Harvest of Injustice
December 7, 1999
Reviewed by Dennis T. Avery
Book Review of Harvest of Injustice: Legal Services vs. the Farmer by Rael Jean Isaac
December 1999
World demand for fruits and vegetables will increase five-fold in the decades ahead, and the U.S. has a strong U.S. comparative advantage in producing them. The production of fruits and vegetables should occupy tens of thousands of American farms, earn good livings for millions of farmers and farm workers. The world’s rising demand for produce should also employ more millions of U.S. off-farm workers to process, transport and export of everything from fresh apples and strawberry jam to frozen TV dinners complete with French fries, applesauce and green peas.
Unfortunately, as Rael Jean Isaac documents in Harvest of Injustice, the U.S. government is funding a Legal Services Corporation apparently dedicated to eliminating all of the seasonal workers who harvest 90 percent of America’s fruits and vegetables.
Why? Apparently because the Legal Services lawyers cannot stand to see the “suffering” of seasonal farm workers who make less than the national average wage. Never mind that the workers may be from Haiti, and earning five times what they could earn at home. Never mind that they may be from Mexico, and sending home scarce investment capital that will help pull Mexico up to First World living standards. Never mind that seasonal farm work is a valuable asset to many workers without the language skills, job skills and/or job histories to get better jobs at a given moment in time.
Never mind that millions of well-paid American jobs and billions of dollars worth of fruit, vegetable and processed food exports depend on getting the crops harvested on time and in good condition.
Never mind that most of the farms targeted by the Legal Services lawyers and their blizzards of job complaints and lawsuits are modest-sized American family farms.
Never mind that the best way to fight cancer is for everyone in the world to eat five fruits and vegetables per day, fresh or processed.
This important book documents the vendetta being carried on against America’s fruit and vegetable industry by the government-funded Legal Services Corporation-and concludes that nothing short of eliminating the LSC will stop the assaults.
Ms. Isaac warns that the corporation’s enabling legislation, designed to protect the corporation from “political pressure,” succeeded so brilliantly that the Corporation itself has been unable to call off its legal attack dogs on the few occasions when it has tried.
One of the most frightening episodes related in Harvest of Injustice is the destruction of the modest family apple orchards of western Maryland in the late 1980s. The assault was led by a Legal Services lawyer named Gregory Schell, who deluged the Maryland family orchards with hundreds of written legal complaints about racial discrimination, substandard housing, “safety defects” on worker busses, and a wide variety of other “problems.” Legal Services even forced the orchard owners to drop the “ladder test,” designed to ensure that the pickers could move the ladder and get up and down it without injuring themselves or others. Legal Services “proved” the ladder test was unrelated to job safety! In all, Legal Services filed a four-foot-high stack of legal actions against the members of the Washington County Fruit Growers Association. Ultimately, the orchardists cut down their trees, and the packing sheds closed.
The vendetta against farm labor started almost as soon as Legal Services was founded in the 1970s. Ms. Isaac says the attacks have been most severe in the “winter garden” states of Florida, Texas and California — but the government’s legal attack dogs have also struck hard at orchards in New England, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Michigan and Washington State; at the cucumber farms of North Carolina, the mushroom growers of Pennsylvania, the pickle growers of Ohio and the chili growers of New Mexico.
In fact, the local legal groups which receive grants from the Legal Services Corporation have targeted virtually every visible cluster of farms which use seasonal labor. (Legal Services doesn’t actually hire young activist lawyers itself; it just grants money to obscure activist organizations which do.).
At first, the Legal Services attack on farms seemed to be an effort to unionize migrant and seasonal workers. But then, the Legal Services lawyers turned on the very unions they had helped form. The self-righteous young lawyers apparently have felt that getting rid of seasonal farm workers was critically important to their fight for “social justice.”
Gary Bellow, then of the Legal Services Institute, wrote: “Most of us agree that America maintains a deeply stratified class system; changing this system …is a primary concern of most of us who do legal services work…” In other words, they’ll get equality between a family orchard which has built up its business over generations in a successful U.S. economy and an illiterate Mexican migrant worker trying to surmount a dysfunctional Mexican economy — even if that means putting both out of their jobs.
At first, the young lawyers could point to Edward R. Murrow’s famous “Harvest of Shame” and claim they were trying to better the lot of poor immigrant workers. But in recent years, the Legal Services fundees have smothered family farms with blizzards of legal complaints and lawsuits even when they paid high wages and offered good housing.
By 1995, when Dan Rather and CBS-TV revisited Murrow’s famous program (”Legacy of Shame”) he was able to document migrant workers sleeping in the streets of El Paso, and decry the fact that growers no longer provided transport to the fields. However, he failed to mention that these problems had been created by Legal Services efforts!
– More than half of the field worker housing in the U.S. has been torn down in recent years, often to prevent Legal Services lawyers from filing housing complaints. (In many cases the housing was virtually new; in some cases the lawyers induced workers to trash their own housing in order to provide grounds for complaints.)
– Instead of keeping unsafe buses off the road, the government has imposed such high insurance requirements on any vehicle transporting farm workers that the cost of ensuring a bus is now six to eight times the cost of the bus. Thus the workers must get to the fields in vehicles operated by crew leaders or their friends, often at exorbitant fares.
Rather pointed no fingers at Legal Services. In fact, he spotlighted, Greg Schell, the nemesis of the Maryland apple industry, as a “noble advocate” for the poor farmworker.
Rael Jean Isaac, already the author of other books, has done a fine job in Harvest of Injustice, spotlighting one of the significant contraints on the revival of rural America which should accompany the world’s growing affluence and the global drive for better diets.
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