CHAPTER 5: Living Hell

On the provincial level, the anti-labour Social Credit government had done nothing to improve the lot of farmworkers, despite recommendations made in 1975 by an all-party committee set up by the New Democratic Party. Although the Socreds passed a new Employment Standards Act in August 1980, provisions in the Act could still exclude farmworkers from the rules applied to all other workers. At the heart of the problem was a section of the Act that allowed for a different minimum wage to be set for farmworkers than for other workers.

The CFU pushed for the B.C. Human Rights Branch to look into the exclusion from minimum-wage legislation from a perspective of racism, but the human rights branch refused to investigate the charge. CFU President Raj Chouhan was outraged.

"The B.C. Human Rights Branch is telling us that if I go into a restaurant and they refuse me service because I'm an East Indian, then the branch will investigate and hold public hearings. But if I am an East Indian farmworker and I can't afford to feed my family because of racist legislation, they won't do anything about it. The Human Rights Branch will defend my right to go to a disco, but they say they have no power to defend my right to feed my family. They can stop one person from discriminating against another, but they can't stop the provincial government from discriminating against the thousands of farmworkers in this province," Chouhan said.

Not only did the new Employment Standards Act fail to eliminate the contract labour system - it denied seasonal workers who worked less than six months any "notice of termination" rights, it had not followed recommendations by the CFU to standardize the weighing of flats by growers or the introduction of time clocks on farms, it did not prohibit the use of children under 12 in the fields and it had no provisions for childcare for farmworkers.

The issue of children working or playing in the fields and housed in squalid and unsafe "cabins" used by the farmworkers became a high-profile issue only after the deaths of four children. The cabins housed workers, often entire families, which had come from communities around B.C. for the harvest season. Since existing legislation didn�t cover these dwellings, the conditions were often deplorable.

While the new Employment Standards Act was being debated in the B.C. Legislature, seven-month-old Sukhdeep Madhar drowned in a bucket of water in a converted horse barn in Matsqui after falling off a cot. The inquest heard testimony from a Matsqui police officer that conditions on the farm where Sukhdeep died resembled "absolute squalor." The former horse barn housed as many as 70 farmworkers and their families at a time. The bucket in which Sukhdeep drowned was used because there was no running water in the building. Her parents, Santokh and Rajit Madhar, lived in a three-metre by four-metre stall with a small refrigerator and hot plate. The 14 stalls in the barn formerly housed horses, but now held up to up to six farmworkers per stall. After a visit to the barn, the coroner said the living conditions resembled "a Nazi concentration camp."

A spokesman for the CFU pointed out to the media that the farm where Sukhdeep died wasn't even one of the worst in terms of facilities for the workers. The spokesman also pointed out that only a few metres away from the barn was the growers' home - a mansion with a Cadillac and a Mercedes parked in the driveway and newly-finished tennis courts nearby.

The inquest into Sukhdeep�s death said it "recognizes the horror of living conditions" and recommended that "the living conditions of farmworkers be investigated and upgraded so an incident of this nature is less likely to happen in the future."

But two weeks after the accident, on July 25 , 1980, three young boys aged seven to eleven - brothers Summandeep and Gurjeet Pejatta and Boota Basi - drowned in an abandoned gravel pit in Langley while their parents were picking berries in a nearby field. After pressure by the union, the owner of the pit was eventually fined.

While the province dithered over regulations for living conditions for farmworkers, the district of Matsqui proposed new rules in early 1982 to upgrade the standards for farmworkers' living quarters. The district took the initiative following a provincial task force investigating farmworkers' living conditions visited one farm in Matsqui, where they found "among other things, that the cabin was a deadly firetrap, that it was overcrowded and had extremely poor ventilation."

The response from growers was swift and hostile. One angry Matsqui farmer vowed to give away his farm rather than live with "rigid" new regulations planned for the housing of seasonal farm workers. The Province newspaper reported that Martin Smith said the bylaw would make farming uneconomical in the area. Matsqui�s draft bylaw proposed a minimum size for cubicles, number of beds per square foot and locations and numbers of kitchens and toilets. B.C. Raspberry Growers� Association representative Cornelius Penner told Matsqui Council the bylaw would "clean up the industry by shutting farms downs."

Calvin Sanborn of the Fraser Valley Farmworkers� Legal Services Project countered that while the bylaw would be a step forward, it would still lag behind international standards. He demanded more room per person and twice-yearly inspections of the cabins. As well, the union was pressing for the government to include farmworkers� cabins under the Industrial Camps Act used in logging and forestry. The union took eight growers to the LRB to get access to farm cabins so CFU representatives could talk to the workers as part of union organizing. But as Sarwan Boal explains, there were problems with the system:

"We had to give notice to the growers first and you can imagine the reception we got. The growers would let their dogs go and we couldn�t get to the door. Or the farmers would send informers in with the other workers to report on what we talked about. At one farm where I had signed up two members the farmer claimed I had forced them to sign and took the workers to the LRB and had them testify that I had forced them to sign union cards. It was obvious they had been coached by the grower on what to say.

"Anyway, the method didn�t work. So what we started to do was go to a farm with our leaflets, and we always went with someone else so we wouldn�t be there alone, and we'd wait until the farmer was present. Then usually he would try to stop us from handing out the leaflets. I would then engage in a debate with the farmer, and I would lay out the facts. What could he say? They were full of shit, and the workers could hear that.

"I had guns pulled on me by farmers three times. One time it was a farmer who hated me because of the LRB hearings and he had been drinking. I was talking to the workers and he pulled up in his van and pointed a shotgun at me. I said 'If you�re going to shoot me, go ahead and shoot me - it won�t stop the organizing.' The method worked, but we were spending so much time fighting with the growers that we were wasting more time than we gained."

The union met with the Labour Relations Board in an bid to set out guidelines for the union to canvass farm workers in their place of work. Over objections from the farmers, the LRB had ruled that the CFU could visit farm cabins to recruit members up to six times a month during the 1982 harvest season.

The union had pressed hard for access because the workers living on farms were hard to get to. The farmers kept the workers away from outsiders and because their accommodations were often in converted barns, farm outbuildings or even chicken coops, it could be hard to identify them as "living quarters" from the outside.

Boal had started organizing with the approach of going to the pickers in the fields to hand out pamphlets and talk to them about the union. But the organizers didn�t have the legal right to be on the farm and could be charged with trespassing. The union saw the access ruling as a way to legally speak with potential members and as an opportunity to check on living conditions of the more than 3,000 farmworkers housed in "cabins" in the Fraser Valley.

"About 65-70 per cent of the workforce is women, said Boal. "They are in constant fear when we come by on the road to talk to them. They always look around about 20 times before they'll even answer back. They think they'll get fired just to grab a leaflet. They need to talk to a union organizer all by themselves."

In his 1982 thesis on organizing farmworkers, Sadhu Binning explained that "Farmers had very effective control over the workers� lives. Although no �barbed wire� existed and no overt policing was done, the farmers usually took necessary precautions to make sure that workers in these cabins had no contact with the organizers. While the farmers charged rent for these cabins by taking a cut from the piece rate, the workers were told they lived �free� and therefore they should be grateful for this and obey the farmer."

While the CFU now had the legal right to go to the cabins, the legal theory and the practice proved very different. In June 1982 the Vancouver Sun went along with Boal when he tried to enter a Fraser Valley farm to speak with the workers. He had gone to the same farm a year earlier and been threatened unless he left. This time farm owner Mohinder Gill refused to let Boal speak to the workers alone and insisted on following him around the farm. Ironically, said Boal, M&G Bros. Farms provide better housing for farmworkers than most Fraser Valley growers. "Gill�s cabins are quite adequate but too many workers� quarters are still little more than shacks and workers are scared to say anything about it. That�s why we need access. Gill knows that the workers will be intimidated if he is there and that's why he won't let us go alone. He knows he's violating the LRB ruling but he'll try to delay us as long as he can. Gill and the others can try to delay us. But if we don't talk to the workers this summer, it will be next summer or in two years. It could be 10 years, I don't care."

The B.C. Human Rights Commission launched a series of hearings on living and working conditions in agriculture. The resulting report, issued in February 1983, suggested the B.C. government was "allowing farmworkers to toil under inhuman conditions in a system built on racism." The report recommended that all farmworkers quarters have adequate showers, toilets and laundry facilities and "receive the same protection as all other workers under the Employment Standards Act."

The chairman of the commission blasted then health minister Jim Neilsen for not enforcing the Industrial Camps Act. Asked if he thought Nielsen was guilty of unintentional racism for not legislating better living conditions for farmworkers, commission chairman Charles Paris said: "If the shoe fits, wear it."

Paris soon had other reasons to be angry with the Socreds. In July, 1983, the government brought down its infamous "restraint" budget. Not only did many of the bills attack the labour movement and the poor, but the B.C. Human Rights Commission and the Human Rights Branch were abolished in the name of "fiscal restraint."

A fire on Feb. 1, 1983 in which six farmworkers housed in a barn nearly lost their lives had again focussed attention on the lack of regulations and on the provincial government�s refusal to improve the situation.

The frustration was summed up in The Province newspaper following the fire: "A Matsqui bylaw would have provided a smoke alarm to alert the workers, who were awakened by an exploding tire in the barn they called home. But the ministry (of health) has refused to authorize the bylaw because it is inconsistent with the Industrial Camp Act regulations it refuses to enforce."