BETTER SALARIES, BENEFITS FOR MIGRANT FARM WORKERS
Mares agrees a long-term labour solution is needed. But he has to worry about this season, these berries. Ninety per cent of the fruit from his Green Gold Farms go to the United States, whose berry harvest won’t peak for months.
His company and others have teams of recruiters scouring the countryside, contacting potential workers via bullhorn, fliers and, increasingly, Facebook.
It can be a tough sell. The jobs they offer — six days a week of plucking berries — are exhausting. Harvesters, paid by the bucket, are in continuous motion. And the industry has a history of abuses, including dilapidated housing and unfair pay practices.
These days, employers have to offer better conditions to attract workers. They’ve hiked harvesters’ salaries in the last few years by up to 100 per cent. While wages still pale by U.S. standards, they’ve been enough to slash extreme poverty in many rural areas — “an extremely important development,” said Agustín Escobar, a Mexican agricultural researcher.
Miguel Ángel de Jesús, 19, said he earns twice as much picking berries in Jalisco as he could back home in the hardscrabble mountains of Puebla state. His after-tax salary at Agrovision, a U.s.based company that sells under the Fruitist brand, is around 400 pesos a day, roughly $24, and his food and dormitory are covered.
“We don’t complain,” he said, as his hands flew over a blueberry bush, the plump spheres cascading into plastic buckets strapped to his waist. “We come from places where they don’t give us all this.”
On billboards and banners around rural Jalisco, berry companies offer potential hires savings plans, social security, signing bonuses and a new incentive: temporary visas to work at partner firms in the United States during their harvest seasons, at much higher salaries.
Mexico has long recruited Guatemalan guest workers to help pick coffee beans in southern Chiapas state. But now authorities are crafting a broader program aimed at the historic flows of migrants headed to the U.S. border. About 2.5 million migrants entered Mexico last year; more than 140,000 sought asylum.
The new program would allow migrants and people living abroad to apply for visas to fill jobs in Mexico. The 14,000 jobs in the first cohort is small, but the program is set up to grow, officials say.
Persuading foreigners to work in Mexican agriculture may not be easy, however. Cerritos, a berry and avocado company, hired around 30 Central Americans through a pilot project. Half soon quit; they’d been factory workers and didn’t take to farming, said Pablo Lázaro, a company official. The rest left after three months. “They said, ‘We found people to help us cross,’ ” he recalled, and they left for the United States.
In the short term, Mexico’s guest-worker programs might not make much of a dent in the northbound migration flow, said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. But given pressure on U.S. politicians to crack down on undocumented immigration, that could change.
“If it becomes harder to cross the border at some point,” Selee said, “Mexico could become an increasingly attractive place to go.”