Vol. 74/No. 7      February 22, 2010

This year Immokalee is filled with idle workers. Most have no work or work only one or two days a week. Some are surviving doing yard sales.

The January 11 eight-hour deep freeze that hit Florida destroyed 70 percent of the tomato crop in this area. An estimated $147 million was lost on crops of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, green beans, sweet corn, squash, and cucumbers. Sixty of the 67 counties in the state have been declared primary natural disaster areas.

Charitable Louis Charles and Meliese Previlus were resting at their home in Farm Worker Village, a state-owned housing community here. They both emigrated from Haiti in the 1980s. Previlus’s last check was three weeks ago for only two hours of work. Louis Charles said that she had worked only 16 hours last week at the packing plant and gets no unemployment compensation.

“The last time it was this bad was when Wilma hit,” Louis Charles said, referring to the 2005 hurricane. They pointed to the surrounding empty houses. “With the poverty wages that the industry has paid for over 30 years, the situation becomes desperate when something like this happens,” Gerardo Reyes, a farm worker and staff member with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, told the Militant. “The problem can’t be solved with charity, even though it is necessary. The solution is to get higher wages.”

Agriculture is the most important Florida export, with more than 750,000 people relying on it for work, from truck drivers to farm workers. The state provides 70 percent of the country’s winter fruits and vegetables.

“People move in with their family or friends because they can’t pay the rent,” said Dellva Ifoquit, a laid-off restaurant worker and also a resident at the farm worker village. “The houses here are state-owned but people are still being evicted.”

Many Haitian workers have no work permits. After the January 12 earthquake in Haiti the Obama administration approved Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians. This temporarily halts deportations of Haitians without papers. It allows them to stay in the United States for 18 months and apply for work permits. Those arriving after January 12 will be deported. It costs almost $500 to register for TPS, which many don’t have. Returning to earthquake-ravaged Haiti is not an alternative.  
 
 
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