Jobs they say Americans won’t do

Jobs they say Americans won’t do.

The strawberry farmer’s foreman started up the old school bus and drove to the Mission in downtown Portland. A small crowd of people waited for him there. It was an early year for the berries this year, and a lot of his helpers from years before were busy with other crops in other places. He sorted through the cowd, discarding the obvious hangover recoverees and holding on to the Mexicans he saw, talking in Spanish to them and English to the rest. He preferred the Mexicans. They were there to work, hard, whereas the Americans he got from the mission were often homeless people who’d work hard enough to buy that night’s bottle of Mad Dog and not much harder.

It’d been on the news that the strawberries were unsually early this year, and a couple of college students with time on their hands had heard and come to the Mission too and the foreman picked them too as likely workers. With a full crew, he pulled out of Portland and made the 40 minute drive to Orient where the berries gleamed in the rising dawn. The bus pulled to a stop, and with a couple of words to some of the Mexicans, a fire was soon built and going, a pot of water heating for coffee later, and everyone given baskets and flats and rows of berries to pick.

It was another season for the farmer’s strawberries. He’d farmed that land since the early 50’s. The Japanese had long been a presence in Willamette Valley agriculture, but he was late to the valley, having served as soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army in China from 1937 until the end of the war with the Americans in 1945. He’d sold what little he had in Japan and moved to Orient, Oregon, eventually earning the fields that now grew the early crop of strawberries, some of the finest Oregon berries that paid more and tasted better than the California mega-farm berries that would hit the market in just a few weeks.

His foreman was a Mexican-American man whose family had served him for years and he knew he’d find good workers to get the berries picked before too many of them went bad on the ground. While the packers who made jam of the berries would take nearly any berries, the best ones would go in small open containers in supermarkets to entich the buyers, so it was best to get all he could while he could. He set the rate at 10 cents a pound and as soon as it was light enough to see, the picking began.

The farmer paid on the spot, 10 cents a pound for the berries. The pickers picked them into buckets which they moved along with them, empting them into the flats that marked their rows. As the flats were filled, they wre brought to the famer who had a scale they set the flats on and paid for what they had and back to their rows they went. The Mexicans were veteran workers, who worked and worked and worked until the picking day ended at noon, the berries being too soft to pick once the sun had caught their glistening sides.

Some of the people the foreman had picked up at the Mission were on the bus already, ready to go back downtown, and wouldn’t be coming back tomorrow.  The college students had worked well and since she was Japanese, she and the famer had a long talk in a language he hadn’t heard in awhile, honest to god Japanese. His sons understood it but didn’t really speak it, and since his wife had died he hadn’t had much occaision to speak it to anyone. Her husband, the other student, was not such a productive worker but he was willing and respectful and eager to do a good job.

He made sure the foreman let them know they were welcome back the next day.  Berry season was just a few weeks and there were acres to pick. The foreman invited the good workers to come back and told the poor ones not to bother and by the end of the week, he had a regular crew whom he picked up every morning in downtown Portland until the berries were picked and it was time to move on to the raspberries.

The Mexicans called strawberries easy money, because they involved a relatively comfortable sqaut and not much reaching beyond comfort ranges. And ten cents a pound! A good worker could make himself $60 a day, with hard work and total focus on the berries. The better American workers were making 40 or 50 dollars a day, but they were migrants who’d picked fruit before. The berries needed picking, so the farmer took all the good workers he could get, but favored the Mexicans who moved with the crops, here and there and all over the Northwest. They knew how to work and worked until the crop was picked and moved on to the next. The farmer had a couple of buses sunk to thir bodies as worker’s housing, and an outhouse set up among them, and migrant workers stayed there until the crop was picked and then moved on.

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