Cannery Castaways : Nabisco Plant Closing Leaves Largely Latino Work Force of 650 Without a Lifeline
For a good long stretch, Alfonso Suarez lived a farm worker’s dream.
Nearly two decades ago, the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant stepped out of the fields and into a job at an Oxnard cannery that has supplied steady work and generous paychecks to generations of local residents.
Back then, he remembers thinking that he had punched his ticket to lifetime employment. His job, filling bottles with A-1 Steak Sauce, gave him everything he wanted: health benefits, three weeks of vacation and a pension plan. And he had no doubt that he would be around long enough to collect the money he was banking for retirement.
But in recent months, Suarez’s dream has come crumbling down around him. And last Sunday, at the stroke of midnight, it came to an end.
That’s when he and about 100 other full-time employees at Nabisco Foods stepped off the production line at the 3rd Street factory for the final time, turned out by the company’s decision to sell its local plant and shift key operations to the East Coast.
“I feel like I have left a part of my life behind, like a part of me has died,” said Suarez, pushing one last time through a creaky old turnstile that separates the Oxnard cannery from a cold, new reality.
“This job was the lifeblood of my family, and it’s hard to believe that it is gone,” said the father of four, who may be forced to return to the fields if no better job comes along. “This leaves a big hole in my life. Now I wake up and ask, ‘What am I going to do today? Where am I going to go?’ ”
He is not alone. In addition to the 100 full-time employees who have been cut loose, another 550 or so seasonal workers were officially notified last week that they no longer had jobs at the plant, which canned Ortega products and bottled the world’s supply of A-1 Steak Sauce and Grey Poupon mustard.
*
In the months leading up to the closure, workers were upended by a dizzying chain of events that has left them numb and searching for answers.
In January 1995, female employees at the Oxnard factory filed sex discrimination charges against Nabisco, contending that they were consistently denied bathroom breaks and resorted to wearing diapers on the job. That was followed by a class-action sex discrimination lawsuit against the New Jersey-based food maker.
Nabisco officials--who have long denied those charges--announced last August they had sold the Oxnard plant and the company’s Ortega line to a division of Nestle USA Inc. While Nabisco was shifting the rest of its operation back East, Nestle decided to shift production of Ortega products to other plants and put the Oxnard factory up for sale, a move that put hundreds of seasonal employees out of work and put an end to the operation for good.
Many workers believe that the labor dispute triggered the plant closure, but Nabisco officials swear that is not true, saying they simply chose to pursue a business deal that will save the company $5 million a year.
Whatever the reason, the closure has silenced, at least for now, the production lines of the Oxnard operation for the first time in at least 50 years.
Moreover, many workers in this largely Latino labor force have been battered and broken by recent events, left to find their way on unfamiliar ground like survivors of a shipwreck.
“The future appears very dark for us,” Suarez put it plainly. “I can’t find the words to say how bad I feel.”
*
*
For longtime workers at the Oxnard cannery, these jobs were the foundation upon which they had built their lives. Paychecks from the 3rd Street factory helped buy new homes and new cars, they financed family vacations and helped parents put kids through college.
This was never white-collar work. Much of it was dirty, sweaty factory toil. But the work was regular and it paid well, an average of $12 an hour for full-time employees.
And that rock steady rhythm stoked the notion that the American dream--even as it was being redefined elsewhere by corporate shutdowns and layoffs--was still accessible, at least to some degree, to this collection of blue collar factory hands.
“Those were good jobs, everyone wanted to get into Nabisco,” said Rusty Montano, 40, a forklift operator who put in nearly 20 years at the cannery. “You felt you had security, you felt like it was never going to end. I don’t think anyone had plans of looking for work anyplace else. We all thought we would retire from there.”
The original food processing operation began half a century ago at a smaller factory just down the road, when the Ortega Chile Co.--born in an adobe home on the banks of the Ventura River--was incorporated into the Coastal Valley Canning Co.
*
Ownership changed hands several times, with A-1 and Grey Poupon added to the mix in 1966 and Nabisco buying the operation in 1988. But no matter which corporate flag was flying out front, local Latinos have always called the plant la chileria--the chili factory.
And the chileria was especially good to Latinos. Teamsters officials estimate that more than 95% of the factory’s work force was made up of Latinos, many of them immigrant farmhands lifted out of the fields by the promise of good wages and benefits.
About one-third of the laborers, union officials estimate, came from Oxnard’s La Colonia barrio, directly across the street from the low-slung, one-story cannery.
“Many families have been raised on the work that comes out of that factory,” said Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez, who grew up in the barrio deep in the shadow of the food processor. “For many people, this was their ticket to a good life. So many people will be affected by this.”
Indeed, the closure cuts far deeper than the nearly 700 regular and seasonal workers--all technically Nabisco employees--who have been displaced. Hundreds of farm workers who stooped in the fields to provide the raw vegetables processed at the plant will also feel the pinch.
The ripple effect will touch local merchants and could even strain social services if enough people remain unemployed and are forced to turn to welfare, Teamsters officials and others say.
“I don’t think Nabisco realized the impact they were going to have on these people, and I don’t think they really cared,” said Frances Chacon, 57, who put in 25 years with the company. “I really feel sorry for the people who don’t have other experience, who don’t speak English, who are going to have to start at the bottom all over again.”
*
Chacon was a shop steward for Teamsters Local 186, having risen from a seasonal employee to a $14-an-hour lab technician testing Nabisco products as part of the quality control process.
Last June, when the rumor mill started cranking up about the possibility of a plant closure, Chacon and others organized a campaign to try to save their jobs.
Workers held prayer vigils and marched on City Hall to urge city leaders to fight for their jobs. They passed around petitions and won support from high-ranking Teamsters officials at a national civil rights conference in Washington.
But in the end, none of it did any good.
“I’m not sure that anybody took us seriously,” said Chacon, who retired when the closure was announced and won an $800-a-month pension and a Nabisco wristwatch for her quarter-century of service. “But I think the decision had already been made. It’s happening to workers everywhere. That’s the reality, but it doesn’t make it any easier.”
The reality is that every year, 1 million people nationwide lose their jobs to plant or company closures, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. And while more jobs are being gained than lost, the new jobs are generally lower-paying than the ones that are disappearing.
That experience is mirrored in Ventura County. While there are more jobs now than there were five years ago, new high-paying sectors have failed to emerge in recent years, employment analysts report. At the same time, the county has lost about 4,000 manufacturing jobs like the ones provided by the Oxnard cannery.
For a work force like Nabisco’s--well-paid, even though many workers didn’t speak, read or write English very well--the prospects of landing jobs of equal pay are tenuous, at best.
“Frankly, in my view, the best prospect is to find a similar kind of company to start up its version of a food processing operation, taking advantage of an already trained, assembled work force just dying to get back to work at the same plant,” said Steve Kinney, executive director of the Greater Oxnard Economic Development Corp.
“It’s a future opportunity for somebody, but it’s certainly a current problem for the workers who have been displaced.”
*
*
Richard and Margaret Guzman suffered a double blow when the Oxnard cannery shut down. He put in 16 years at the company, driving a forklift most of that time. She was a seasonal worker during that same period, packing chiles from August to October.
Together, the high school sweethearts raised six kids and wanted to buy their first home. Now, they wonder if they can keep paying the bills and stay out of bankruptcy.
“I’ve worked there so long, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said Richard Guzman, 44. “I was proud of myself because I was working. It was important, it makes you feel like a dependable person. Now I’m going to have to file bankruptcy; that’s not what I taught my kids.”
The Guzmans were in a unique position to witness the last days of the Oxnard factory. Margaret Guzman was among the workers who complained to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging an unfair restriction of bathroom privileges for female employees at the plant.
*
And she is one of three named plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit filed against Nabisco and pending in U.S. District Court.
Guzman, 42, said the restroom restrictions were so prohibitive that she and other women were forced to sneak off the production line because they couldn’t go when they needed. She said she was even sent home once for doing so, and resorted to using panty liners and toilet paper to guard against on-the-job accidents.
After the plant closure was announced, Guzman said, some workers blamed the women for bringing the operation to an end.
“It made me angry,” she said. “I didn’t want them to close it either; we lost our jobs too. But we were just sticking up for our rights. We didn’t think they were going to end up packing up and moving.”
*
*
Lawyers representing the women in the lawsuit say neither they nor their clients are responsible for recent events. In complaints filed with the EEOC last September, the lawyers contend that Nabisco shut down the local operation in retaliation for the filing of sex discrimination charges against the company.
“The lawyers are not closing the plant, nor are the people who brought the lawsuit, nor are the workers as a whole closing the plant,” said lead attorney Paul Strauss, with the Chicago-based law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. “Only one company, Nabisco, is responsible for workers losing their jobs.”
Nabisco officials deny the retaliation claims, saying neither the move to the East Coast nor the sale of the Oxnard plant had anything to do with the labor dispute, but rather were based strictly on business considerations.
Ultimately, pointing fingers and looking for someone to blame has become a fruitless and frustrating exercise for the bulk of the former workers at the Oxnard plant.
And such an exercise is of little value to Ventura County officials who are now scrambling to find jobs to replace the ones that have vanished.
Supervisor John Flynn, whose district includes Oxnard, held a meeting last week of the groups trying to throw a life preserver to the displaced work force.
“These workers face immediate problems,” Flynn told the group, which included the Teamsters and county jobs officials. “We don’t have the luxury of straightening this out over a long period of time. The bottom line for them is they want to go to work.”
*
At the meeting, the county’s Workforce Development Division agreed to fund 10 peer counselors--former Nabisco employees--to conduct a survey to determine the wants and needs of the workers. And a meeting has been called for Wednesday in Oxnard to tell workers about retraining possibilities and other job opportunities.
In coming weeks, Teamsters representatives plan to meet with Nabisco officials to discuss a severance package for the displaced seasonal employees.
“We’re going to try to make sure that all of the workers get what they are entitled to,” Teamsters representative Joe Fahey said.
But listen to former Nabisco employees, left now to survive on unemployment benefits of $230 a week, and learn how scary an uncertain future can be.
Gathered Thursday at an Oxnard bar, they talked of longtime co-workers deep in depression and now contemplating bankruptcy. They talked of couples splitting up, of homeowners unable to keep pace with mortgage payments, of whole households coming apart at the seams because they relied solely on Nabisco paychecks.
Mostly, they talked about the unraveling of a tightknit work force, and the pain of looking on over the final weeks as the plant was shuttered, as machinery was crated and shipped someplace else.
“I think everybody kept saying, ‘It’s not going to happen, they won’t close, not this company,’ ” said Frances Chacon, starting on her second margarita of the afternoon. “People didn’t want to believe it. But it’s finally here, and that’s not real easy to take.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Chronology of a Plant Closure
1988: Nabisco Foods buys the Oxnard operation.
August 1994: Seasonal worker Lydia Hernandez files a complaint with state officials alleging that women are being denied bathroom breaks.
January 1995: A handful of female employees file similar charges with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Nabisco denies the charges.
March 1995: Lawyers representing the women file a sex discrimination lawsuit against Nabisco.
August 1995: Nabisco announces that it will sell the Oxnard plant and the company’s line of Ortega products to Nestle USA Inc. and is shifting key operations to the East Coast.
September 1995: Lawyers representing the women file charges with the EEOC alleging that Nabisco is selling its Oxnard plant in retaliation for sex discrimination complaints filed against the company.
Sept. 28, 1995: The sale of the plant to Nestle becomes final.
November 1995: Nabisco issues layoff notices to its full-time workers.
March 1996: Nestle announces that it will shift production of Ortega products to other plants and put the Oxnard factory up for sale. March 10 is the final day of production. A handful of workers remain at the site.
