Are Sheepherders the Indentured Servants of Today?
Farming » Ranchers say they couldn’t make a living without immigrant labor.
By Ivan Moreno
The Associated Press
Updated: 01/19/2010 12:42:37 AM MST
Wamsutter, Wyo. » Alone and thousands of miles from home, the immigrant sheepherder roams some of the West’s most desolate and frigid landscapes, tending a flock for as little as $600 a month without a day off on the horizon.
“You take it or leave it. You take it because the economy is worse at home,” Pepe Cruz, a 40-year-old Peruvian, said in Spanish.
Cruz is one of hundreds of immigrants from South America, Mexico and Nepal who work as sheepherders in states such as Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and California.
Advocates are pushing for improvements in working conditions for the sheepherders. One Colorado lawmaker plans to introduce a bill this session to raise their minimum wage to $9.88 an hour, the amount other Colorado farmworkers are paid.
Colorado Legal Services, a Denver-based nonprofit legal assistance network, found that sheepherders with temporary work visas in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming sometimes toil more than 90 hours a week, can’t leave the isolated sites where they work and are grossly underpaid by U.S. standards. The group’s report on the conditions was to be released Thursday.
Rep. Daniel Kagan, a Democrat from Denver, said sheepherders often don’t speak English, don’t know where they are, and depend entirely on their employers for food, water and contact with the outside world.
“It struck me as a situation rife with the possibility of abuse, and I was afraid that we were looking at a situation of indentured servitude, of near slavery, right here in Colorado, and that troubled me a lot,” Kagan said.
The struggling U.S. sheep industry argues the immigrants — and the current pay scale — are crucial to its survival and that the jobs give foreign workers opportunities for a better life back home.
“A laborer is worthy of his hire!’
We always hear the advice that we should give an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, but the emphasis is always on the laborer, not the employer.
The excuse is always given that the employer will go out of business if he pays an honest day’s wages. The answer should be easy—go out of business. If you don’t have an honest business, if it depends on slave labor, indentured servitude then you don’t have an honest business.
When anyone hires anyone for 40 hours a week it should provide that employee a living wage. If not, the business is not legitimate. It is similar in nature to the devilish practice of usury. Slave labor and a debtor’s prison are much the same.
They are evil!
Cruz said he earns four times what he can in Peru and has put two siblings through college. He also wants to start his own bus company.
“Based on what I know about the minimum wage, what they pay us is very little,” Cruz said.
Peter Orwick, executive director of the American Sheep Industry Association, said any cost increase to ranchers — wages, fuel, grain — can shut them down.
“We couldn’t survive without these men,” said Anthony Theos, a rancher and president of the Colorado Wool Growers Association.
The sheepherders with the H2-A visas are exempted from federal minimum wage standards because it’s hard to tabulate their hours. And while housing and food are provided, federal rules don’t mandate running water, toilets or electricity.
To find the sheepherders, CLS workers often spent hours following footprints in the snow.
On a recent trip into Uintah County, Utah, a sheepherder on horseback trotted toward the CLS Jeep. He said his name was Gonzalo, from Peru, and has a wife and five children back home. He declined to give his last name because he didn’t know if he would get in trouble with his boss.
He said he is so isolated that he passes the time by talking to his dogs and sheep.
He then reined his horse and galloped away into the field of snow, his two border collies behind him.