of the San Joaquin Valley, not far from Arvin. At 5:30 that morning, as the sun came up, workers’ cars already lined the valley’s rural roads and highways, next to field after field. Even before daybreak, people were streaming from their vehicles into the rows and vines. By starting early, they could get seven or eight hours in before the heat reached its peak. 

Juan Hernandez picks up a watermelon as Jose Chavez gets ready to catch it. Meanwhile Martin Mendoza tosses two melons to Jose Moreno on the trailer.


It was already over 80 degrees, and by midafternoon the temperature would top 114. The southern San Joaquin Valley is a desert-like pan between the high Sierras and the Pacific Coast ranges, whose rivers have been diverted into giant irrigation projects. High temperatures are the norm. In 1933 the thermometer reached 116 degrees on July 27. The high in July 2021 was 115.

I had been looking for watermelon tossers to photograph, and Fausto Sanchez, the community worker for California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), had given me the coordinates for a field where he’d seen them the day before. When I was a United Farm Worker (UFW) organizer in the 1970s, finding fields often meant following obscure instructions based on landmarks and imagined estimates of distance. Guidance by reading coordinates on an iPhone was a new experience. But it worked, kind of, and after failing to locate two fields I finally found the crew in a third. 

Going into the field to take the pictures, I knew I didn’t need to ask permission from a supervisor. Watermelon crews work without a foreman, so I just needed their agreement to photograph them. These workers take pride in their ability, and willingness, to do this heavy labor in ferocious heat, day after day. They were glad to show a white guy with a camera what they could do.

On the trailer Marcos Mascareno catches two watermelons at a time, puts them (without bruising them) into the bins and gets ready for the next toss.


I’ve photographed such crews for decades. You don’t have much time to shoot in the middle of a field. People are working and don’t want to stop, especially if, like the melon throwers, they’re working on a piece rate. If you want pictures of people while they’re working, you do it on the run. You learn to walk backwards and look and talk and shoot, all at the same time. That in itself earns you respect.

So in this melon field I was half running and half walking backwards in the mud and vines, with a worker in front of me, sort of interested, but I’m sure thinking, “What a pain in the ass this guy is. I hope he doesn’t get in the way.” They were very polite though. No one ever said, “Get the hell out of my way.”   

I’ve admired watermelon harvesters since my union days. They’re strong and skilled; the melons are heavy, yet they throw them in precise coordination. A given crew will travel together for months, heading north from fields near the Mexican border through California, Oregon and Washington as the advancing heat ripens the fruit. In the winter, most watermelon workers live in the border towns of Mexicali and Calexico in the Imperial Valley, and the twin cities of San Luis in Arizona and San Luis Rio Colorado in Sonora. A few live in the Coachella Valley, an hour north of the border. During the harvest season they’re on the road and don’t see their families until the picking is over and they return home. 

The tractor and crew head down the field.


Some crews function as a collective and return to the same fields and growers year after year, bargaining with the grower directly. In previous years, the crew method of bargaining, and their control of the speed of the work, gave them a lot of leverage and resulted in better pay. Watermelon crews get paid as a group, $150 for each trailer. The trailer in this field held 16 full bins, for a total of perhaps 500 watermelons. They divide the money evenly, which worked out to about $20 per person for each trailer. They can load 7-8 trailers before it gets too hot for this heavy exertion. 

Other farmworkers also have used their crew organization to get better wages through control over the work. Lettuce cutters had a similar power and were organized in what were called “ground crews” of 30-40 workers divided into trios: two cutting and one packing boxes. They could control the amount of lettuce they would cut in a day and would slow down or even stop to get the piece rate increased. In earlier decades, Filipino crews of grape pickers would also negotiate with growers as a group, headed by their own crew boss. The 1965 grape strike began when those crews struck, first in Coachella and then in Delano.

Today, however, this traditional way of working and bargaining is disappearing. The Filipino crews are now history. Ground crews are disappearing too, and lettuce is harvested these days by workers behind a lettuce machine that controls the work speed, making collective action harder. Lechugeros are no longer always among the best paid in farm labor, as they were before.

Each trailer carries an Igloo cooler with water. When the workers stop for a break they get a drink. Armando Miranda drinks straight from the spigot. California regulations require employers to provide one quart of fresh water per worker per hour of labor.


To see if the same process was changing the work of melon harvesters, I began driving through the San Joaquin Valley, searching for crews, particularly those recruited to work under the H-2A visa program, which allows employers to bring workers from abroad, who labor under exploitative conditions for up to 10 months, after which they have to leave the country. In the end, I found several. Often the foremen were young men in the H-2A program themselves. 

The crews saw no problem with me taking photographs. They talked easily about their jobs, which they’d tried hard to get when they were recruited in Mexico. 
 
On one ranch near Firebaugh, I recognized the name on the boxes of melons the workers were picking. King Fisher was a play on words by the Fisher family, whose Fisher Ranch is one of the largest growers in the Palo Verde Valley. In the 1970s, I was sent to that desert oasis on the Colorado River by the UFW, to help melon workers organize a union. The Fishers employed more workers on more acres there than any other grower.

The loading crew often works faster than the cutters can cut, and stop for a break when they catch up to them. Juan Hernandez wipes the sweat from his eyes as he pauses for a minute or two.


In the Firebaugh field, I found a crew of farmworkers on H-2A visas, harvesting melons early in the morning. Their recruiter, Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, contracts crews of H-2A workers for growers throughout California. The Fisher family had hired Rancho Nuevo Harvesting to harvest the field. 

Under state and federal law, employers must provide the workers with housing. In 2023, acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su won a judgement against Rancho Nuevo for providing unsafe housing, underpaying workers and supplying them with spoiled food, forcing the contractor to pay over $1 million in back wages and penalties.

The temperature in Firebaugh at 9:00 in the morning was over 95 degrees. It would reach 110 that afternoon. The workers in the field were Cora indigenous people (náayerite in their language), recruited from the Mexican state of Nayarit. It was only their second day of work in the U.S. and they were not yet accustomed to the heat. The náayerite live in a mountainous region where the climate is cool, often even cold. According to a man cutting melons next to the machine, one worker began to bleed from his nose the day before, on his first day working in the fierce heat.

An H-2A worker tosses a melon onto the conveyor belt.


As they moved through the field they cut the melons from the vines and tossed them onto a conveyor belt leading to a platform pulled behind a tractor. There, other workers packed the melons into boxes. This system is replacing the earlier system, in which workers tossed, caught and packed melons with their hands. The conveyor belt and the loader assembly are parts of a mechanized system, the Melonator, intended to supplant much of hand labor in melon harvesting. 

Growers, especially the largest corporate ones, don’t like the old system. It gives workers too much control, which the workers use to win better wages. Today some autonomous crews still cut and toss watermelons, but for other melons this new system of machines and H-2A workers is becoming almost universal.

Grower Bart Fisher says that when an additional assembly is added to replace the pickers themselves, the machine will only need seven people to do a job that now requires 30 people in the H-2A crew. He has developed melon varieties that stand up to machine harvesting. Nevertheless, even Hank Giclas, senior vice president for science and technology at the Western Growers Association, regrets the disappearance of the old system. “These workers are skilled,” he says, “and the product is a delicate product.”

Farmworkers brought to the U.S. in the H-2A visa program harvest melons early in the morning in a field near Firebaugh, in the San Joaquin Valley.  They cut the melons from the vines, ad toss them onto a conveyor belt that leads to a platform where other workers pack the melons into boxes.


According to Fisher, a shortage of farmworkers is driving up labor costs, and California law, fought for by the UFW now requires that growers pay overtime after 40 hours. “We’re marching toward an 8-hour workday and $15 an hour. It’s just going to make us noncompetitive,” he told the Desert Sun in 2018.

As the pandemic was well into its second year, Roberto de la Rosa called me from Porterville in the southern San Joaquin Valley. Roberto, a human rights lawyer and board president of CRLA, was helping a group of H-2A guestworkers who’d been cheated of their pay by a labor contractor. 

I talked with a leader of this group who’d confronted their stubborn crew boss, who he knew would never hire him again. Like all H-2A workers, he was dependent on the wages he could earn in U.S. fields—low by U.S. standards, but a lot higher than farmworker pay in Mexico. He wanted to denounce what had happened to him, but also to come back to work in the U.S. the following year. He feared other labor recruiters would blacklist him as a protester and asked me not to use his real name. “All the people I work with are afraid of reprisals if we speak up,” he told me. 

Workers on the machine pack melons into boxes with the “KingFisher” label. The label marks produce from the ranches of the Fisher family, one of California’s largest melon growers.


I’ll call him Eduardo. In 2020, he arrived in the San Joaquin Valley to pick oranges, tangerines and lemons for Porterville Citrus, a large grower. He was hired in Veracruz, Mexico, by a recruiter for Fresh Harvest, another labor contractor that brings thousands of workers to the U.S. every year under the H-2A visa program. Fresh Harvest also has a record of labor violations and paid $1 million to farmworkers in a case brought by CRLA in 2018 over unpaid travel time.

About 2 million farmworkers labor in U.S. fields. In 2025, the Department of Labor gave growers certifications for 398,258 H-2A workers, or about a fifth of the entire U.S. farm labor workforce. That’s a fourfold increase from 98,813 in 2012. Almost all are young men. Those who can’t work fast enough, or who protest, can be fired at any time and sent back. “We all come from marginalized communities in Mexico where there’s no work,” Eduardo explained. “It’s easy for the company to take advantage of our need.” 

Federal regulations establish a minimum wage for H-2A workers. In the fall of 2025, the Trump administration cut the mandatory minimum for H-2A workers in California from $19.97 an hour to $16.59. Since the state’s minimum wage is now $16.90 an hour, the federal wage would be illegal and will therefore default to the state minimum. 

The H-2A workers at the Travelodge Motel get their meals at the taco truck in the motel parking lot.


The UFW sued, and at the end of August, U.S. District Judge Kirk E. Sherriff in Fresno ruled that the federal wage was illegal because the Department of Labor didn’t “ensure that the hiring of H-2A workers will not ‘adversely affect’ U.S. farmworkers’ wages.” Nevertheless, the probably illegal wage will remain in effect while the Department of Labor formulates a new one. Despite that, the ruling is based on the obvious fact that the wage paid H-2A workers in effect functions as a ceiling on the wages of all farmworkers, who face replacement if they’re not willing to work for it. 

Many H-2A workers report not being paid even what they were promised, or what the law requires. What makes the program attractive to growers is that workers do not have any ability to negotiate their labor contracts. Their living environment and mobility are restricted, and they face the loss of their job and visa if they protest. 

“We were being paid by the hour, but they put production quotas on us and continually demanded more,” Eduardo told me. “They said we’d be fired and put on a blacklist if we didn’t meet the quota. In the oranges, we had to fill a bin every hour. If there was a lot of fruit in the trees, we had to fill it every 45 minutes, or even every half hour.” In his crew of 45 pickers, eight were fired in six months for not meeting the quota. “It was completely exhausting. The food the company gave us wasn’t enough and we were tired all the time.”  

Some rooms in the Palm Tree Inn have notices on the windows saying they've been decontaminated and/or disinfected "against a multitude of virus and bacteria to specifically include COVID-19."


Trump’s wage cut of over $3 an hour comes on top of other complaints that H-2A workers have had, especially about their housing. Historically, the regulations governing the H-2A program required growers to furnish housing to workers without charge. Last year, however, the Trump administration issued a new rule, now being challenged in court, that would allow growers to charge workers $3 an hour for housing, on top of its mandated pay cut. According to the U.S. Department of Labor memo, that would bring the hourly wage for H-2A workers in California down to $13.52, even more illegal should growers implement it.

In 2020 Eduardo was housed, along with several hundred other H-2A workers, at the Palm Tree Inn, a rundown motel by the freeway in Porterville. “Some of us were living 3-4 people in one room,” he said, “and there were rooms with as many as 8 or 10. In the van or bus going to and from work we were crowded like sardines. During the pandemic we were very worried about it.”

According to Mari Perez and Art Rodriguez, organizers for the Central Valley Empowerment Alliance, when they went to the Palm Tree Inn to talk with Eduardo and other protesting workers, Fresh Harvest guards threw them off the property. Other farmworker advocacy organizations also charge that labor contractors routinely refuse public access to motel residences for H-2A workers.

After the controversy over unpaid wages the motel appeared vacant.  The H-2A farmworkers working for Porterville Citrus were housed there.


The Palm Tree Inn is an old motel. It received terrible reviews on Yelp until Fresh Harvest took over its rooms to house its H-2A crews. I visited the Palm Tree Inn after the workers left, a dilapidated two-story building on two sides of a blistering hot asphalt parking lot. After the controversy over unpaid wages, and the expiration of the contracts for the last workers, the motel appeared vacant. I couldn’t get into the locked rooms. The concrete stairways and outside walkways were crumbling. 

Most disturbing was the notice posted in several windows, saying the rooms had been decontaminated and/or disinfected. The Material Safety Data Sheet said the chemical used was Aqua Systems’ Quat Sanitizer II, “a quaternary ammonium product proven to be effective for sanitizing work areas and equipment against a multitude of virus and bacteria, to specifically include COVID-19.”

During the pandemic, in little towns like Huron and Los Banos, growers have taken over motels like the Palm Tree Inn, hastily assembling steel bunk bed frames so that each room can house four or six workers, sometimes more. While proximity increased the danger of Covid infection, labor contractors seemed oblivious. Perhaps they were making so much money from their mushrooming labor contracts that the risk was worth ignoring, at least for them.

Farmworkers brought to the U.S. in the H-2A visa program are housed by the labor contractor Jim Hernandez at the Travelodge Motel in Los Banos, in the San Joaquin Valley.  Jose Diaz Solano is welding bunk bed frames so the contractor can increase the number of workers sleeping in each motel room from  3 to 4.


Corporate agriculture is increasingly dependent on the explosive growth of this program, ignoring the cost in lost jobs to local farmworkers, and the toll on the H-2A workers themselves. The pandemic highlighted that cost. Cynthia Rice, former litigation director for CRLA, points to the isolation of the workers and the temporary nature of their presence in the U.S. as root causes of their vulnerability. “Our agricultural industry is sustained by cross border labor—we have to acknowledge that,” she says. “But these workers have only a quasi-legal status, controlled by growers.”  

Where the self-organizing of watermelon crews and lettuce cutters gave them some degree of power to counter grower control, they are losing it to this exploitative new labor system.

H-2A workers for Rancho Nuevo Harvesting on the Fisher ranch.

The temperature at the time, about 9:00 in the morning, was over 95 degrees.

The conveyor belt and the loader assembly are parts of a mechanized system the Melonator.  As the machine moves through the field, at the end of the conveyor belt the melons are loaded into a large hopper on a trailer dragged by a tractor.