A Compromise Must Be Reached

Migrant cherry pickers such as Marco Rantonio and Efigenia Clemente have been forced to camp in squalor this summer.

Living conditions for the 16,000 migrant workers who move into Washington state for the cherry season might have improved had a bill passed during the last legislative session been allowed to become law.

This bill required the Department of Health to write “temporary worker building codes” that could strike a balance between cherry growers’ needs for low-cost solutions and workers’ needs for better shelter. The bill was vetoed by Gov. Gary Locke on May 20, after the United Farm Workers union argued vigorously against it.

Now, a lawsuit has been filed against the Washington Department of Health for failing to enforce its own safety standards for migrant workers, many of whom live surrounded by dirt, flies and urine in makeshift camps.

So far, all of this conflict has failed to improve the living conditions of people like Rantonio and Clemente, who wound up camping along the Columbia River, sleeping on crushed cardboard boxes and cringing from the nightly gunfire crackling from a nearby encampment. “This is no good,” Rantonio said. “We are scared at night. There is nowhere to go.”

Diseases like typhoid, which broke out last summer, also threaten the lives of migrant workers who must use Columbia River water for bathing, drinking and washing dishes.

Growers argue that they can’t afford to build expensive dormitories with snow roofs and double-paned windows for such short growing seasons. One Royal City cherry grower built a $100,000 bathhouse for workers last spring, passing state and local inspections, and building wheelchair-accessible toilets and showers to meet federal law. For this grower, “doing the right thing” proved pricey.

Surely, a solution exists which could safely house temporary workers at less expense. The Legislature’s bill would have allowed growers to build simple walls without insulation, or even walls made of straw bales, for their summertime crews. A new version of that bill, which could address workers’ reservations about the last one, might become a reasonable alternative. Another solution has been devised in the Wenatchee area. Several growers will pay for a community camp, organized by Blue Bird, Inc., a Wenatchee-area packing house. This camp will provide clean tents and showers for the hundreds of fruit pickers who work local orchards.

This year, Washington orchards yielded a bumper crop of cherries, accentuating the absolute disgrace of pickers’ Third World living conditions. These workers deserve a clean, safe place to live in Eastern Washington every summer. Growers deserve a break on the state’s building codes.

This issue demands negotiation, compromise and a fresh harvest of common sense. Workers, union leaders, growers and the state must work together to devise creative solutions.

Washington cherries, glistening in baskets in the grocery store, should symbolize the delicious evanescence of summertime - not the frightening and deplorable conditions of the human beings who pick them.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jamie Tobias Neely/For the editorial board