The Great Strawberry Labor Scramble
As Kennewick prepares for its largest berry harvest in history, local growers are turning to the Exchange and coastal agencies to import hundreds of workers—specifically Japanese laborers—to handle the crop.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
With bright prospects for the largest strawberry crop the valley has ever produced, the big question which is confronting the growers of Kennewick and Richland at the present time, is that of securing enough pickers and packers to handle the crop. Although some of the growers are doing their own hustling, for the most part the question of help is being worked out through the Association and the Exchange.
Both of these organizations have plans well under way and believe they will have no difficulty in bringing the necessary help into the valley.
Manager H. W. Desgranges said this morning that members of the Association will need more than five hundred helpers, the Richland growers alone having made application for 310 pickers and 70 packers. Mr. Desgranges has notified the managers of the district associations in the Yakima valley and a large percentage of the needed help will be supplied through these branches.
The Exchange is also busy with plans for importing help. At the first quarterly meeting of the stockholders Friday it was voted to make the Exchange a clearing house for pickers and packers. Under this plan the Exchange will engage the pickers, put them in the patches of their members and work them under the direction of a foreman. Instead of the pickers' tallies being turned to the grower they will be turned into the Exchange Who will issue checks in payment, charging the amounts to the accounts of their members. In this manner the grower will be relieved of a lot of worry and responsibility and thru the different foremen the Exchange will be enabled to exercise close supervision over the picking and packing.
Secretary W.R. Crawford, of the Exchange is now in communication with several Coast employment agencies and believes that he will have no difficulty in bringing enough Japs into the valley to meet the needs of all those who market through the Exchange.
The price that has been adopted for this year is 35 cents a crate for picking and 20 cents for packing. With the size of the crate reduced to 24 pints the price is apparently very satisfactory to pickers.
This article captures the intense labor dependency of early 20th-century agriculture in the Tri-Cities area, specifically the reliance on Japanese immigrant labor which would soon be severed by the Immigration Act of 1924. It mirrors modern agricultural debates regarding migrant labor shortages and the mechanization of harvests, showing how the 'big question' for local growers has shifted from sourcing bodies to sourcing technology.
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