AFL-CIO Targets Berry Growers for Union Push
In a scene reminiscent of the activist 1960s, the AFL-CIO announced Wednesday a nationwide publicity and pressure campaign to help the United Farm Workers union organize the 20,000 workers in California’s strawberry industry.
Instead of the boycott used successfully a generation ago to help organize grape workers, the new drive will rely on demonstrations, speeches and rallies to convince strawberry growers to voluntarily recognize the union.
A “National Strawberry Commission” will start the campaign next week with meetings in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, New Jersey and Baltimore, all areas with “tremendous consumption of strawberries,” according to UFW President Arturo S. Rodriguez.
A pro-industry group, the Strawberry Workers and Farmers Alliance, said the UFW is “misleading the public with exaggerations of the working and living conditions of strawberry workers.” Many of the workers “own their own homes and cars and have kids in college,” said Gary Caloroso, a spokesman for the alliance, which claims 6,000 members.
The UFW drive will be an organizing model for other unions, which have been frustrated by the slow pace and high cost of signing up members at individual companies, said Richard Bensinger, the AFL-CIO’s organizing director.
With the notable exception of the UFW’s table grape boycott, mass, industrywide organizing is “something that has not been done in 40 years,” Bensinger said. “Even when you win an election, companies can litigate and appeal for years. Maybe we organize one nursing home in town, and there are 200.”
The strawberry campaign “will be at thousands of supermarkets where the AFL-CIO’s more than 600 central labor councils will seek support for basic rights for strawberry workers,” AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney said during a news conference at the labor movement headquarters.
Demonstrators will be active at presidential inauguration receptions and events where people dine on strawberries, promised Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women. Besides NOW, the campaign is backed by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, the Sierra Club, several religious organizations and a number of celebrities, including musician Carlos Santana, singer Linda Ronstadt and actors Edward James Olmos and Danny Glover.
The UFW and AFL-CIO will be “wasting a lot of time and money,” Caloroso said of the industry group. The union “has to win elections in the field and gain the respect of the workers--now they don’t have that. It is up to the workers to decide the issue.”
The UFW claims that raising the price of strawberries by about 5 cents a pint would enable growers to raise the pay of workers by 50%. Most workers earn $8,000 a year or less, according to the union. In the East, strawberries typically sell for about $2 per pint, it said.
In the fresh produce industry, the price paid for a product bears no relationship to the actual cost of producing it, said Dave Riggs, president of the California Strawberry Commission in Watsonville.
“It’s entirely supply and demand,” he said, adding that there is no simple method of passing along to consumers an increase in labor or other costs.
The UFW drive is “going to hurt the industry because we’re coming off a very bad year,” said grower Scott Deardorff of Deardorff-Jackson Co. in Oxnard. “There are probably some very, very isolated cases where farm workers need some help. But I think the industry overall does a fair job of paying good wages and offering good working conditions.”
The past season was marked by high production amid reports that California strawberries--which account for 80% of the U.S. crop--were linked to outbreaks of illness caused by cyclospora, microscopic parasites that cause diarrhea. Although no cases were reported in the state, the strawberry industry took a $20-million hit as consumers shunned the berries. Since then, the illnesses have been tentatively tied to raspberries grown in Guatemala.
Rosenblatt reported from Washington and Groves from Los Angeles.
