by Ben Botkin, Oregon Capital Chronicle
August 14, 2024
Blanca Calderon listened carefully while U.S. Rep. Andreas Salinas spoke about her bill that would provide relief to farmworkers when natural disasters strike, from heat domes to wildfires or pandemics.
Calderon, a 40-year-old mother of four, lives in Woodburn and labors at a cannery that packs harvested blueberries. For 25 years, she has lived in Oregon after moving from Michoacan, a Mexican state famous for its avocado orchards. When the Labor Day wildfires in 2020 choked the skies with smoke, she could not work and stayed home to care for her daughter, whose asthma flared up.
Calderon is among Oregon’s workforce of 100,000 farmworkers, a diverse group of people who toil in fields, tend cattle at ranches and process fruit at canneries across the state. Salinas, D-Oregon and the daughter of a migrant worker, introduced the “Disaster Relief for Farm Workers Act,” to compensate them for lost earnings due to events tied to extreme weather and public health.
“We should be working from a place of abundance, not scarcity,” Salinas said Tuesday during a gathering of about two dozen farmworkers in Woodburn.
Salinas was in the heart of the 6th Congressional District’s rural Willamette Valley region that relies strongly on farmworkers, many of them immigrants.
Oregon has a $5 billion agricultural industry, but the work is often fraught with hardships, from cramped housing quarters to low wages and seasonal work. A state study found the average farmworker in Oregon and Washington earned from $17,500 to nearly $20,000 annually. In their entirety, farmworker households earn an average income of less than $25,000 a year.
The bill would make grants available to community organizations to provide emergency relief to farmworkers. Those organizations would give out money to individual farmworkers and their households, with amounts based upon what the federal government provided. The House Appropriations Committee has not assigned a dollar amount to the bill yet, though one estimate suggests $50 million to launch the program.
“I know the appropriators will not be able to fund it nationwide commensurate with the need because we are starting to see so many natural disasters,” Salinas said. “It’s only going to continue to grow, but I want the community here to know that they’re part of the equation.”
As a state legislator in Salem, Salinas was instrumental in getting farmworker overtime legislation passed in 2022 with ramped up requirements to pay time-and-a-half. Now, overtime kicks in after 55 hours. In 2027, overtime after 40 hours will be required. Salinas also has helped get millions in disaster relief for farmworkers in Oregon.
For Calderon and her community, the risks of nature come in different forms. Events like forest fires and ice storms can impact a household, whether the event lasts a day or a week, Calderon said.
“It’s income that is not coming into the home,” she said.
Dozens of farmworker groups and advocacy organizations support the bill, including the Farmworker Housing Development Corporation, which participated in the event with Salinas. The nonprofit provides affordable housing, much of it to farmworkers, to nearly 3,000 people in the Willamette Valley.
Maria Elena Guerra, the group’s executive director, said the bill would protect farmworkers who worry about losing their jobs if they don’t work in extreme conditions like 100-degree heat.
“People get fired because they don’t show up to work if the heat is out there,” she said. “This bill will help those families.”
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