Who'll Pick the Strawberries?

In the hothouse valleys of California, acres of strawberries and asparagus last week were spoiling in the fields while growers looked with foreboding to the summer's melon and lettuce harvest. Al though the state has nearly 440,000 un employed, it faces a severe farm-labor shortage and huge losses in its biggest ($3.5 billion) industry -- farming.

For years the backbreaking job of picking the big crops was done mostly by Mexican immigrant workers, known as braceros (arm laborers), who crossed the border in droves during peak sea sons. They lived, for the most part, in shanties, often received less than the $1.25-an-hour federal minimum wage.

This arrangement irritated American la bor unions, which pointed to domestic jobless rolls, and Congress allowed the permissive bracero law to lapse at the end of last year.

Growers bitterly complained that Americans would not do the menial stooping labor, that the only non-Mexican workers they could get were drunks and incompetents. "They want us to go to Los Angeles and screen scum," charged Jack Tabata, who last month plowed under twelve acres of his Orange County strawberry field in a well-publicized protest against the Government's refusal to lower the bars to braceros. Tabata also sent Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz a tray of bruised berries, picked, he said, by a worker supplied by the Labor Department.

"Pampered Children. "Under the gen eral immigration law, Wirtz can admit foreign laborers if he is convinced that workers cannot be found on the domes tic market and if growers promise the same wages to all -- now $1.40 an hour in California. He refuses, however, to admit the huge numbers that flowed in under the expired law (more than 100,000 braceros worked in California last year), bringing cries from California growers for his ouster. Despite the farm ers' complaints, Wirtz's office said, fewer than 10,000 foreign nationals have been requested under the general immigration law. Some of the crop spoilage was blamed on "riotous overplanting."

Thomas L. Pitts, secretary-treasurer of the California A.F.L.-C.I.O., accused growers of acting "like pampered chil dren sitting back with a steady barrage of crybaby pleas that their crops are about to rot. If they would demonstrate only a fraction as much interest in their workers as they do in their crops, the labor problem would evaporate."

Final Solution? In response to farmers' cries that a $1.40-an-hour wage scale would price California out of the produce competition, Democratic Governor Pat Brown said that "you cannot expect an American to work for less than $1.40 an hour in that hot sun and the hard work that they're doing."

As the debate continued, all parties launched into a few hurried, stopgap solutions aimed at saving the crops from disaster. Secretary Wirtz approved the employment of about 3,500 braceros (at $1.40 an hour). And, in a cooperative venture of the Labor Department, state government, farmers and schools, more than 700 high school boys have been recruited to help on the farms this summer. But none of this provides a real answer to the picking problem.

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