A ‘Kapital’ Demonstration in Watsonville
Driving down Highway 1 a couple of weeks ago through the strawberry fields around Watsonville, 90 miles south of San Francisco, I gazed at the millions of young green plants poking up through the plastic and thought of Karl Marx’s famous remark about commodities in the first chapter of “Das Kapital”:
“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But analysis shows us that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”
In other words, there’s more to a strawberry than the bland, watery, bioengineered fruit we know. Within these berries we can find the history of class conflict on California’s Central Coast, a history maybe moving to a new stage next Sunday, when John Sweeney and other leaders of the AFL-CIO will lead a march of many thousands through Watsonville, hoping to fire up the efforts of the United Farm Workers to organize the strawberry pickers and display to America the combative zeal of a revived labor movement. To this end, the AFL-CIO-financed UFW is pumping $100,000 a month into the small town, and this, as my old friend Frank Bardacke pointed out to me as we rolled on past the strawberry fields, makes the UFW the largest new business in Watsonville.
Bardacke has lived in Watsonville for 25 years and worked in the fields for six of them. These days he’s writing a history of California farm workers and so their story is vivid in his head.
The organizing efforts of the late Cesar Chavez’s UFW pushed the farm workers’ entry wage from $1.25 in 1965 to $7 an hour in 1980. But by then the union had serious internal problems and Republican counter-attacks came rolling out of Sacramento and Washington. Today, farm workers are taking home the same as they were in 1980. For a strawberry picker working eight or nine months a year, this means $9,000 a season. Spend $5 on strawberries in the supermarket and the people who picked the berries get maybe 45 cents.
At least they’re still growing strawberries in the Pajaro and Salinas valleys, to the value of $300 million a year. In 1980, Watsonville was the frozen food capital of the world. Not any more. These days Irapuato in Mexico holds that title. Watsonville lost 5,000 jobs in a population of some 35,000. The farm workers--mostly from Michoacan--who made $7 an hour in the Pajaro Valley now can make $6 a day in Irapuato.
The strawberries would have followed the broccoli and cauliflower down to Irapuato. In fact, the strawberry growers tried to move to Mexico in the 1960s, but found they couldn’t do without the University of California, whose scientists on the Davis campus have lavished millions of dollars of research time in the somewhat fetishistic pursuit of bigger, redder, more comely berries. Mexico sends up only processed strawberries, which, on one recent notorious occasion, got relabeled as American and sold in desserts to school lunch providers, imparting hepatitis A to some of the unfortunate consumers.
Given the $300-million annual take, some folks in the Pajaro and Salinas valleys are making bundles on strawberries. It’s not the pickers and it’s not even the growers. As Bardacke explained to me, strawberries are raised mostly by small growers who hock themselves up to the eyeballs to rent the fields, sterilizing them with methyl-bromide pumped in under the plastic, putting in the plants and then spraying them with costly pesticides and water. Comes harvest time, the race is to get the berries into the coolers, of which there are about a dozen in the Pajaro and northern Salinas valleys. The people who get the big slice of the $300 million are the cooler owners and the marketers.
Organizing in the strawberry fields is fiendishly difficult. Bardacke, who worked in one, recalled the intense solidarity of a celery or broccoli picking crew, which got paid as a unit and divided the day’s take. But strawberry pickers don’t work in crews, and they get paid by growers teetering on the edge of ruin.
Somehow the UFW, with the AFL-CIO behind it, has to organize “cooler-wide,” which means compelling the cooler operators to commit to buying berries only from UFW-organized growers. And how is that going to be done? The ultimate arbiter is the consumer wwho buys those red berries so imbued with metaphysical subtleties, or who listens to the union and maybe passes up Watsonville strawberries in the interests of justice. The union leaders aren’t talking about a boycott yet, but they must have one in mind. The grape boycott of the late 1960s lasted five years. My neighbor up in Humboldt County, 400 miles north of Watsonville, is looking pleased. He’s a one-man operation and his berries are organic. Start reading those labels.
