Rural News: January, 2001 - Volume #7

RURAL AMERICA

Meat: Midwest, Southeast
Vanguard. In 1999, the INS in Omaha subpoenaed records from 111 meatpacking plants in Nebraska, compared employee I-9 information against SSA and INS records

San Joaquin: Elections, Jobs, Poverty
Elections. Actor Alan Autry, a.k.a. Bubba, the fictional good-old-boy cop who played alongside Carroll O'Connor in the TV series "In the Heat of the Night," was elected mayor of Fresno

IMMIGRATION

No Guest Workers
Congress did not approve a new guest worker program for agriculture in 2000, leaving US agriculture with a seasonal farm work force that is about 55 percent unauthorized, and increasing.

H-2A Program
The H-2A program is currently the only guest worker program for farm employers seeking temporary foreign workers.

OTHER

US Farm Policy
President-elect George W. Bush nominated Ann M. Veneman to be Agriculture Secretary, making her the first female USDA leader and marking a break from the usual practice of having a Midwesterner lead USDA.

California: $27 billion Farm Sales
California's farm sales were $26.7 billion in 1999, up from $26.3 billion in 1998 but down from the record $27.2 billion in 1997.

Agriculture, Land and Trade
Leather has become a mass commodity product, largely because there are so many pigs in China.

GMOs, Mad Cows
Genetically modified organisms or genetically engineered crops are plants with genes added that confer resistance to insect, fungal and viral pests to plants that might otherwise die or require heavy doses of pesticides to prevent damage from these pests.

FARM WORKERS

California: Wages, Health, ES, Housing
Minimum Wages. California's Industrial Welfare Commission boosted the minimum wage from $5.75 to $6.25 an hour on January 1, 2001, and to $6.75 on January 1, 2002.

UFW: Strawberries, Mushrooms
The UFW filed its LM-2 report for 1999, reporting $7 million in revenues, including $1.7 million or 24 percent from the dues of 26,000 members, $4 million in contributions, and the balance from income from affiliates and interest.

ALRB, NLRB
The United Food & Commercial Workers Local 1096 lost an election at Boskovich Farms in Oxnard on a 19-3 vote in November 2000.

Northwest: Apples
The US harvested about 240 million 42-pound bushels of apples in 2000, down from 251 million bushels in 1999.

Northeast, Midwest
Aroostook County, Maine has two large broccoli farms, and they employ primarily Mexican-born workers to harvest crops.

Southeast: Florida Sugar, FLOC
Florida Sugar. Between 1941 and the mid-1990s, virtually all sugarcane grown in Florida was cut by hand by workers imported from the Caribbean, usually from Jamaica, under the H-2 program (1953-86)

Farm Worker Services
Legal Services. Cruz Reynoso, the first Latino to serve on the California Supreme Court, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in August 2000.

Data: Benefits, Social Security, MHS
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics computes the costs of hiring workers. In March 1999, the most recent data available, the total cost of employing workers in the US private sector was $19 an hour