Primo’s Problem

Ms. Hermana’s visit got me reminiscing about cherry season and all the years we hired pickers to harvest the fruit. For decades my father ran his own cherry crew without using a contractor. My mother did all the bookkeeping, which was vital since both Dad and I were too tired from the long work day to post box totals to each picker’s pay sheet. Mom also did those dreaded labor filings to the EDD and SSA.

But eventually all the labor paperwork and I9’s and safety training requirements and pesticide notifications got to be too much, especially since we didn’t have a Human Resources Department. We only needed 30 to 40 people for two weeks each year. So we got lucky and found an honest contractor who took care of all that stuff, for a fee of course. Money well spent.

There are cherry picker stories galore, especially from the days when we ran our own crew. One year RL, a descendant of Dust Bowl migrants, showed up with a brand new motor home towing a Dodge Charger convertible. This was back in the 1980’s, and RL had actually won $1,000,000 in the State Lottery. The prize was paid out in installments of $50,000 per annum for 20 years. In those days this was life changing money . It was more than Stoker’s and my incomes combined in the 1980’s. Considerably more.

The money did change RL’s life; it bought him a new car and motor home. And left him broke until the next installment. So he had to go to work picking cherries to pay for gas and beer and cigarettes. No financial planning for him!

My favorite cherry picker story is completely different. One year we hired a new employee named Primo Delgado. He was the first Delgado brother to come to work for us, and it must have been to his liking because the next year he was joined by his brothers Adelmo and Juan and Jose. Those guys could really pick cherries, fast and clean, no stemming or bruising.

But on Primo’s second day of employment there was an incident. To understand what happened you should know that pickers are assigned a group of trees (usually 6), called a ‘set’. They pick all the trees in the set and then move ahead to the next open set. There is a row called a ‘drive’ which is where they place all the full boxes. My dad drove the tractor up the drive pulling a trailer with bins. He had punch cards and a notebook and a hole punch with him. He would stop at each picker’s stack of boxes. I would count the boxes and tell my dad (sitting on the tractor, no need to get on and off 100 times a day) how many so he could punch holes in the picker’s card. Pickers get paid by the box, and before we hired a contractor and Ms. Hermana did the checking, that was our responsibility.

Next I would dump the fruit from the 35 lb. box into the bin, very carefully. Then I would find the picker and tell him how many boxes we had picked up to confirm with him/her the count was correct, and then follow the trailer to the next stack. I used to lift anywhere between 300 and 800 of these crates a day. I think one day we picked 1000.

• 

• 

• 

With that backround, here is what happened. We pulled up to Primo’s stack. I counted five boxes, told my dad 5, dumped them into the big white bin, then found Primo and told him “Cinco cajas”. I like to pretend I know some Spanish.

Primo frowned and said “No, seis. Seis cajas”. Now I have a problem. There are three possibilities:

1. I made a mistake. Rare but possible.
2. Primo made an honest mistake. Possible. But people who are being paid by the box are usually quite aware of how many boxes they have picked.
3. Primo was trying to cheat me.

Possibility 3 was by far the most likely. But I couldn’t be sure, and there was no way to tell since there were empty boxes everywhere. This situation was quite rare on our ranch but when it did happen our policy was to take the picker’s word. Once. If it happened again with the same person we would pay him/her off at the end of the day and tell them not to come back. I don’t think that ever happened.

So I told my dad to mark 6 boxes. I said I thought I dumped 5 but I made a mistake. I looked at Primo and told him “Seis cajas. Lo siento” (I’m sorry).

As I turned to walk to the next stack Primo told me, in English, “Maybe five”. What followed was a kind of pax de deux, because I didn’t want him to think I was pressuring him to change his count. And he didn’t want me to think he was cheating us.

Remember this is Primo’s second day. I thought about this for a long time and I think I know what happened. Primo had probably been cheated by contractors and coyotes and unscrupulous growers many times. He had to try to get an extra box, because in his world you have to look for any edge you can get. And he succeeded. I would have given it to him, no questions asked. As I said, once.

But Primo had second thoughts. He was picking some nice trees and getting a lot of boxes. He was being well paid for those boxes, more than at virtually any other ranch around. He got away with the scheme, but his conscience wouldn’t let him keep it. He saw my dad and I working plenty hard, and saw we treated people fairly. He decided to reciprocate.

Primo’s brothers were a fixture of our cherry crew for years. They even went to work for our contractor when we quit running our own crew, which told me that we had hired an honest contractor. But Primo disappeared after a few seasons. His brothers told me he was working on “caw blay”. That is the Spanish pronunciation of ‘cable’. Primo was installing cable TV and internet lines in the Bay Area. Another move up, just like Ms. Hermana.

But early in May a few years later, who shows up at my front door but Primo. He wants to know if he can have a job picking with his brothers. I said sure, but what happened to the ‘caw blay?” He smiles and said “tengo vacacion”. He had some vacation time and wanted to come pick fruit and camp with his hermanos. So I guess picking cherries along Brumby Road did not constitute worker exploitation. Take that Dr. Marx!