A win-win in Willcox

Tucson, Arizona -  Hawa Abdi stretches up to snip leaves off a tomato plant twice as tall as she is. Abdi, 24, works alone most of the day in a forest of vines growing 20 feet long here and looped like garlands to keep the ripest fruits within arm's reach. With the crunching sound of her scissors on the branches, she likes to sing Somali songs that "make me laugh and remember happy times," she said.

 

Abdi is one of 65 refugees living in Tucson and working for Eurofresh, a tomato grower just north of Willcox. She is just the kind of worker the company is desperate to find. Eurofresh is a big fish in a small labor pool. The company will pay around 1,300 workers to produce up to 180 million pounds of tomatoes this year, said David Leitch, packhouse operations manager.

 

Hiring refugees from Tucson is part of the company's new staffing strategy.

The company has tripled its production in six years and has added more labor-intensive varieties of tomatoes, Leitch said. "When we decided to build a greenhouse here, I don't think we ever dreamed we'd grow to this size," he said. Willcox has a work force of fewer than 2,000, which was fine when the company started in 1992 with 50 employees. But now the company must find half of its workers outside the Willcox area — in a state with the lowest unemployment rate in 38 years.

 

Beside refugees, Eurofresh is recruiting weekly from welfare offices, contracting with the state for prison labor, hiring foreigners with work visas for part of the year and hiring high school students for the rest.

Eurofresh human-resources manager Lou Barbato had an "aha" moment when he learned about Tucson's refugee population through a university contact. "I found out a lot of them have agricultural backgrounds. They worked on farms — they worked with tomatoes." Abdi, one of Barbato's recruits, left her job as a housekeeper at the Westin La Paloma Resort & Spa to sign on with Eurofresh. She likes the work, and even though she has to be up by 3 a.m., she can be home by 6 p.m. to make dinner for her children and play with them before bedtime, she said.

 

Her family were successful farmers in the Juba River Valley of Somalia before civil war forced them to flee to Kenya in 1992. She came to Tucson to reunite with some family members. Abdi's cousin watches her baby and her 5-year-old while she works.

 

"Eurofresh offers a good opportunity for newly arrived refugees who don't have the work history, don't speak English but are looking to become self-sufficient as quickly as possible," said Tim Jefferson, of the International Rescue Committee in Tucson, one of the agencies that help place refugees in jobs.

Most refugees who come to Tucson go to work in a hotel or restaurant, but those jobs can be seasonal, he said.

 

Eurofresh offers the chance to earn more, too. Crop workers start at $8.27 an hour and average $11.08 an hour. That's 30 percent higher than the national average for farmworkers — $8.48 an hour.

"Eurofresh pays well for an entry-level job. Definitely a living wage that a breadwinner could support their family," Jefferson said.

 

Competition for hourly laborers is fierce. Tucson's unemployment rate is a low 3 percent.

But Eurofresh has its advantages: indoor work, year-round jobs and technology that makes labor as easy as possible, said Russell Tronstad, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Arizona. 

Sometimes refugees just show up on the bus and say they're here to work, Barbato said. It will be somebody's brother or cousin, and Barbato will have to explain about applying for a job, he said.

Eurofresh pays $2,800 per day for four buses, or around $12 per person, just to get workers to the site from Tucson, Barbato said. Moving to Willcox to cut out the bus commute is not a possibility for most. There's a shortage of affordable housing, and there are more services for refugees in Tucson.

In April, Barbato also started making Tuesday presentations at state Department of Economic Security offices in Tucson. Those who want a job get a bus pass to tour the company on Friday. They can start work on Monday.

 

New Tucson recruit Anna Pro, 42, said the presentation was exciting. She was receiving unemployment checks at the time. "It's nice to be self-sufficient again," Pro said. On a recent morning, two older Somali women started work in the packhouse, placing tomatoes in plastic cartons or cardboard crates for shipping. They worked alongside Pro and Rosa Cordero, 64, who lives in Willcox and has worked at Eurofresh for 10 years.

 

Their gloved fingers are green from tomato juices and they do their best to try to talk to each other. The new workers speak Somali, Cordero is most comfortable speaking Spanish, and Pro speaks English.

It's a challenge for management, too. Where can you find someone who speaks English, Spanish and Somali?

Ramadhan Shehe, 36, was selected to be a shift supervisor because he was studying science in his home country of Burundi, in central Africa. And he has a talent for languages: He speaks three African languages and French, and he has picked up English in 10 months.

 

Shehe will supervise other Burundians who will work here. Tucson agencies are expecting 300 to settle here in the next few months. The job pays well, making the long bus rides to and from Tucson worthwhile, and "every week I get a carton of tomatoes to take home," he said, smiling.

Eurofresh CEO Dwight Ferguson said he'll deal with the work-force shortage as a trade-off for perfect geography. "Our priority is to put farms where produce grows great," he said. "The down side of that is that you have to be creative to find labor." Labor shortages are part of the company's local history.

Dutch workers were brought in to build the first greenhouse in 1992, but Eurofresh set off a dispute with the Department of Labor and the Immigration and Naturalization Service when it tried to hire Dutch workers to expand the facility. So the company hired American workers trained by the Dutch.

 

Eurofresh also sent vans to the U.S.-Mexican border to pick up workers from Agua Prieta. The company still employs 300 foreigners, mostly Mexicans, with agricultural work visas. Inquiries to federal immigration agencies and federal courts turned up no evidence of enforcement actions against Eurofresh, which says it hires only legal workers. The company has had labor crises in the past, too. Laborers went on a weeklong strike over a new pay structure in 1999. Their union, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 99, then fought the company over the use of prison labor and won higher wages. Since then, the number of prisoners working at the facility has doubled to 200, and no grievances have been filed related to prisoners.

Now labor relations are tame and the union acknowledges the company's difficulty in finding workers, said Paul Rubin, a union spokesman.

 

The company is still growing, and will consider buying more land near Willcox. But for now it is turning its attention to expanding its operations in Snowflake, a 44-acre facility in the White Mountains town. Eurofresh has around 150 employees there. It could be the beginning of a familiar labor story. Big growth is planned in a place with a work force of less than 2,000.

● Contact reporter Becky Pallack at 573-4224 or at [email protected].

 

Source: Arizona Daily Star, July 08, 2007