Ralphs Backs UFW on Bid for Reforms in Berry Fields

The Ralphs Grocery Co. chain, in a sharp departure from the supermarket industry’s history of tensions with the United Farm Workers, will throw its support today behind the union’s drive to improve the lot of the 20,000 fieldworkers who harvest California’s strawberry crop.

In addition to providing a big boost to the UFW’s campaign, Ralphs’ announcement is seen as an acknowledgment of the growing clout of Latino consumers in Southern California--traditionally a bastion of support for the farm workers union, which once was led by the legendary Cesar Chavez.

Ralphs executives will join the UFW at a Los Angeles news conference in calling on the state’s strawberry growers to provide their pickers with such basic comforts as toilets and clean drinking water. The company will also endorse the union’s demands for health insurance and better wages for the workers, along with protection from allegedly widespread sexual harassment.

“This is not an unrealistic request to make of someone in 1996. All working men and women should have clean water and bathrooms, and sexual harassment has no place” at any work site, said Darius Anderson, a Ralphs vice president.

The Ralphs announcement intensifies an effort that the AFL-CIO, the umbrella group for the nation’s unions, has characterized as one of the most important organizing campaigns in America.

Ralphs, the No. 1 supermarket chain in Southern California, is now by far the biggest grocer nationally and the only major one in the state to side with the UFW and reject the strawberry growers’ claims that their pickers are treated well. Two smaller chains in the New York City area previously backed the UFW’s efforts.

At the same time, neither Ralphs nor any of the other chains is threatening to stop selling or advertising any grower’s strawberries. Though the UFW has for years staged boycotts of table grapes, lettuce and other farm products, this time it is relying instead on public opinion to coax the growers to come to the bargaining table.

Boycotts have had mixed success in pressuring growers, and growers have sometimes turned workers against the union by blaming boycotts for eliminating their jobs.

But a spokesman for the group representing the state’s growers, whose revenues totaled $551 million last year and accounted for 80% of the nation’s strawberry production, said the public pronouncement will have little impact.

If Ralphs “decided to stop advertising or buy less, then it would have an impact and mean a lot to us, and there’d be a great concern. But it sounds right now like that’s not the case,” said Gary Caloroso, spokesman for the Strawberry Workers and Farmers Alliance.

“Basically, we think that the UFW is totally exaggerating [the problems concerning] the living and working conditions of the strawberry workers,” Caloroso said.

“Strawberry workers have a living wage, they have clean drinking water, they have clean bathrooms in the fields. There are laws that protect people from sexual harassment. In fact, California has some of the strictest health, safety and labor laws in the country.”

But Mark A. Carleson, deputy chief of the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, said that, “as with most things, the truth is somewhere in between” what the two sides are saying.

He said that in the strawberry business, as with much of the rest of the California agriculture industry, his agency’s inspections find that about half the growers fall short of some state sanitation requirements, including those calling for accessible toilets and clean drinking water.

The announcement by Ralphs marks a major turnabout from the 1970s, when the UFW antagonized the supermarket industry by selectively boycotting chains and staging protests over conditions in the table grape industry. In California, Safeway was the main chain to be boycotted, but Ralphs, then under different ownership, also was briefly a target.

Although the rift has quietly healed over the years, the announcement by Ralphs and other chains marks the first major public support for an important UFW campaign.

For Ralphs, the announcement provides an opportunity to win the goodwill of the roughly 30% of its Southern California customers who are Latino.

“This is a community that has been extremely good to us as a business,” said Ralphs’ Anderson. “We have a lot of loyal customers out there, and we want to provide a certain amount of loyalty back to that customer base.”

Some strawberry growers complained that Ralphs was singling out their industry even as it continues to buy as many as 7% of its strawberries from Mexico, where labor conditions are far worse.

A wage of $4 a day is common in Mexico, whereas California workers typically get $6.10 an hour, said Dave Riggs, president of the California Strawberry Commission in Watsonville.