Trajeto casa-trabalho de cariocas ficou 39 minutos mais demorado em dois anos
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Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Gas prices drive Geos from clunkers to chic
May 20, 2008|By Mallory Simon CNN
Brenton Netz has made a side business out of fixing up Geo Metros and selling them locally and on eBay.
It's a 12-year-old oft-mocked clunker of an automobile.
But Marci Solomon is hoping she'll be the one laughing -- all the way to the bank -- when her Geo Metro saves her from skyrocketing gas prices.
Solomon, like many others, was taking a huge hit when it came to gas prices. With her 100-mile commute to and from work each day, she saw no end in sight. Then she rediscovered the Geo Metro.
"I used to be a car snob, and I used to be too vain to drive anything that doesn't shine," said Solomon, an electrician. "But now it's about, do I want to eat, or do I want to make it to work? I want to do both."
The Metro has been making a huge comeback, especially on eBay, where Solomon bought the car, because of its extremely high gas mileage.
The 1996 Metro's average of 40 miles per gallon nears that of the hybrid 2008 Toyota Prius -- priced at $21,000 for the cheapest model -- and bests most current cars by a long shot, according to government ratings. Older models of the Geo Metro, specifically cars from 1991 and the XFi edition, have the same average as the hybrid.
Solomon toyed with the idea of purchasing a Prius but decided that for a price of $7,300, the Metro was the more economical option.
For the most part, Solomon plans on using the car for commuting from her home in Rochester, Washington, to her job. The vehicle she has now, a Honda Element, was getting 28 mpg, and she was filling up twice a week, costing her nearly $100. Stations were charging $3.97 a gallon in her area Tuesday, she said. iReport: Tell us how high gas prices are affecting you
The Metro is an investment in the future, Solomon said, even if she did pay more than five times the Blue Book value of the car.
"It was all about saving money," she said. "I don't think gas is ever going to go down, and these are going to be the types of solutions we have to turn to. I wanted to beat the rush."
The rush may have begun.
The 1996 2-door 3-cylinder Metro Solomon now owns opened on eBay May 7 with a bid of $200. A week later, Solomon won the car auction with a bid of $7,300. In 1995, a new Metro hatchback sold for about $9,000, according to Auto Mall USA.
In May alone, 43 Metros of various years and models were sold on eBay, ranging in price from $221.50 to Solomon's bid of $7,300. The cars have been hot items, drawing upwards of 49 bids on certain vehicles, with many of the auctions coming down to last-second bidding wars. On Tuesday morning, 34 Metros were still up for grabs.
Since her eBay purchase, Solomon has acquired another Metro, which she is considering flipping on eBay for profit. She has her eye on a third at a local car lot.
"To be honest, I'm thinking of scarfing up any Geo Metro I can find," she said.
Solomon isn't alone in trying to profit off of a gas-saving craze. Brenton Netz has been selling fixed-up Metros and Ford Festivas for two years now.
After buying a Metro on Craigslist in Montana and driving it back to his home in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Netz realized how rarely he was making trips to the pump.
"I thought the gas gauge was broken," Netz said. "I couldn't believe the gas mileage I was getting."
He realized that he had stumbled upon a possible side business and began buying one-way tickets to states in the West to purchase as many of the cars as he could. Netz said he has sold about a dozen cars and has eight more sitting in his backyard.
His cars go up for sale only one at a time because he knows that putting up a couple at a time would drive down the value and cut into his profit.
Netz says consumers don't seem to mind paying more than the retail value, and if they do, they generally stop feeling that way after they pick up the cars. He's gotten phone calls and e-mails from customers saying how thrilled they are with the mileage.
It seems, Netz said, people are beginning to realize that their car choices need to be focused more on practicality than status and appearance.
"Gas prices are definitely driving increased popularity in the Metro, which at times wasn't cool," he said. "Now the coolness factor is stemming from the fact that you're getting 50 miles per gallon and never having to fill up."
Friday, December 2, 2011
Learning Too Late of the Perils in Gas Well Leases
Learning Too Late of the Perils in Gas Well Leases
By IAN URBINA and JO CRAVEN McGINTY
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Jared Ely near gas wells leased on his family's land near Dimock, Pa. His father, Scott, says the leases should have been clearer.
After Scott Ely and his father talked with salesmen from an energy company about signing the lease allowing gas drilling on their land in northeastern Pennsylvania, he said he felt certain it required the company to leave the property as good as new.
So Mr. Ely said he was surprised several years later when the drilling company, Cabot Oil and Gas, informed them that rather than draining and hauling away the toxic drilling sludge stored in large waste ponds on the property, it would leave the waste, cover it with dirt and seed the area with grass. He knew that waste pond liners can leak, seeping contaminated waste.
“I guess our terms should have been clearer” about requiring the company to remove the waste pits after drilling, said Mr. Ely, of Dimock, Pa., who sued Cabot after his drinking water from a separate property was contaminated. “We learned that the hard way.”
Americans have signed millions of leases allowing companies to drill for oil and natural gas on their land in recent years. But some of these landowners — often in rural areas, and eager for quick payouts — are finding out too late what is, and what is not, in the fine print.
Energy company officials say that standard leases include language that protects landowners. But a review of more than 111,000 leases, addenda and related documents by The New York Times suggests otherwise:
¶ Fewer than half the leases require companies to compensate landowners for water contamination after drilling begins. And only about half the documents have language that lawyers suggest should be included torequire payment for damages to livestock or crops.
¶ Most leases grant gas companies broad rights to decide where they can cut down trees, store chemicals, build roads and drill. Companies are also permitted to operate generators and spotlights through the night near homes during drilling.
¶ In the leases, drilling companies rarely describe to landowners the potential environmental and other risks that federal laws require them to disclose in filings to investors.
¶ Most leases are for three or five years, but at least two-thirds of those reviewed by The Times allow extensions without additional approval from landowners. If landowners have second thoughts about drilling on their land or want to negotiate for more money, they may be out of luck.
The leases — obtained through open records requests — are mostly from gas-rich areas in Texas, but also in Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
In Pennsylvania, Colorado and West Virginia, some landowners have had to spend hundreds of dollars a month to buy bottled water or maintain large tanks, known as water buffaloes, for drinking water in their front yards. They said they learned only after the fact that the leases did not require gas companies to pay for replacement drinking water if their wells were contaminated, and despite state regulations, not all costs were covered.
Thousands of landowners in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Texas have joined class action lawsuits claiming that they were paid less than they expected because gas companies deducted costs like hauling chemicals to the well site or transporting the gas to market.
Some industry officials say the criticism of their business practices is misguided. Asked about the waste pits on Mr. Ely’s land in Pennsylvania, for example, George Stark, a Cabot spokesman, said the company’s cleanup measures met or exceeded state requirements. And the door-to-door salesmen, commonly known as landmen, who pitch the leases on behalf of the drilling companies also dismiss similar complaints from landowners, and say they do not mislead anyone.
The Sales Pitch
“There are bad leases out there, and, as with any industry, there have also been some unscrupulous opportunists,” said Mike Knapp, president of Knapp Acquisitions and Production, a company in western Pennsylvania that brokers deals between landowners and drilling companies. “But everyone I know who does this work is on the up and up, and most of the bad actors that there may have been before are no longer in business.”
He said that his company’s leases ensure that landowners will get replacement water. The company also encourages landowners to visit an existing drilling site before signing a lease to get an idea of the potential noise and truck traffic. Some of the complaints about leases, he said, are just sour grapes from landowners who are envious about the amount of money they believe their neighbors are earning in bonuses and royalties.
To be sure, many landowners have earned small fortunes from drilling leases. Last year, natural gas companies paid more than $1.6 billion in lease and bonus payments to Pennsylvania landowners, according to a report commissioned by the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry trade group. Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest natural gas companies, has paid more than $183.8 million in royalties in Texas this year,according to its Web site.
Much of the money has gone to residents in rural areas where jobs are scarce and farmers and ranchers have struggled to stay afloat. Mr. Ely once worked for a company owned by Cabot on drilling sites in his area, until he was fired shortly after publicly complaining about Cabot’s drilling practices.
But many landowners and lawyers say that gas companies are intentionally vague in their contracts and use high-pressure sales tactics on landowners.
“If you’ve never seen a good lease, or any lease, how are you supposed to know what terms to try to get in yours?” said Ron Stamets, a drilling proponent and a Web site developer in Lakewood, Pa., who started a consumer protection Web site, PAGasLease.com, in 2008 so that he could swap advice with his neighbors as he prepared to sign a gas lease. Others have also taken steps to better inform landowners about the details in leases. In the past several years, the attorneys general in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania have published advisories about the pitfalls of leasing land for drilling.
State regulations also provide protections to landowners above and beyond what is in their leases.
At least eight states specifically require companies to compensate landowners for damage to their properties or to negotiate with them about where wells will be drilled, even if the lease does not provide those protections.
Asked about the leases, officials from Exxon Mobil, the largest natural gas producer in the United States, declined to comment.
Protecting Landowners
Jim Gipson, a spokesman for Chesapeake Energy, said any claims of damage can be investigated by the state and federal authorities and, he added, noise or other disturbances that may come with drilling tend to be brief.
“The most frequently asked question we receive from our mineral owners is, ‘When are you going to drill my well?’ ” he said.
Mr. Gipson said that most leased properties do not end up having a well placed on them, so those leases do not need added protections. But some consumer advocates and lawyers say that protections are needed for all leased properties, even those without wells, because drilling may occur underneath them. These advocates also say that landowners’ eagerness to start earning royalties has made them vulnerable to deceptive tactics by landmen.
“We’re in town until tomorrow,” the landmen typically say, according to interviews with more than two dozen landowners in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania. “We have already signed up all your neighbors.”
The landmen then claim that if you do not sign right away you will miss out on easy income because other drillers will simply pull the gas from under your property using a well nearby.
Some landmen show up in poorer areas shortly before the holidays, offering cash on the spot for signing a lease. They might offer thousands of dollars per acre as a bonus to be paid shortly after the lease is signed. Royalties, which usually run between 12.5 percent and 20 percent of what the companies make for selling the gas, can mean tens of thousands of dollars per year for landowners.
Jack Richards, president of the American Association of Professional Landmen, said his members follow a strict code of ethics. His organization also encourages landowners to ask questions before they sign leases, he said.
“We promote open and honest communication between the landman and landowner before signing the lease,” he said, adding that the standard lease forms are written with some protections for landowners.
Some leases, however, also include language that comes back to haunt landowners.
“I thought I knew what the sentence meant,” said Dave Beinlich, describing a section that said that “preparation” to drill was enough to allow Chief Oil and Gas to extend the duration of his lease.
In 2005, Mr. Beinlich and his wife, Karen, signed a lease for $2 an acre per year for five years on 117 acres in Sullivan County in north-central Pennsylvania. They soon realized they had gotten far less money than their neighbors, so they planned on negotiating a new lease when theirs expired in 2010.
A day before their lease term ended, no well had been drilled on their land, but the gas company parked a bulldozer nearby and started to survey an access road. A company official informed them that by moving equipment to the site, Chief Oil and Gas was preparing to drill and was therefore allowed to extend the lease indefinitely.
The Beinlichs have sued. Kristi Gittins, a vice president at Chief Oil and Gas, says that the company does not comment on pending litigation, but that its goal is to produce gas and it makes an honest attempt to develop the land it leases.
“Lease contracts work both ways,” she added. “Chief honors the terms of its lease contracts, and we expect the landowners who have signed the lease contract to honor the terms of the contract as well.”
But lawyers say that drilling leases are not like other contracts.
“You’re not buying a refrigerator or signing a car note,” said David McMahon, a lease lawyer in Charleston, W.Va., and co-founder of the West Virginia Surface Owners’ Rights Organization, adding that once a well is drilled, it can produce gas for decades, locking landowners into the lease terms.
“With a gas lease, you’re permitting industrial activity in your backyard, and you’re starting a relationship that will affect the quality of living for you and your grandchildren for decades,” he said.
Mr. McMahon and other lease lawyers say that unlike many contracts, oil and gas leases are covered by few consumer protection laws, in part because drilling has been most common in states with less regulation.
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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Natural gas being burned off at wells near Dimock, Pa.
Natural gas being burned off at wells near Dimock, Pa.
Clauses With Consequences
“When it comes to negotiation skills and understanding of lease terms, there is a gaping inequality between the average landman and the average citizen sitting across the table,” said Chris Csikszentmihalyi, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who created a Web site last year called the Landman Report Card that allows landowners to review landmen’s professionalism and tactics.
Some lawyers also say that there are major differences between what drilling companies tell landowners and what they must disclose to investors.
Under federal law, oil and gas companies must offer investors and federal regulators detailed descriptions of the most serious environmental and other risks related to drilling. But leases typically lack any mention of such risks.
In New York, the duration of leases has been an especially contentious issue.
As leases near expiration, some gas companies try to extend them, often by invoking “force majeure,” a legal term referring to an unforeseen event that prevents the two sides from fulfilling an agreement.
In these instances, gas companies say the unforeseen event is the state’s repeated delays in releasing environmental regulations and issuing drilling permits.
Force majeure clauses appear in as many as half the roughly 3,200 New York leases reviewed by The Times.
Another important lease term is the Pugh Clause, said Lance Astrella, a lease lawyer in Denver. It is named after Lawrence Pugh, a Louisiana lawyer who started adding it to leases in 1947 to ensure that they would not be extended indefinitely without wells being drilled.
Fewer than 20 percent of the more than 100,000 Texas leasing documents reviewed by The Times include such a clause, and very few of the leases from Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia include the language. While the leases collected by The Times represent a small fraction of the more than 8 million oil and gas leases in the United States, experts said they illustrated issues that landowners need to understand.
Mr. Astrella said that leases also typically lacked a clause requiring drillers to pay for a test of the property’s well water before drilling started, and landowners often do not think to do the tests themselves. If drilling leads to problems with drinking wells, landowners have few options if they want to prove that their water was fine before drilling started.
For some landowners, it can be a costly mistake.
“It’s been one expense after another since our water went bad, and the company only has to cover part of it,” said Ronald Carter, 72, of Montrose, Pa. Mr. Carter and his wife, Jean, said they signed a lease in 2006 for a one-time fee of $25 per acre on their 75 acres and annual royalty payments of 12.5 percent.
The Carters live on $3,500 a month, including the $1,500 per month they average in gas royalties. But they had to spend $7,000 to install a water purifier when their drinking supply became contaminated in 2009 after drilling near their property.
The Carters joined a lawsuit with about a dozen neighbors, including Mr. Ely, accusing Cabot Oil and Gas of contaminating their drinking water.
Mr. Stark, the Cabot spokesman, said that his company was not responsible for any water contamination in the area and that Cabot’s studies showed that the gas seepage into the drinking water was occurring naturally.
“All the testing we have been able to conduct show the water meets federal safe drinking water standards,” Mr. Stark said.
In 2009, Pennsylvania ordered Cabot to provide the affected residents with water. For the Carters, the company has paid for bottled water and for the installation of a water buffalo next to their trailer. Mr. Stark added that his company had offered to pay for treatment systems to remove gas if it leaked into their drinking water.
Mr. Carter said that even though Cabot had paid to provide him with bottled water and a water buffalo, he can barely afford his electricity bill, which doubled because he has to heat the water buffalo to make sure it does not freeze.
Those expenses may soon go up.
On Wednesday, Cabot stopped delivering water to the Carters, the Elys and others in Dimock after state regulators said the company had satisfied requirements of a settlement agreement with the state.
“It’s a little late now,” Mr. Carter said. “But there are a lot things I’d like to have done different with that lease.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 2, 2011
An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect url for Ron Stamets’ Web site. It is http://pagaslease.com.
A Layman’s Guide to Lease Terms
Lawyers and consumer advocates say that leases often contain or lack fine print that landowners should not overlook in signing leases. Here are some examples of key clauses that landowners have come to regret:
Key Clauses in Many Leases
FORCE MAJEURE Typically refers to natural disasters or other events that are beyond a company’s control and can delay drilling plans. In New York, gas companies have used it to argue that leases should be extended beyond their original terms because of the state’s moratorium on certain types of gas drilling.
ASSIGNMENT CLAUSE Allows a company to sell or transfer a lease to another company. Some landowners have complained that their leases have been sold to companies that are financially unstable or have poor environmental records.
ON-SITE STORAGE Some leases allow the energy company to use land for underground storage of gas or drilling waste, sometimes from another property.
PITS Many leases allow companies to place drilling waste into pits on the landowners’ property. Some lawyers say that leases should explicitly prohibit waste pits.
EXTENSION OF LEASE Leases are typically for three to five years, but they often include clauses that allow the drilling company to extend the leases even if landowners want to renegotiate or cancel them.
POST-PRODUCTION COSTS Some leases include language that allows the company to deduct certain costs of producing the gas before paying royalties.
Key Clauses Often Omitted
WATER TESTING CLAUSE Some lawyers say that landowners should add language requiring energy companies to pay for independent testing of the landowners’ drinking supply before they drill so that investigators can determine the origin of any contamination that might occur.
PUGH CLAUSE Protects landowners from gas companies indefinitely holding rights to an entire parcel, even if only a small part of it is being used for gas drilling.
INDEMNIFICATION CLAUSE Lawyers recommend that leases contain language exempting the landowner from all forms of liabilities stemming from the company’s activities.
FACILITIES CLAUSE Often establishes the “setbacks,” or the distances that are required between drilling activity and houses, roads, wells or other structures on the property. Without them, the lease may violate mortgage rules that dictate how certain properties can be used.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs
FEATURES November 09, 2011, 11:00 PM EST
Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs
In the wake of an immigrant exodus, Alabama has jobs. Trouble is, Americans don't want them
Skinning, gutting, and cutting up catfish is not easy or pleasant work. No one knows this better than Randy Rhodes, president of Harvest Select, which has a processing plant in impoverished Uniontown, Ala. For years, Rhodes has had trouble finding Americans willing to grab a knife and stand 10 or more hours a day in a cold, wet room for minimum wage and skimpy benefits.
Most of his employees are Guatemalan. Or they were, until Alabama enacted an immigration law in September that requires police to question people they suspect might be in the U.S. illegally and punish businesses that hire them. The law, known as HB56, is intended to scare off undocumented workers, and in that regard it’s been a success. It’s also driven away legal immigrants who feared being harassed.
Rhodes arrived at work on Sept. 29, the day the law went into effect, to discover many of his employees missing. Panicked, he drove an hour and a half north to Tuscaloosa, where many of the immigrants who worked for him lived. Rhodes, who doesn’t speak Spanish, struggled to get across how much he needed them. He urged his workers to come back. Only a handful did. “We couldn’t explain to them that some of the things they were scared of weren’t going to happen,” Rhodes says. “I wanted them to see that I was their friend, and that we were trying to do the right thing.”
His ex-employees joined an exodus of thousands of immigrant field hands, hotel housekeepers, dishwashers, chicken plant employees, and construction workers who have fled Alabama for other states. Like Rhodes, many employers who lost workers followed federal requirements—some even used the E-Verify system—and only found out their workers were illegal when they disappeared.
In their wake are thousands of vacant positions and hundreds of angry business owners staring at unpicked tomatoes, uncleaned fish, and unmade beds. “Somebody has to figure this out. The immigrants aren’t coming back to Alabama—they’re gone,” Rhodes says. “I have 158 jobs, and I need to give them to somebody.”
There’s no shortage of people he could give those jobs to. In Alabama, some 211,000 people are out of work. In rural Perry County, where Harvest Select is located, the unemployment rate is 18.2 percent, twice the national average. One of the big selling points of the immigration law was that it would free up jobs that Republican Governor Robert Bentley said immigrants had stolen from recession-battered Americans. Yet native Alabamians have not come running to fill these newly liberated positions. Many employers think the law is ludicrous and fought to stop it. Immigrants aren’t stealing anything from anyone, they say. Businesses turned to foreign labor only because they couldn’t find enough Americans to take the work they were offering.
At a moment when the country is relentless focused on unemployment, there are still jobs that often go unfilled. These are difficult, dirty, exhausting jobs that, for previous generations, were the first rickety step on the ladder to prosperity. They still are—just not for Americans.
For decades many of Alabama’s industries have benefited from a compliant foreign workforce and a state government that largely looked the other way on wages, working conditions, and immigration status. With so many foreign workers now effectively banished from the work pool and jobs sitting empty, businesses must contend with American workers who have higher expectations for themselves and their employers—even in a terrible economy where work is hard to find. “I don’t consider this a labor shortage,” says Tom Surtees, Alabama’s director of industrial relations, himself the possessor of a job few would want: calming business owners who have seen their employees vanish. “We’re transitioning from a business model. Whether an employer in agriculture used migrant workers, or whether it’s another industry that used illegal immigrants, they had a business model and that business model is going to have to change.”
On a sunny October afternoon, Juan Castro leans over the back of a pickup truck parked in the middle of a field at Ellen Jenkins’s farm in northern Alabama. He sorts tomatoes rapidly into buckets by color and ripeness. Behind him his crew—his father, his cousin, and some friends—move expertly through the rows of plants that stretch out for acres in all directions, barely looking up as they pull the last tomatoes of the season off the tangled vines and place them in baskets. Since heading into the fields at 7 a.m., they haven’t stopped for more than the few seconds it takes to swig some water. They’ll work until 6 p.m., earning $2 for each 25-pound basket they fill. The men figure they’ll take home around $60 apiece.
Castro, 34, says he crossed the border on foot illegally 19 years ago and has three American-born children. He describes the mood in the fields since the law passed as tense and fearful. Gesturing around him, Castro says that not long ago the fields were filled with Hispanic laborers. Now he and his crew are the only ones left. “Many of our friends left us or got deported,” he says. “The only reason that we can stand it is for our children.”
He wipes sweat from beneath his fluorescent orange baseball cap, given to him by a timber company in Mississippi, where he works part of the year cutting pine. Castro says picking tomatoes in the Alabama heat isn’t easy, but he counts himself lucky. He has never passed out on the job, as many others have, though he does have a chronic pinched nerve in his neck from bending over for hours on end. The experiment taking place in Alabama makes no sense to him. Why try to make Americans do this work when they clearly don’t want it? “They come one day, and don’t show up the next,” Castro says.
It’s a common complaint in this part of Alabama. A few miles down the road, Chad Smith and a few other farmers sit on chairs outside J&J Farms, venting about their changed fortunes. Smith, 22, says his 85 acres of tomatoes are only partly picked because 30 of the 35 migrant workers who had been with him for years left when the law went into effect. The state’s efforts to help him and other farmers attract Americans are a joke, as far as he is concerned. “Oh, I tried to hire them,” Smith says. “I put a radio ad out—out of Birmingham. About 15 to 20 people showed up, and most of them quit. They couldn’t work fast enough to make the money they thought they could make, so they just quit.”
Joey Bearden, who owns a 30-acre farm nearby, waits for his turn to speak. “The governor stepped in and started this bill because he wants to put people back to work—they’re not coming!” says Bearden. “I’ve been farming 25 years, and I can count on my hand the number of Americans that stuck.”
It’s a hard-to-resist syllogism: Dirty jobs are available; Americans won’t fill them; thus, Americans are too soft for dirty jobs. Why else would so many unemployed people turn down the opportunity to work during a recession? Of course, there’s an equally compelling obverse. Why should farmers and plant owners expect people to take a back-breaking seasonal job with low pay and no benefits just because they happen to be offering it? If no one wants an available job—especially in extreme times—maybe the fault doesn’t rest entirely with the people turning it down. Maybe the market is inefficient.
Tom Surtees is tired of hearing employers grouse about their lazy countrymen. “Don’t tell me an Alabamian can’t work out in the field picking produce because it’s hot and labor intensive,” he says. “Go into a steel mill. Go into a foundry. Go into numerous other occupations and tell them Alabamians don’t like this work because it’s hot and it requires manual labor.” The difference being, jobs in Alabama’s foundries and steel mills pay better wages—with benefits. “If you’re trying to justify paying someone below whatever an appropriate wage level is so you can bring your product, I don’t think that’s a valid argument,” Surtees says.
In the weeks since the immigration law took hold, several hundred Americans have answered farmers’ ads for tomato pickers. A field over from where Juan Castro and his friends muse about the sorry state of the U.S. workforce, 34-year-old Jesse Durr stands among the vines. An aspiring rapper from inner-city Birmingham, he wears big jeans and a do-rag to shield his head from the sun. He had lost his job prepping food at Applebee’s, and after spending a few months looking for work a friend told him about a Facebook posting for farm labor.
The money isn’t good—$2 per basket, plus $600 to clear the three acres when the vines were picked clean—but he figures it’s better than sitting around. Plus, the transportation is free, provided by Jerry Spencer, who runs a community-supported agriculture program in Birmingham. That helps, because the farm is an hour north of Birmingham and the gas money adds up.
Durr thinks of himself as fit—he’s all chiseled muscle—but he is surprised at how hard the work is. “Not everyone is used to this. I ain’t used to it,” he says while taking a break in front of his truck. “But I’m getting used to it.”
Yet after three weeks in the fields, he is frustrated. His crew of seven has dropped down to two. “A lot of people look at this as slave work. I say, you do what you have to do,” Durr says. “My mission is to finish these acres. As long as I’m here, I’m striving for something.” In a neighboring field, Cedric Rayford is working a row. The 28-year-old came up with two friends from Gadsden, Ala., after hearing on the radio that farmers were hiring. The work is halfway complete when one member of their crew decides to quit. Rayford and crewmate Marvin Turner try to persuade their friend to stay and finish the job. Otherwise, no one will get paid. Turner even offers $20 out of his own pocket as a sweetener to no effect. “When a man’s mind is made up, there’s about nothing you can do,” he says.
The men lean against the car, smoking cigarettes and trying to figure out how to finish the job before day’s end. “They gotta come up with a better pay system,” says Rayford. “This ain’t no easy work. If you need somebody to do this type of work, you gotta be payin’. If they was paying by the hour, motherf—–s would work overtime, so you’d know what you’re working for.” He starts to pace around the car. “I could just work at McDonald’s (MCD),” he says.
Turner, who usually works as a landscaper, agrees the pay is too low. At $75 in gas for the three days, he figures he won’t even break even. The men finish their cigarettes. Turner glances up the hill at Castro’s work crew. “Look,” he says. “You got immigrants doing more than what blacks or whites will. Look at them, they just work and work all day. They don’t look at it like it’s a hard job. They don’t take breaks!”
The notion of jobs in fields and food plants as “immigrant work” is relatively new. As late as the 1940s, most farm labor in Alabama and elsewhere was done by Americans. During World War II the U.S. signed an agreement with Mexico to import temporary workers to ease labor shortages. Four and a half million Mexican guest workers crossed the border. At first most went to farms and orchards in California; by the program’s completion in 1964 they were working in almost every state. Many braceros—the term translates to “strong-arm,” as in someone who works with his arms—were granted green cards, became permanent residents, and continued to work in agriculture. Native-born Americans never returned to the fields. “Agricultural labor is basically 100 percent an immigrant job category,” says Princeton University sociologist Doug Massey, who studies population migration. “Once an occupational category becomes dominated by immigrants, it becomes very difficult to erase the stigma.”
Massey says Americans didn’t turn away from the work merely because it was hard or because of the pay but because they had come to think of it as beneath them. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the job itself,” he says. In other countries, citizens refuse to take jobs that Americans compete for. In Europe, Massey says, “auto manufacturing is an immigrant job category. Whereas in the States, it’s a native category.”
In Alabama, the transition to immigrant labor happened slowly. Although migrant workers have picked fruit and processed food in Alabama for four decades, in 1990 only 1.1 percent of the state’s total population was foreign-born. That year the U.S. Census put the combined Latin American and North American foreign-born population at 8,072 people. By 2000 there were 75,830 Hispanics recorded on the Census; by 2010 that number had more than doubled, and Hispanics are now nearly 4 percent of the population.
That first rush of Hispanic immigrants was initiated by the state’s $2.4 billion poultry and egg industry. Alabama’s largest agricultural export commodity went through a major expansion in the mid-’90s, thanks in part to new markets in the former Soviet Union. Companies such as Tyson Foods (TSN) found the state’s climate, plentiful water supply, light regulation, and anti-union policies to be ideal. At the time, better-educated American workers in cities such as Decatur and Athens were either moving into the state’s burgeoning aerospace and service industries or following the trend of leaving Alabama and heading north or west, where they found office jobs or work in manufacturing with set hours, higher pay, and safer conditions—things most Americans take for granted. In just over a decade, school districts in once-white towns such as Albertville, in the northeastern corner of the state, became 34 percent Hispanic. By the 2000s, Hispanic immigrants had moved across the state, following the construction boom in the cities, in the growing plant nurseries in the south, and on the catfish farms west of Montgomery. It wasn’t until anti-immigration sentiment spread across the country, as the recession took hold and didn’t let go, that the Republican legislators who run Alabama began to regard the immigrants they once courted as the enemy.
A large white banner hangs on the chain-link fence outside the Harvest Select plant: “Now Hiring: Filleters/Trimmers. Stop Here To Apply.” Randy Rhodes unfurled it the day after the law took effect. “We’re getting applications, but you have to weed through those three and four times,” says Amy Hart, the company’s human resources manager. A job fair she held attracted 50 people, and Hart offered positions to 13 of them. Two failed the drug test. One applicant asked her out on a date during the interview. “People reapply who have been terminated for stealing, for fighting, for drugs,” she says. “Nope, not that desperate yet!”
Rhodes says he understands why Americans aren’t jumping at the chance to slice up catfish for minimum wage. He just doesn’t know what he can do about it. “I’m sorry, but I can’t pay those kids $13 an hour,” he says. Although the Uniontown plant, which processes about 850,000 pounds of fish a week, is the largest in Alabama and sells to big supermarket chains including Food Lion, Harris Teeter, and Sam’s Club (WMT), Rhodes says overseas competitors, which pay employees even lower wages, are squeezing the industry.
When the immigration law passed in late September, John McMillan’s phone lines were deluged. People wanted McMillan, the state’s agriculture commissioner, to tell them whether they’d be in business next year. “Like, what are we going to do? Do we need to be ordering strawberry plants for next season? Do we need to be ordering fertilizer?” McMillan recalls. “And of course, we don’t have the answers, either.”
His buddy Tom Surtees, the industrial relations director, faces the same problem on a larger scale. Where McMillan only has to worry about agriculture, other industries, from construction to hospitality, are reporting worker shortages. His ultimate responsibility is to generate the results that Governor Bentley has claimed the legislation will produce—lots of jobs for Alabamians. That means he cannot allow for the possibility that the law will fail.
“If those Alabamians on unemployment continue to not apply for jobs in construction and poultry, then [Republican politicians] are going to have to help us continue to find immigrant workers,” says Jay Reed, who heads the Alabama Associated Builders & Contractors. “And those immigrant workers are gone.”
Business owners are furious not only that they have lost so many workers but that everyone in the state seemed to see it coming except Bentley, who failed to heed warnings from leaders in neighboring Georgia who said they had experienced a similar flight of immigrants after passing their own immigration law. Bentley declined to be interviewed for this story.
McMillan and Surtees spend their days playing matchmaker with anxious employers, urging them to post job openings on the state’s employment website so they can hook up with unemployed Alabamians. McMillan is asking Baptist ministers to tell their flocks that jobs are available. He wants businesses to rethink the way they run their operations to make them more attractive. On a road trip through the state, he met an apple farmer who told him he had started paying workers by the hour instead of by how much they picked. The apples get bruised and damaged when people are picking for speed. “Our farmers are very innovative and are used to dealing with challenges,” McMillan says. “You know, they can come up with all kinds of things. Something I’ve thought about is, maybe we should go to four-hour shifts instead of eight-hour shifts. Or maybe two six-hour shifts.”
McMillan acknowledges that even if some of these efforts are successful, they are unlikely to fill the labor void left by the immigrants’ disappearance. Some growers, he says, might have to go back to traditional mechanized row crops such as corn and soybeans. The smaller farmers might have to decrease volumes to the point where they are no longer commercially viable. “I don’t know,” says McMillan. “I just don’t know, but we’ve got to try to think of everything we possibly can.”
Since late September, McMillan’s staff has been attending meetings with farmers throughout the state. They are supposed to be Q&A sessions about how to comply with the new law. Some have devolved into shouting matches about how much they hate the statute. A few weeks ago, Smith, the tomato farmer whose workers fled Alabama, confronted state Senator Scott Beason, the Republican who introduced the immigration law. Beason had come out to talk to farmers, and Smith shoved an empty tomato bucket into his chest. “You pick!” he told him. “He didn’t even put his hands on the bucket,” Smith recalls. “He didn’t even try.” Says Beason: “My picking tomatoes would not change or prove anything.”
While the politicians and business owners argue, others see opportunity. Michael Maldonado, 19, wakes up at 4:30 each morning in a trailer in Tuscaloosa, about an hour from Harvest Select, where he works as a fish processor. Maldonado, who grew up in an earthen-floor shack in Guatemala, says he likes working at the plant. “One hundred dollars here is 700 quetzals,” he says. “The managers say I am a good worker.” After three years, though, the long hours and scant pay are starting to wear on him. With the business in desperate need of every available hand, it’s not a bad time to test just how much the bosses value his labor. Next week he plans to ask his supervisor for a raise. “I will say to them, ‘If you pay me a little more—just a little more—I will stay working here,’ ” he says. “Otherwise, I will leave. I will go to work in another state.”
Dwoskin is a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in Washington.
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