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Ignored and Cheated

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President Bush mentioned the need for laws to bring in more temporary foreign workers in his 2007 State of the Union address so they "won't have to sneak in." The Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association, which represents most growers in the state, calls it necessary because few American residents want to do such hard manual labor. The trade group fielded 65 requests for about 4,500 workers in 2007. That's a 30 percent jump from 2006. "It's not a perfect program, but more growers are accessing it," says Lisa Lochridge, a spokeswoman for the fruit and vegetable group.

In the past, only one Miami-Dade farm sought to import workers, state records show. This season, four labor contractors submitted seven applications. They were approved to ship in up to 300 workers and pay $8.56 an hour. Toto's Picking is one of them. The company's president is Enite Cemerville, a 27-year-old hairstylist whose father, Seden Penel, was recently overseeing the pickers in the field. She says there aren't enough people willing to harvest beans. And older Haitians, who once made up the bulk of the workforce, pick too slowly. "They really don't want to do the dirty work anymore," she adds.

She and her father, Penel, did six weeks of interviews in a Port-au-Prince hotel to recruit workers, she explains. "Believe me, when you go to a starving country, it's funny how fast you get phone calls," Cemerville says. "It was easy to get them here, honestly."

Workers eat daily at a restaurant run by Penel, whom they call "Toto." They pay $9 for both breakfast and dinner. Attendance is taken nightly at two Krome Avenue motels, the Holiday Motel and the Country Lodge. Cemerville says her company picks up the tab and warns workers about fleeing. "Ever seen that show, Scared Straight?" she asks. "We told them all the bad stuff that could happen.... They know that if there are problems, they are not coming back."

Four guest workers interviewed on a busy Saturday night at the Holiday Motel confirmed Cemerville's description. They say they earn $8.56 per hour. They'll be sent home in May but hope to return in the fall. A lanky, six-foot-tall, 38-year-old, who asked not to be identified for fear he could lose the job, said he has saved some money to pay medical bills for his seven-year-old daughter, who can't walk. "I'm hoping that November is right around the corner so I can come back," he says.

But the program might not be everything it seems. Immigration authorities are investigating claims of human smuggling, sources say. Several Homestead residents have claimed they paid a recruiter thousands of dollars to bring in relatives, which would be illegal, lawyers say. One crew told Florida Rural Legal Services their passports and visas had been taken from them, a sign of human trafficking. And in late February, dozens of guest workers in Georgia joined a suit alleging they'd been underpaid by Two Brothers Farms, a company that applied to import about 75 pickers to county fields.

"It is like human trafficking," says Sauveur Pierre, a Haitian-American who works with Florida Rural Legal Services. "They hear there's a job here, and they'll do whatever they can to get that job. It's cheaper because they're often not paid what they're supposed to be paid. And if they complain, their employer will say, 'We'll send you back.'"

Though Bush backs the program, some politicians shun it. Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-NY) recently said, "This guest-worker program's the closest thing I've ever seen to slavery."

Whether the program is good for Miami-Dade is unclear. The county's unemployment rate has risen to 4.1 percent in the past year. Some low-paid or jobless workers in urban areas might prefer the reasonably high-paying gigs filled by the Haitians. Pickers like Claircina Sinois scrape to find jobs — even those that pay below minimum wage. "Some days there just isn't work," she says, noting she has on occasion received less than one-fourth of the imported workers' pay rate.

It is a Sunday in February. Dusky beams of sunlight filter through the trees. Birds chirp. Greg Schell, who is 54 years old and looks like a brainy high school math teacher in his short-sleeve dress shirt and thick glasses, tries to calm Sinois in the front yard of her North Miami home. She's describing how a bean crew leader recently warned her not to cause trouble. "He said, 'Take it easy because T Johnny was asking for you,'" she says and then explains the reference is to farmer John Torrese. "If he finds me, I'll tell him to talk to my lawyer or the good Lord."

"It's okay," the lawyer says, patting her arm as she clutches his.

"God bless you," she says.

"I can only hope I'll be half that strong at her age," he says.

Schell has represented farmworkers in hundreds of cases during the past three decades. After growing up on a wheat farm in Washington state, he attended Harvard Law School and graduated in 1979. Then he moved to Florida and began suing growers and crew bosses. His name is up there with NAFTA among words that growers curse.

"If there is one person who has it out for the American farmer, it is Greg Schell," says Katie Edwards, executive director of the Dade County Farm Bureau.

In the late Eighties and early Nineties, he filed about a dozen bean-related lawsuits. After reviewing three years of state records and meeting Sinois and Venant, the lawyer realized conditions had plummeted again, he says. He estimates the daily pay for the more than 5,000 bean pickers ranges from less than $15 to $75. Workers must fill at least 16 boxes in eight hours to earn the state's $6.79 minimum wage. Like Sinois, many don't.

"If there's no enforcement and there's economic gain by cheating, a lot of people will cheat," Schell says. "If agriculture in Dade County has gotten to the point where they can't pay workers adequately, I don't think we should go out of the way to save it."

He is collecting evidence he hopes will persuade U.S. District Court Judge Patricia Seitz to certify as a class action the suit against Torrese and two companies he heads, T-N-T Farms and Quality Kid Produce. A handful of pickers now living in Alabama has already contacted him, he says. In about a month, Schell plans to run radio spots asking green-bean pickers with concerns about their pay to call the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project. So far, though, Venant and Sinois are his only plaintiffs.

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