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February 8, 2007
WATSONVILLE — Nearly 3,500 farmworkers and packers statewide have applied for unemployment insurance three weeks after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared 10 counties in California disaster areas due to the January freeze.
Patrick Joyce, a spokesman for the state's Employment Development Department, said the applications are still available and that the benefits last as long as six months, offering a minimum of $40 a week and a maximum of $400 — depending on the pay scale.
The claims took effect Jan. 11, the first day temperatures dropped below freezing, ushering in eight straight days of frost, which damaged dozens of crops across California, most notably the citrus industry in the Central Valley.
Although financial estimates on damage have still not been finalized, a preliminary look at crop damage stood at $1.1 billion Wednesday, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
In Monterey County, artichokes were hit hardest, contributing to an estimated $1.5 million in losses for growers. It also figured in hundreds of field workers and packers losing their jobs when artichokes froze on the vines across a swath of 5,000 acres in the northern portion of the county.
Although only 109 field workers in Monterey County have filed unemployment insurance claims with the state, more are expected in the coming weeks across California, said Jehan Flagg, director of communications for the Labor and Work Force Development for California.
Although the hardship connected to the freeze isn't immediately obvious, social services and food pantries have reported an increase in the number of field workers who have sought their help since the freeze hit the Pajaro Valley, said Christine Woodward, a spokeswoman for the Second Harvest Food Bank in Watsonville.
"It's sad," she said. "We had something like 1,500 people show up at our food giveaway last week. We haven't seen those kinds of numbers in quite a while"
Also, the number of people petitioning for the highly coveted volunteer jobs at Second Harvest — in which they receive a free bag of food at the end of the day for having sorted and bagged food — is also on the rise, said Woodward.
"These days are bad times for the agriculture industry," Woodward said.
And nowhere is the problem more pronounced than in Salinas, where a disaster site has been set up by the state to help find unemployed farmworkers jobs in the interim at the Employment Development Department at 730 La Guardia St. in Salinas.
Kurt Silva, the supervisor of the site, said the state hasn't seen such a high number of unemployed farmworkers since the early 1990s, when similar freezes hit the state, idling the agricultural industry.
"They're coming in and using the unemployment insurance phones," he said. "We've got them here if anybody needs them"
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