COLUMN LEFT : Uniting to Slay a Jolly Green Giant : Everyone loses when a plant moves out of the country and exploits cheap labor.

Last Saturday in this farm town 90 miles south of San Francisco they led a green giant through the streets, with ropes on his wrists and around his waist and 220 locals marching along behind. They started at noon from Callaghan Park, headed along Ford and Walker to West Beach on the edge of town where the big packing plants are, then back along Main Street to the park again.

At least half the marchers were Mexican, and the rite in which they were engaged has been enacted by dismayed and angry folk around the world: a march against plant flight. On West Beach in Watsonville stands the Green Giant frozen-food plant. Many years ago it was Russo Frozen Foods, until it was bought by Green Giant, which was bought by Pillsbury, which in turn was engorged in 1988 by Grand Metropolitan, a London-based conglomerate. In May, Grand Met announced that 370 of the 520 workers in the Green Giant plant would be laid off in January and processing moved to Irapuato, on the main road from Mexico City to Guadalajara.

Up here in the Pajaro and Salinas valleys where, six months of the year about 80% of the fresh vegetables in the United States are grown, the food cutters and packers get about $7 an hour. The workers in Irapuato will get $4 a day for the same jobs. The factory there is in the area known as El Bajio, once the center of domestic corn and bean cultivation, now being taken over for export crops that, in the case of Green Giant, will be shipped to a non-union minimum-wage plant in Ohio for repacking and distribution.

Consequences? Watsonville’s economic base will shrink, and people who have worked in the plant for two decades will be slung into the jobless lines of a town still battered from the Loma Prieta earthquake. Irapuato peasants will get jobs at barely subsistence wages but pay a lot more for imported corn and beans, with government subsidies for these staples slashed under pressure from the International Monetary Fund. Grand Met cuts its costs, easing its debt burden from the buyout of Pillsbury.

When the news broke in the Green Giant plant, most of the workers thought there was not much to be done. Local 912 of the Teamsters, which represents the Green Giant packers, negotiated severance rates and some retraining. Varnish on the coffin.

But a few workers felt some protest was essential. Among them were Yolanda and Lauro Navarro who between them have more than 20 years in the plant. As Yolanda put it, “Cuando recibimos una cachetada, al menos tenemos el derecho a gritar. “ When we get slapped across the face, at least we have the right to cry out.

Oct. 21 through 27 saw the first fruits of their organizing: a week of protest. Among Grand Metropolitan’s subsidiaries are Burger King, Haagen-Dazs, Smirnoff, J&B; Scotch, Gilbey’s Gin, Alpo. So in Watsonville they put a picket outside a Burger King for an afternoon and just one person crossed the line. In Santa Cruz they had 75 people outside a Liquor Barn, handing out leaflets. There were other pickets in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and in Los Angeles where a dozen pickets, mostly from Justice for Janitors, marched up and down in front of a Burger King on Crenshaw Boulevard. Soon Grand Met headquarters in London will be picketed.

But symbolic protest is one thing, success another. These days capital is a frequent flier and redeploys effortlessly to cheaper labor, lower taxes somewhere else on Earth. There’s no precedent for stopping a runaway shop or a plant closing. The Green Giant workers are now deciding whether to get into a long boycott fight.

If a boycott can be made to stick here in Santa Cruz County, it has a chance elsewhere. Grand Met has not claimed it was actually losing money on its Watsonville operation, merely that it could make more money out of the pittance labor in Irapuato. In this instance jobs are going from Mexicans to Mexicans, and there are political and labor ties. These factors could lend sinew to a boycott movement.

There are environmental issues too. Farmlands in El Bajio, some of which are leased to transnational companies, are in part irrigated with untreated waste water, as discovered by the producers of a video, “Dirty Business,” commissioned by Local 912. On current models of global warming El Bajio will, over the next 30 years, require at least 20% more irrigation water. Water-intensive crops like broccoli and cauliflower will strain Mexico’s already reeling water economy.

Here are elements that could fuse the labor-environmental-consumer coalition needed to make a boycott stick. The odds are long, but even if it’s not these workers, one day such a coalition will have to start making a just worldwide wage scale stick, so that capital can’t always be on the move toward that $4-a-day worker in the next country down the road.