Strikers Reap Harvest of Bitterness : Labor: In tough times walnut-plant workers took pay cuts. But when profits grew, they wanted their old wages back. The firm said no, sparking a long, rancorous walkout.
In the migrant labor camps of this Delta town, Diamond Walnut was a way out of the tomato and onion fields that trapped the lives of young single mothers like Toni Escobedo.
In good years, working as forklift drivers and plant supervisors--jobs traditionally not open to women--they brought home $32,000 in wages and had a health plan that was the envy of cannery workers in this depressed region where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers meet.
When the walnut processor and packer tottered on the edge of financial ruin a decade ago, there was no doubt what Escobedo and her fellow workers would do. They agreed to wage cuts as high as 35% to save the company they regarded as family.
Today, walking a weary picket line outside the giant plant where she worked for 23 years--a statistic in one of the nation’s longest and most bitter labor strikes--Escobedo still has trouble believing how fast it all went sour.
In 1991, as a flushed Diamond Walnut prepared to process and ship its biggest crop ever, she and 260 other full-time employees went on strike. The company, she said, had reneged on its promise to restore higher wages when the good times returned.
Clutching their “Can Walnuts, Not Workers” placards, they have been on the other side of the barbed wire fence ever since, supplanted by a work force that is years younger and mostly male. They survive on Teamsters Union strike pay of $200 a week.
“I put everything into Diamond Walnut--all my hours, all my energy, all my youth,” the 49-year-old Escobedo said bitterly. “Now, when I’m too old to get a new job and my body is starting to break down, I have nothing.”
The company said it had no choice but to hire permanent replacements because of the timing of the strike. Officials believed their obligation was first and foremost to the 2,000 walnut growers up and down the San Joaquin Valley who make up the 82-year-old cooperative. Growers would have lost millions of dollars if the crop had failed to get to market.
To union workers and their supporters across the country, the fight at Diamond Walnut has become a touchstone in the debate over the right of employers to hire permanent replacement workers as a way to defang a strike and eventually bust a union. The issue came to the fore in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers and replaced them with a new work force. Every year since, legislation to ban the hiring of strikebreakers has been introduced in Congress without success. The Clinton Administration supports such a law.
“What happened to these women, most of them grandmothers, embodies the worst in management’s treatment of America’s working class,” said International Teamsters President Ron Carey.
During a recent congressional hearing, Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Burlingame) blasted William Cuff, Diamond Walnut’s chief executive officer, for not restoring old wages after the company earned $66 million in net profits over five years. The congressman reminded the 50-year-old executive that the two years he had spent heading the company paled in comparison to the decades spent there by the strikers.
In January, the National Labor Relations Board charged the cooperative with encouraging “an atmosphere of fear and intimidation for union supporters.”
The two sides expect to meet this month in Washington with a federal mediator. But if a solution is in the offing, it could not be found here during a recent visit--not at Teamsters Local 601, on the picket line or inside the 13-acre plant that ships 115,000 tons of walnuts each year, the world’s largest supplier.
Indeed, the two sides seem as far apart as ever. There is almost nothing they agree on, not the least of which is the fate of the strikebreakers.
“What are we supposed to do? Fire the replacement workers who came to work under the worst possible circumstances and saved the 1991 harvest?” asked Sandra McBride, spokesman for Diamond Walnut. “Our commitment is to the new work force.”
“They say the scabs got them through the 1991 season and they owe them,” countered Lucio M. Reyes, a striker who now heads the Teamsters Local 601 office. “What about the other 30 seasons? What about the 12 hours a day, seven days a week we put in? What do they owe us?”
Diamond Walnut Growers Inc. is a corporate cousin of Sun-Maid Growers. As a cooperative, it agrees to process and market its members’ crops at “the highest possible grower return.”
For decades that mission included wages inside the plant that were 50% to 75% above those paid by smaller, independent walnut processors--a contract that union officials acknowledge was the “Cadillac” of the industry.
Like everything else, the origin of Diamond Walnut’s tailspin in the mid-1980s is disputed. Company officials say depressed walnut prices forced the cooperative to reconsider its generous wage and benefit package. Strikers point to the company’s embarrassing revelation that it “overpaid” tens of millions of dollars to growers after “overstating” the value of 1983 and 1984 harvests.
To save the company, workers agreed to a new three-year contract that cut average hourly wages from $10.05 to $7.70. The company purchased new laser and acoustical machines to speed up the process of culling the dark and light meat of the nut--automation that slashed the 600-member full-time work force in half.
Diamond Walnut quickly rebounded and has posted record sales in each of the past four years. Last year, the cooperative sold $204 million worth of walnuts--$58 million more than when the wage cuts went into effect. Grower proceeds nearly doubled to $11.2 million in the same period.
When the contract came up for renegotiation in 1991, the cooperative was willing to restore some but not all of the pre-1985 wages. At the same time, it wanted workers to contribute $12 a month to their health plan.
“I gave the best of me to Diamond,” said striker Gricelda Contreras, a 40-year-old single mother who grew up in a farm worker family. “Whenever they needed me, overtime and on weekends, I was there. And that loyalty wasn’t returned.”
No such promise was expressed or implied, said company spokeswoman McBride. “This was a restructuring that was long overdue, and even with the cuts we were still paying 35% more in wages than our competitors were paying.”
By this time, the family atmosphere that had always lightened the workload had been lost to acrimony. Workers recall putting up a Christmas tree only to see management throw it away. Managers erected a wall in the cafeteria that separated professionals from blue-collar workers. Gone was the plant manager who knew every worker by his or her first name. The company retained a San Francisco law firm known for its union-busting tactics.
In the weeks before the strike began Sept. 4, 1991, management sent in inexperienced replacement workers to shadow longtime employees as they performed their jobs.
“It was one slap in the face after the other,” said Cynthia Zavala, a 53-year-old grandmother who left a $11.25-an-hour job as a cannery supervisor to go on strike.
Zavala took a double hit because her husband, Cruz, a Diamond Walnut maintenance manager making $13.40 an hour, also refused to cross the picket line. They worked a combined 59 years at the plant.
She is known as “the Roadrunner” because she never stopped moving from machine to machine. Her crew set a production record two years straight and in 1991, a few months before the strike, she was named employee of the year. Last summer, she traveled 23 days cross-country by bus with other strikers to publicize their plight. The trip was followed by a 40-day fast.
“Except for the grape fields,” she said, “Diamond Walnut has been my whole life.”
Each day, Zavala drives to her spot outside the plant and assumes the place she has taken for 32 months, next to Contreras, Willa Miller, Debra Goodin, Frances Atilano and Rachel Peralta--each one a grandmother and each one saving her hard hat in anticipation of the strike’s end.
They long ago stopped trading invective with the strikebreakers who now cross their line without a second glance. They say their solidarity has only been strengthened by fellow strikers whom they have buried or seen broken by financial trouble.
Inside the plant, permanent replacement workers who average $9.36 an hour--almost as much as the pre-1985 wage--said they understood the strikers’ resolve but they too have families to feed and dreams to pursue.
“This is the best job I have ever had and I want to keep it,” said Eric Fountain, a 26-year-old sheet metal worker who earns $13.45 an hour. “We worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day to process that first harvest and the harvests that followed. I think we’ve earned the company’s respect.”
