Former migrant organizes workers

by Amy Driscoll

Miami Herald

Tuesday, May 9, 2000

Lucas Benitez is a second-generation farmworker from Mexico with a junior high school education, a smattering of English and years of back-breaking experience in the fields of southwest Florida.

Yet the migrant worker from Immokalee has met with a governor and a senator, received honors from Rolling Stone magazine and the Catholic Church, caught the attention of rock stars Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne, and been quoted in newspapers from New York to Los Angeles.

At 24, Benitez is emerging as a powerful new symbol for farmworkers across the nation. The serious young man with the black buzz cut, silver-tipped front teeth and unassuming air is giving voice to those who languish silently on one of society's lowest rungs -- itinerant workers hidden in rural trailer parks and paid 45 cents per 32-pound bucket for picking America's fruits and vegetables.

Benitez is co-director of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a grass-roots organization with a flair for creative protests that have attracted national attention.

The group has organized work slow-downs and a hunger strike, protest marches and a petition drive. The petition, which called for improved relations between workers and growers, was presented in March to Gov. Jeb Bush. Other labor groups in South Florida -- including Unite for Dignity, a union that represents nursing home workers -- have joined the coalition's protests.

But the biggest attention-getter for the group has been a $100,000 award that Benitez won last year from the youth leadership organization, Do Something. The New York-based organization honored him, in part, for helping expose two modern-day slavery rings that forced illegal immigrants to pick crops without pay.

The award money, Benitez says, belongs to the coalition.

``My story cannot be separated from the story of the people,'' he says gravely in Spanish, uncomfortable in the spotlight. ``When it comes to the rights of the farmworker, we are all one.''

On this evening, Benitez is hard at work on his self-chosen mission, this time at the center of the coalition meeting hall in Immokalee, a building adjacent to the parking lots where buses disgorge workers at dusk. Outside, the storefront is painted in distinctive murals vividly depicting the workers' struggle. Inside, the place is so packed that many workers sit on overturned buckets.

Benitez sits at the center, his eyes dark with intensity as he tries to coax responses from a tired and reticent crowd.

The faces are mostly young, male and Hispanic. They slump in T-shirts and jeans, and sometimes cowboy boots, tired lines etching their faces.

``This is a country of immigrants,'' Benitez tells the group firmly. ``We have rights in this country. Every worker has the right to respect and dignity from the ranchero.''

Benitez holds up a slip of paper, one of the meeting notices he handed out earlier in the day on street corners and parking lots. The invitation has a drawing showing a worker being twisted, wrung dry like a towel, between a contratista, or crew leader, on one side and a patron, or grower, on the other.

The grower is drawn fat and well-dressed and the crew leader also appears prosperous. The worker, though, is a pretzel in a baseball cap.

``Why are we like this picture?'' Benitez asks. They are silent, staring down at their slips of paper.

He tries again. ``Can anybody think of a way we are like this, in the middle?''

This time the responses trickle in. The low wages, one man says, then ducks his head, embarrassed when everyone looks his way. Too much work, adds another.

A third man stands up, emboldened: ``When the crew leader runs out of water, he makes us drink water from the ditch!'' he says angrily.

Though he no longer moves to follow the crops, Benitez occasionally picks local citrus and watermelon -- and he looks the part. Dressed in khaki-colored pants and shirt, with a goatee and low-key manner, he appears like everyone else in the hall.

That, says coalition co-director Greg Asbed, is Benitez's appeal: ``They look at him and see themselves. And in that sense, he can speak to the workers like no one else.''

Now the discussion moves on, to cars, with Asbed taking a turn. ``How many of us have cars?'' he asks. No one in the room raises a hand.

The workers have to live close to the parking lots where buses pick them up to go to the fields. And that means few choices about where to live and buy goods.

One man stands up: ``They told us it would be $55 a month for rent, but it was $55 a week!'' he said. ``And the toilets don't even work!''

The others laugh knowingly. They understand about price gouging. That's why the coalition also runs a cooperative store, with dried staples like pasta and tortillas and toilet paper, sold at lower prices than the local stores.

A sign above the door of the cooperative declares how the workers feel they are treated by the growers: ``Yo no soy tractor,'' or, I am not a tractor.

At meeting's end, about two dozen men line up to obtain membership cards. Because the population of farm workers is so mobile -- many chase the picking seasons across the country -- registration is a constant at these meetings, as new faces appear. More than 1,000 people have membership cards showing they belong to the coalition; many move on, some return with the picking season.

Greg Schell, managing attorney for the Migrant Justice Project in Belle Glade, says the surplus of workers and their mobility handicaps the coalition's chances of success.

``As long as there are two workers for every job, they have no leverage,'' Schell said. ``They are stuck trying to appeal to the good graces and conscience of the growers. Consequently, the growers have been pretty much able to ignore them.''

He said the coalition would have a better chance of prevailing by forming alliances with other migrant groups in the state. ``These folks won't cooperate. They've missed an opportunity for others to help them.'' he said, clearly frustrated.

But the coalition members insist their method -- grass-roots, inclusive -- is the more democratic and less bureaucratic way.

``Everyone here is equal,'' Benitez explains. ``No one is more important than anyone else.''

And indeed, the coalition's tactics have worked at times, even Schell concedes. In 1998, after then-gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush met with farmworkers and growers, two growers voluntarily raised rates from 40 cents to 45 cents a bucket.

``In the interests of working with the governor, we decided to raise the rate voluntarily,'' said Mac Carraway of Pacific Tomato Growers Ltd., which has a farm in Immokalee along with farms in other parts of Florida and in Maryland and Virginia.

The pay hike affected all of their operations, Carraway said, increasing production costs by 12 percent or 13 percent. ``But it was something we had been considering anyway,'' he said. ``By paying more, we can keep crews together, and that's to our advantage.''

Last year, when Immokalee workers held a hunger strike to protest wages and living conditions, the discord didn't end until former President Jimmy Carter sent a letter calling for a halt to the 30-day-old strike. He urged workers and growers to negotiate. The talks still have not occurred.

``I think they aren't legitimate, period, if they call themselves representatives of that labor force,'' Ray Gilmer, spokesman for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, said of the Immokalee coalition.

He said the coalition is trying to force growers to raise rates to unrealistic levels. ``It is the first step toward putting us out of business.'' he said. ``It would be a short-lived victory when they came back the next season and the farm was gone.''

Ask members of the coalition why they joined, and reasons come tumbling out.

Take, for example, the story of Francisco Martinez, 22, a Mexican vegetable picker. Before joining the coalition, he picked vegetables in a forced-labor camp run by Abel Cuello near Immokalee.

After enduring harsh conditions for close to three months, Martinez ran away. He turned to the coalition, and Benitez, for help. Others followed. The coalition called in federal authorities.

In April 1999, Cuello was arrested on federal charges of slavery conspiracy.

``After the slavery case, I felt like I have to fight for my rights,'' said Martinez.

For Benitez, who began working in the fields at 16 to help support his family, the coalition represents a chance to break his own chains.

``Everyone deserves respect and dignity,'' he says. ``We are not machines. We are human beings.''