Farmhands in Bitter Dispute Over UFW

For most of his 51 years, Antonio Sagredo has worked stooped over on dusty farmland--as a child in the fields around Brawley, and, for the last 12 years, on the 300 acres of Camp Pendleton now called the San Clemente Ranch.

With thick brown fingers he points to scars on his knees and hands, the results of a few careless slashes from his own knife over the years. “It’s dangerous work, and they pay us so little,” said Sagredo, who earns the standard hourly wage at the ranch of $4.25.

Now, after four years of prolonged labor disputes between ranchers and farm workers, that may be changing.

Cesar Chavez Expected

Sagredo, the United Farm Workers’ committee chairman at the ranch, is leading a fight to reach a contract agreement with San Clemente’s management that would increase wages and improve working conditions. Union leader Cesar Chavez is expected to lend his hand to the cause today by leading a march of 300 UFW workers and sympathizers through San Clemente, union officials said.

But the UFW’s involvement in what is one of Orange County’s most bitter and complicated agricultural labor disputes is not welcomed by all, or perhaps even most of San Clemente Ranch’s workers.

“We don’t want no union here cause we don’t need it,” said Robert Jaramillo, 53, who is spearheading a drive by some workers to have the union decertified as labor’s representative in negotiations with management.

“What Chavez did in the beginning was right,” said Jaramillo, who earns $11.25 an hour as a farm mechanic. “But we don’t need a union here now--we’ve got good benefits, and the people earn damn good wages. There’s farms around here that pay minimum wage.”

Petition Results

There were no workers in the fields Friday--”to keep us from stirring up support for tomorrow,” UFW leaders claimed, while ranch manager Tom Tanaka said there just wasn’t any work to be done.

However, a number of San Clemente Ranch workers appear to agree with Jaramillo’s opposition to the UFW. A petition he circulated in May to decertify the UFW was signed by more than half of the ranch’s 150 to 200 employees. The state Agricultural Labor Relations Board blocked an election on that issue, however, because of the ranch’s unfair labor practices that have gone unremedied since 1981, an board official said Friday.

“The thinking is that you have to clean out the old misconduct before you can have elections free of coercion,” said Janet Vining, the board’s executive secretary. “The union’s image may be suffering precisely because management has not bargained in good faith--you can’t reward that kind of behavior just because it’s a few years old.”

Deardorff Jackson Co., an Oxnard firm that operates the ranch--the land is leased from the government--took over the property in December, 1977, from the Highland Ranch. The UFW had won an election that gave it exclusive rights to bargain with Highland, but Deardorff, after firing a number of workers and hiring new ones, refused to recognize and negotiate a contract with the union.

In 1981, the state Supreme Court affirmed a labor board ruling that the company had violated labor laws in refusing to bargain with the UFW, and it ordered the company to compensate workers for what they would have earned had a contract been signed. Although the labor board has not yet set the amount, Deardorff estimates it at less than $15,000, while the UFW says it could be as high as $400,000.

But the union, too, has been accused of not bargaining in good faith.

In June, the labor board’s general counsel found merit in the ranch’s charges that the union had retracted previous labor agreements, engaged in regressive bargaining (offering proposals less favorable to management than those already rejected) and repeatedly canceled meetings without justification.

Facing a potentially costly judgment, the union avoided further litigation and signed an agreement stating that it would comply with the Agricultural Labor Relations Act. Although the settlement disclaims any admission of guilt by the union, “they certainly thought they might lose,” said the labor board’s regional attorney, Timothy Foote, who was acting regional director for the board at the time of the dispute.

“We’re not dealing with a normal trade union like the Teamsters,” charged Deardorff’s attorney, Charley Stoll. “In March they wanted a 35-cent raise; now they want 90 cents.”

But some workers see it differently. Sagredo said the $5.15 hourly wage now being sought by the union is not unreasonable. “We’ve gone almost four years without a raise,” he said.