By Jamey Dunn
Lawmakers are looking to improve conditions for the
thousands of migrant and seasonal workers who travel to Illinois to work in
agriculture and other industries.
One witness testifying before an Illinois Senate agriculture committee
this week compared the conditions for migrant workers formerly living in an
apartment building in northern Champaign county to those documented in "The
Jungle," Upton Sinclair’s 1906 expose on the conditions workers met in Chicago’s
meat packing plants.
Julie Pryde, administrator of the Champaign Urbana Public Health
District, said her department received a complaint about raw sewage being
dumped from the Cherry Orchard housing complex, which often houses migrant
workers. “I was absolutely shocked with what I encountered. And all of the amount
of services that have come to bear on this one situation, and the hundreds of
thousands of dollars it costs [to intervene],” Pryde said. “We were not able to
do anything until this summer, when the courts were finally able to give us the
authority to go up there and board up the facility and shut it down and keep
people out for good.” Pryde recounted holes in walls and ceilings and a lack of
running water and electricity.
The owners — who Pryde said were licensed in the past by the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) to use the
building as housing for migrant workers — were brought up on charges. It is this
sort of scenario that committee members say they hope to address. “In 35
[or] 40 years, things have not changed. This is a condition of indentured
servitude,” said Peoria Democratic Sen. David Koehler, who says he saw such
conditions first hand when he worked with organizations run by immigrants’
right advocates Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez. “It was deplorable then. It’s deplorable
now, and I think we need to do something to fix it.”
Pryde said industries reap the benefits of cheap
labor while local governments and charity organizations foot the bill for
services needed by the workers. “This is subsidized labor. If you think that
cheap labor is cheap, you are absolutely not looking at it correctly. … There
are enormous costs for having what I would consider a very low paid group of
workers who are not even earning a living wage. … We need to provide them rent subsidies.
We need to provide them health care.” She said it is not just farming
operations that profit from the situation. “It is all the really cheap
labor we’re talking about. We’re talking about agribusiness. We’re talking
about people working in restaurants. We’re talking about people working in
manufacturing.”
According to the Latino Policy Institute, a majority of
the migrant workers in the state are legally allowed to work in the United States, and 33
percent are U.S. citizens. They typically bring family members along for the
trip — on average four people — and their median household income is $17,000 to almost
$20,000. The average length of stay for a migrant worker in Illinois is just
over six months. According to the Illinois Migrant Council, approximately 28,000
seasonal and migrant workers traveled to the state last year.
Pryde pointed to local efforts to close down Cherry Orchard.
“This one situation cost tens of thousands of dollars locally. That’s not even
counting what the state had to pay for this situation—to finally get it shut
down. And of course all we’ve done is push the situation elsewhere. The
situation still exists. We just can’t see it.’
Miguel Keberlein Gutierrez, supervisory attorney of the
Illinois Migrant Legal Assistance Project, said migrant workers are lured to
Illinois, as well as other states across the nation, by labor recruiters. The
recruiters contract with companies to provide low cost workers and also act as sort of a legal buffer because the companies often do not technically employ
the workers. Gutierrez said workers typically come to Illinois from Texas,
Florida and Mexico. “[The recruiters] begin to make promises about good free
housing, about getting their kids into school, about access to food stamps, SNAP
benefits. But of course, farm workers are never told how dangerous or poor the
housing will be that they’re going to be placed in.” He said once workers come
here, they and their families are usually crammed into small and decrepit
living spaces. “The labor contractor is used as the middle man to do all the
basically the dirty work that no one else wants to do,” Koehler said.
If workers complain, they can lose their jobs and
have no way to get home, or they can even face physical retaliation. Gutierrez
said the only way a worker can get legal help is to file an injunction to shut downh a housing camp or a work operation. “The likelihood of a farmworker
being able to navigate the local court system [with no legal representation] to
get an injunction against a labor camp is remote,” he said.
Pryde said cramped and unsanitary living conditions create a
public health threat for the community at large. “It does hurt them, and it hurts us when there
is tuberculosis involved, when there are other illnesses involved. People are
coming here and being hired without even the most basic infectious disease
health screening.” She said the dumping of raw sewage, like what was happening
at the Cherry Orchard complex, opens up the potential for the public to be
exposed to a host of diseases. “You're probably thinking, 'Cholera, typhoid fever,
what are the chances of that happening?' Cause we don’t even see those in this
country hardly, do we? We certainly have had cases of them in Champaign County
this year.”
Witnesses suggested that lawmakers require the IDPH to meet
three times a year with advocacy groups and those providing services to
migrant workers, make it easier for migrant workers to contact the state for
help and to highlight the need for legislation to improve IDPH oversight of both migrant housing and
labor contractors. Bob Palmer, policy director for Housing Action Illinois,
said lawmakers must step up the consequences for those who skip out on the
state’s licensing process. Multiple witnesses said that because since the
consequences for not getting licensed are minimal, many involved in recruiting
and housing migrant workers do not go through the process and avoid oversight
from the state. “In order to not have more growers or labor contractors totally
remove themselves from the limited regulatory system that we have now, we need
to have … some penalties for not participating,” he said.
The committee plans to hold more hearings on the issue, and
Sen. Toi Hutchinson said she hopes they will produce legislation
addressing some of dangerous hosing and labor conditions faced by many migrant
workers in the state. “If this were [happening] in another country, we would be
talking about human rights violations — not an agricultural protection act — I’m
talking about human rights violations.”
Pryde said she thinks the issue is one that goes largely
unnoticed by Illinois residents. “I am truly an accidental advocate,” she said.
“Until I had a personal experience with this, I had no idea. And now I simply
cannot not talk about it.”
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