Posted on Sat, Apr. 20, 2002 in the Philadelphia Inquirer

Reaping workplace justice
Patiently, doggedly, lawyer Arthur Read fights for the farmworker.

Arthur Read was an idealistic 27-year-old lawyer in the summer of 1979 when the short-fused, 300-pound foreman of a migrant farm labor crew came after him with a knife. It took 220 stitches to repair the gash in Read's face. Forty more to close the wound in his stomach.

Today, he is an idealistic 50-year-old lawyer, with a gentle paunch and a scar that runs from the edge of his jaw to the side of his nose. When he smiles, the line becomes almost unnoticeable, blending into the soft creases etched by middle age and good nature.

Professionally, Read has learned to live with setbacks as well. He has accepted, more or less, that the fight for the rights of farmworkers requires patience and determination as well as legal skill.

His entire career has been dedicated to the unglamorous, low-paid, and often frustrating work of helping people who harvest the region's agricultural crops obtain decent living conditions, fair wages, humane treatment on the job.

In January, he scored a major victory.

After nearly a decade of courtroom appearances, union organizing and labor negotiations, Read helped the workers at the Kaolin Mushroom Farm in Chester County win a collective bargaining agreement. The contract guarantees workers, among other things, reasonable pay based on productivity, grievance procedures, and protection against layoffs. In Pennsylvania, which produces half of all the mushrooms in the United States, the Kaolin workers are the only ones with such an agreement.

"I was just in a supporting role," Read says, deflecting congratulations. He seems so heavily burdened with reality that giddiness is not an option.

"There is still so much work to be done. This is just another phase," he says. Workers need to learn how to use their newly won power. They must be trained to document their grievances and gather evidence, to distinguish a personal argument from a formal complaint, and understand their employer's rights to make and enforce rules.

In other words, la lucha continúa - the fight continues. That may be a cliche of the Left, but on the farms in Chester County it expresses commitment. For Read, the words are less a political slogan than a plain statement of fact.

On the way into Rangoon, a Burmese restaurant on North Ninth Street around the corner from his office, Read says, "I'm the kind of person who brings his lunch and if he's lucky, remembers to get to it before he leaves work. Otherwise, I eat it in the car on the way home."

As the waitress leads him to a booth, Read stops to greet two fellow lawyers who work for public service organizations in the same office building as Friends of Farmworkers. Read is a stalwart veteran in this field of purely intentioned, modestly paid law. "The Vietnam era politicized many of us," he says, and from his perspective most have remained, like him, committed. "One of the interesting things about farmworker law - there are probably a couple of hundred people in the whole country involved in it - is that a fairly significant number have been consistently involved since the 1970s," he says. "I guess we haven't had enough sense to consider other careers."

With his tie askew, longish, straight, graying hair parted in the middle, walrus mustache, and wire-rimmed glasses, Read has a professorial, rumpled-suit geniality. He orders curried chicken and tries to explain the 30-year journey that brought the son of a bilingual schoolteacher and self-employed consumer bankruptcy lawyer here from Arizona. But his soul is so invested in the tale that he can't bring himself to sacrifice any of the details.

He seems to know everyone connected to any group on the Eastern seaboard that promotes social justice, dropping the names of activists the way Liz Smith name-drops socialites.

For three hours, he recounts his recovery from polio, his dealings with the draft board, supporting strikes by cafeteria and library workers, his research for the lawyers defending the prisoners in Attica. ...

He tells of going to watch a sentencing hearing for a few Vietnam War protesters, who were accused of sabotaging a draft board. "They were represented by a lefty lawyer who did a terrible job. I came out of that experience feeling if I was going to do law, I would do it well."

He talks about law school at New York University, and from there, he's on to internecine battles with mainstream union organizations, investigations by the General Accounting Office, the vital importance of grassroots organizing. He is fluent in the names of paralegals who were terrorized and the acronyms of nonprofit groups. His stories are populated with associates and professors, asides and tangents, constitutional protections, statutes and amendments.

When the waitress brings him the check and his wrapped leftovers, he is startled. "And we haven't even gotten to the Kaolin contract," he says sheepishly.

"A lot of people abandoned their beliefs as if they were a fashionable outfit, bell-bottoms, the Beatles and the Stones," says Ira Katz, who has known Read since their student activist days in the 1960s at the University of Pennsylvania. "But a significant number of us have continued acting consistently with those values."

Katz lived across from Read in West Philadelphia for several years, before moving to New York, where he is now associate general counsel for UNITE, a textile and industrial workers union.

"I can't tell you what motivates Art, I can only project from my own situation. It's fairly rewarding to know you're doing the right thing. To be part of these struggles and make some kind of contribution. You get the intellectual rewards from the work and being successful at doing the work. You don't have the same level of economic reward, but if you can live modestly the way he does, you can be comfortable."

Read still lives in the same house he did back then. He met his wife, Cindy Rosenthal (a legal services attorney specializing in welfare law), at a meeting of the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive professional association.

"He's not making half a million with a Center City law firm," Katz observes, and describes his friend as smart and dedicated. "There are lots of disappointments and the law generally favors the other side, which has more money and power. You're fighting an uphill battle."

If he didn't already understand how dramatically the odds were stacked against his clients, the outcome of his own, nearly fatal, experience with an abusive crew leader made it clear.

The man who attacked Read, Marcos Portalatin, had a dicey history. He had been accused, and later acquitted, of enslaving teenage migrant workers and assaulting a state assemblyman (who suffered a broken arm during his run-in with Portalatin). A New Jersey jury convicted him of assault with a deadly weapon and atrocious assault, and acquitted him of assault with intent to kill. He was sentenced to 90 days and served his time on work release - at the same farm where the attack had occurred.

"I couldn't help thinking that if this is how I was treated, what would have happened if it had been a farmworker?" Read says. "Society places so little value on their lives."

On the rare occasions he has considered another line of work, he says, that thought snaps him back to his senses.

The venetian blinds are crushed and bent, but they do the job of covering the windows of the Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agrícolas offices in Kennett Square. The executive committee of CATA, a farmworkers group, is about to meet with Read to go over grievance procedures and the details of their new contract.

On one wall hangs a silky flag of Mexico, its colors faded by time and the sun. There are multiple pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe, posters urging workers to exercise their rights, and two calendars, neither of which shows the right month.

Seated around the conference table are eight mushroom laborers, most of Mexican descent if not citizenship. They are all dressed in layers of work-worn flannel, thin T-shirts, quilted jackets and baseball caps, one of which reads "Mi vida pertenece a mi novia" - "My life belongs to my wife."

Three women are interspersed among the group - they are the paralegals and volunteers and staff of CATA. Everyone is speaking Spanish.

Read arrives about 10 minutes late, and takes a seat at the head of the table. He says hello to everyone and apologizes for keeping them waiting.

Speaking quickly in his college-level Spanish, Read explains that he is here to answer their questions and help them understand how to use their newly acquired rights to complain about the way they are treated.

They jump right in. "Es un problema, Arturo," says one man, telling about a disagreement he had with a supervisor that day.

Read asks one of the women to translate, to make sure he has fully understood the question. "Yo estoy de acuerdo," "I agree with you," he says. The problem does not amount to an official grievance, "but if the supervisor retaliates against you tomorrow, or next week or next month, if he reduces your workload to punish you over your disagreement today, then that's a violation."

Throughout the meeting, Read is thoughtful. He raises an eyebrow, taps the table, chooses his words carefully, offers practical advice. Try to collect evidence, he says. Talk to witnesses and take notes. If you're told to pick a tray of mushrooms that's already been picked over, get a disposable camera and take pictures to prove that what you were asked to do was unreasonable.

But keep in mind, he cautions, that your employer has rights as well.

"The company has the right to implement a policy that no one likes," he explains. "Unless you are able to organize and talk to each other, to offer your own plan as an alternative."

Mike Pia, the owner of Kaolin Mushroom Farms Inc., says that during the two-year negotiations, Read was always respectful.

"There were times when things got emotional," Pia says. But the tension never grew into animosity. "Art was always very knowledgeable. ... he's very meticulous about things. Some of the things we discussed were very involved and got to be tedious. But we got used to Art's style. He approaches things in a very complete manner. He's very detail-oriented."

During the meeting with the workers, Read takes notes. Two hours pass. One of the staff members gets up to stretch her legs. "He works ungodly hours," she says of Read. "Tonight, he probably won't leave until 8. Then he has to drive all the way back to Philadelphia."

Read explains that the workers are going to need a pamphlet that explains their rights in a clear and simple way. "A copy of the contract isn't going to be enough," he says.

The workers say they're in the process of printing one up.

"Bueno," Read says, and smiles. His scar falls into shadow. •

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Melissa Dribben is a magazine staff writer. Contact her at 215-854-2590 or mdribben@phillynews.com.