Dolores Huerta Has Seen Farm Raids Before. But Not Like This.
Let's offer farmworkers $50 an hour, the same kind of a salary that you offer the prison guards, and you'll get a lot of American workers.
We have very high unemployment in the Central Valley. We have the prison industrial complex, where a lot of our young people are going to prison. So many of these young people don't have to go to prison if they were paid adequately. I'm sure a lot of them would go and do the farm work, especially if they had good wages to do it. And we still have a lot of young people here in the valley that go out during the summers and they do farm work to help their families. I'm sure a lot of people that we now see that are homeless on the streets and that are able to work would go to work if they were paid $50 an hour.
So it's just a matter of improving wages?
And training, too. Because farm work is hard work. I mean, you've got to be in good physical shape to be able to do farm work.
Why are undocumented workers such a large part of the agricultural workforce? Is it just that these are low-paying, hard jobs that Americans don't want to do, or is there more going on?
Well, like I said earlier, the growers have denigrated the work so much that people don't realize that this work is dignified. Farm workers are proud of the work that they do. They don't feel that somehow they're a lower class of people because they do farm work. They have pride in their work. If you were to go out there with farm workers, you would be surprised to see that they have dignity, and they care about the work. They care about the plants.
When we started the farm workers union way back in the late '50s and early '60s, you would be surprised how many American citizens were out there. Veterans were out there. The Grapes of Wrath was filmed here. All of those workers in that camp were white. It was the 'Okies' and 'Arkies,' the people that came from Oklahoma and Arkansas and those places to work in the fields. They were all white workers. There were some Latino workers, and then over the years, you had the Chinese, you had the Japanese, and different waves of immigrants that came in to do farm work.
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