Labor

You got never less then seven cents an hour or pound with piece rate. I remember one family [that] had two or three boys. Their goal was a hundred pounds each a day, and that would get them seven dollars each. They were making pretty close to thirty dollars a day. Harold Aussicker
I think the first time I ever drove a loaded truck to Chicago alone, I was either fourteen or fifteen, which is unheard of today. Back then you did what you had to do.

The labor has become very interesting because most of your labor came from the South. Families in bigger farms out here had labor camps to house these southern people. The southern people started out with strawberries, which is the earliest crop which came around the first of June. When mechanical harvesting came along, it picked the cherries and grapes. Thousands of people from the south came to work on these farms. Austin Cupp
When I was very young, I can remember the folks sending us out to pick up apples and they’d give us a nickel a bushel. I think it was more to get us out of the way than anything. Most often, we worked in what they called the shed, which was a sheltered area for where the pickers would bring the fruit in crates. You’d give ‘em tickets for how many boxes they’d have. Then when the day was done or week, or whatever, they’d come in with their tickets and have them redeemed, so much a time.

I can remember dad driving down to Benton Harbor and picking up migrant help. Not necessarily though, migrant help. There was an old hotel where Mary’s hotel is in Benton Harbor . I’m using the term hotel very loosely. They kinda hang out there so you just go down. It was near the market in those days. They’d just go down and pick up a few. Arlene Emery
My father was a taskmaster. He’d look over a field and I’d clean the weeds out of it. We did a lot by hand at that time. He could spot a weed a half mile. I tell you, he was pretty tough, but I learned.
When I first came here, the laborer was mainly southern people practically all white people. Then, over the years, they gradually changed. The black people came in some, and gradually the whites found jobs back at their homes in the south. We had almost entirely black crews. Then, later, the Spanish started coming in from Mexico and southern Texas . At the present time, most of your crews your entirely Spanish. That has been over the fifty years. It has changed that much.
Cliff Emlong

My man went back to Louisiana and got another load [of laborers]. Out of two loads, we did make a full load of help that stayed with [us]. We were picking cherries by hand. We needed a large crew. Sometimes we had a hundred people out there picking cherries.

We had twenty-two houses for [the] help. Most of those are gone now. We took care of our help here on our property. We gave them everything they needed. Sometimes we would have to take them, if they got hurt, to the hospital.

If anybody wanted to work, they would come and see these different farmers, and they would usually know the farmers if they had been working on the farm. They would come and ask them if they needed any help. One of the big ways to get help was right there. Anybody in town that wanted to work ‑ all they had to do was go down to [the] market and there was work right there ‑ unloading trucks [and] loading big trucks that w[ere] hauling in and out. There w[ere] a lot of people that had work there, and they got paid cash. They would negotiate the rate right there. If someone really needed a lot [of] help they would offer more money. If they didn’t need it very bad[ly], the price would go down. Usually a general price at the time, when I came to this farm after five years in the service, [was] got seventy cents an hour. Harold Fox
[My dad] had one man that worked for him on the farm [for] a dollar a day. Dollar a day and anything he wanted out of the garden. On the weekend, my dad might give him a chicken or something for Sunday dinner.

[During the war], I worked a lot of German prisoners on the farm [who were in] camps here. When they first came to Benton Harbor , they stayed at a place called the armory. They [would] go out there on Sundays and sing all day. Everybody [would] go and listen. They pretty much knew English. Everybody liked them and they liked us. George Glade
The migrants that we had were small farmers from around Arkansas . That was before cotton picking machines. After the blueberries were finished, they’d go back and harvest cotton. Most of them were just fine people. They even had a preacher [who traveled] with them.

We have about a hundred and fifty migrant pickers that we hire every year. We have fourteen housing units and we house families and groups of people. We have probably two, I think two, really large groups of men that just basically travel around the country following the fruit seasons, and they come out every summer and we house them. We also house some families that have been coming back since we started. So they come from all over, Texas and Florida , and we have a couple [of] families that live in Lawrence , Michigan . Kim Grabovac
Pickers are almost one hundred percent Spanish now, “Texicans.” That changed twenty years ago. When you only had forty acres, you didn’t have that much help. Then you got so you’d have eighty acres and you didn’t have a lot more help. You’d have some more. Constant change. Bernard Herman
We tried to hire the best people. We sought young people out of college, and many were good people. Unfortunately, someone would hire them away from me. Wallace and Laura Heuser
Instead of one person picking for a day to pick all the cherries off a tree, you have four people do it in one minute and go to the next tree. Suddenly cherries went from a crop that was very hard to grow and very expensive, to a crop that was very easy to grow and very cheap. Mark Longstroth
The migrant help that we had living with us was like growing up with strangers. One time when I was a youngster, we had three men that lived at our house for three months. From 1929 until probably 1940, there was anywhere from one to three migrants [who] worked year round and lived in the house. I recall the so-called hobos.

During the Depression, it was a dollar a day or ten cents an hour, and pickers were paid by a container filled with a certain commodity. Juice apples, at one time, were twenty-five cents a hundred pounds, tart cherries were two and a half cents a pound. Proportionally, prices began to increase along with labor costs. Farm labor has never been overpaid because it’s tedious work. James Lull
We used to have literally thousands of migrant workers [who] would come into the state. [They would] move [from] south to north. Fruit ripens earlier in Benton Harbor/ St. Joe than it does in Traverse City . So, the migrant streams would move north with the harvest. With the automatic harvesting of cherries, that migrant stream has virtually disappeared. It’s still there to a lesser extent for the fruit that still has to be hand picked. Russell Mawby
When we were making bushel baskets, it was seasonal. [It was hard work], very labor intensive, making wood containers. At our plant in Shelby , we had eighty people working. I think it was even more than that, peeling wood off of a log to make quart berry baskets. The labor was in a better supply. Today, that just c[a]n’t be done. It’s just not available, and if it is, the price is prohibitive where the cost of the item would get so high, that it just doesn’t pay to for a bushel basket or a quart. Sam Monte

My uncle started using migrant workers back in the [19]30s, before the war. Most migrant families would stay in through the summer and some would stay year round. We would also have second and third generations of people coming up out of Arkansas and Missouri , and they stayed here. I recall they had bunkhouses there. They would cook outside just like we would do at a camp out. They had outhouses. But then the government came around and said, “Hey, you’ve got to have running water for these people. They can’t have an outhouse. You’ve got to have modern facilities.” After the war is when it was suppressed. You needed all the labor you could find during the war. Labor: Four days at sixty-six and two-thirds cents a day. Eugene Peters
During and after the war, after the war especially, that’s when a lot of the migrants were busy. Baroda was just buzzing because everybody, all the neighborhood, had migrants. It was good for the whole town, too, because we had three grocery stores. The migrants, at that time, didn’t earn money like they earn today. It must have been in the [19]50s when it started in.

We’d get local help to pick grapes, and then the grape harvester came along. More women were going out to work away from home, too. When we had the raspberries, we’d [hire] women, and they’d bring their kids out. Two or three weeks, they were in raspberries. They earned money [and] they learned how to work.

We’ve known them [laborers] the years because a lot of them are local people, and they learned to work at a young age. They were ten years old and [their] mother thought they could come out and pick. But then all these laws came along. You’re not supposed to do this. And so, I think it affected the young people learning how to work because they’re not going to want to go start working at sixteen and learn how to do it. We have lots of children that learned picking raspberries [and] cherries. They learned how to work. As we think back to where they are today, almost without a doubt they have gone ahead and made something of their life. Leo and Dorothy Rennhack
Ours [Birdseye] is a union shop, which is kind of unusual in the fruit business. In Michigan , most of the plants are not union. [But] if you go to the Heinz pickle companies, Gerber, the big name brand people, you’ll see a lot of union shops. The kind of people you run across here [are] mostly a non-union workforce. Our people are local, [and] we don’t use a lot of migrants because of our union capacity. People come and stay. We use a lot of seasonal people, people [who] come back over and over. A lot of [the] line workers are female. [At] our plant, forklift drivers, management – we’ve got females integrated very well. But, in the industry in general, there’s probably a lot of female employees [o]n the production side of things.

Imports [like] apples and asparagus from China , and asparagus from South America , are a huge challenge because of the cheap labor – [In the] last ten years, we[‘ve seen] a huge surge in imports. The things that we have to do for compliance compared with what our government lets us import is frustrating. It’s not a level playing field, and that’s one of the other reasons [besides] labor that people have an advantage outside of this country. Glenn Rogers
When I first came back from California in 1956, I used local whites and local African Americans. African American boys from local high schools worked at the farm. I hire a lot of the ones that are now adults here. In those days, there were white migrants [who] migrated with the crops and most of them came from Florida . Before, they had been pickers and share croppers. There was a time when labor was very difficult to come by, and I picked the whole crop with high school kids and folks on social security. I also used Latinos [who] spoke almost entirely in Spanish, from Mexico . I had to learn Spanish in college and I had it in high school and it helped me. Most of the day, I spoke Spanish to the migrant workers. Paul Rood
Mainly, farm workers were used in harvest. That’s one of the reasons we were diversified [with our crops], so that you can keep the [workers] there from asparagus through the apple season. We did it. We had diversity all the way across the board.

The initial workers that we had been this term might seem derogatory but we had what we considered hillbillies. They were typically from Arkansas and Missouri [and], occasionally, some from Florida . And these were families that usually followed the fruit crops. They usually started with southern Indiana , and they moved up with the fruit crops. And most of the time, they were families, and we would provide housing for them; beds, and we would have pots and pans, and things like that. Occasionally, there would be families that would come up from Missouri and Arkansas again that were in financial difficulty, many times because of illness and so on. They could not make enough cash on their own farms, and they would work a summer or two and get enough cash to cover themselves for the typical growing season.

The only thing that came out of there was the Migrant Worker Act, whe[re] they had an inspector come around. Migrant worker inspections, and you had to provide more and more things for them, the workers that you housed. My dad had to build an outhouse and a shower, and refrigerators. [They] had real outhouses.

Mainly, the farm workers were used in harvest, and that’s one of the reasons we were diversified so that you can keep them there from asparagus through the apple season.

Once in a while, we would use students, university students or students from the local high school, but not that often. As the farm got older and the climate changed, the migrant workers changed more over to Hispanics, as opposed to low-income [people from] Missouri [and] Arkansas . [From the 19]70s and up, mainly Hispanics from Texas .

During World War II, we had POWs. We had POWs for three years. And, being of German heritage, they would treat us very well. They corresponded with my parents afterwards. My parents actually wanted to visit them in Germany , but they never had the chance to do that. They worked for us and for my grandparents, and a couple of the other farmers in the area, too. Richard Schinkel

They [laborers] came from all over ‑ Alabama , Kentucky , Georgia . They’d all come in to pick fruit. Many of these guys would be adopted by these farmers and they would just stay out there with the farmers and later become very successful. [The farmers] helped them become what they are today. Families would get on a flatbed truck, and farmers would take them out to the farm and bring them back home in the evening. That went on for years and years. Roy Shoemaker
When I was in college and all, the labor was actually by the hour, and it ranged from fifty cents to a dollar, in that range, per hour. Today, you will find farm labor somewhere between five and a half and ten dollars, and that’s just for inexperienced help. Herb Teichman
Fruit orchards abounded in the counties south and east of Benton Harbor , providing seasonal work picking fruit, everything from strawberries to peaches to cherries to blueberries. I started working in the fields during my first summer in Michigan [in 1951]. Summer mornings, the men would head off to the factories, and the women and children would go to the fields. Every morning in the summer, Mr. Yarbrough’s old flatbed truck would cough itself awake at the projects around five a.m. My mother and I would be outside, along with many other people, and we’d climb aboard for the ride to the fields. The farmers treated us pretty well, giving us water and food breaks in the blistering heat. Each of us made up to ten dollars a day. I worked alongside my mother in the fields. Such work was familiar but a far cry from southern sharecropping. Mr. Yarbrough would pick us up at the orchards late in a long day. We’d stagger off the truck at night, almost bent in two by our day of picking.

Two weeks after I graduated from high school [1958], I began the job with the House of David cold-storage plant. This was the first real job I had, other than working in the fruit orchards. I worked the night shift, three [to] eleven p.m. Because of my ‘clout’ as a basketball star, I never had to go into storage lockers to store fruit like the other employees. Chet Walker
Initially growing grapes was very labor intensive. Everything was done by hand, starting out with some horse drawn equipment. Tim Washburn

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