Strawberry Fields a Hard Row for UFW

The immigrant strawberry pickers toiling in the fields surrounding this Central Coast town would seem to be ripe for the plucking by union recruiters.

Most of the pickers, despite a relatively long harvest season lasting about eight months, earn no more than $9,000 a year. Some worry about the effects of their exposure to the heavily applied chemicals, including known carcinogens, that keep pests from destroying the strawberry crop.

The work is completely unmechanized and physically punishing, requiring pickers to remain stooped in awkward crouches most of the day. When workers get up to take an occasional stretch, 40-year-old picker Jose Rojas said, the field foremen “yell at us. . . . They always want us bent over.”

“It really is backbreaking labor,” added Miriam Wells, a UC Davis anthropologist and author of a 1996 book on the strawberry industry. “They call it ‘the fruit of the devil’ because of the toll it takes on people.”

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Yet here in the heart of the nation’s strawberry industry, amid a historic campaign led by the rejuvenated United Farm Workers to unionize California’s more than 20,000 pickers, organized labor faces an uphill fight. To overcome that resistance and call national attention to the strawberry workers, a mass march expected to attract thousands of demonstrators will be staged here Sunday.

The stiff challenge facing labor organizers partly reflects the unyielding anti-union stance of the strawberry industry. At the same time, some pickers at the better-paying, more humanely managed farms are skeptical about what the UFW can do for them.

But perhaps most of all, the UFW’s aims are complicated by fears among the most economically vulnerable pickers that supporting the union will cost them their jobs.

Those fears--an obstacle for decades to union organizers trying to combat miserable working conditions in California agriculture--are also partly based in recent UFW history.

Twice in the last three years, workers on separate farms voted the UFW in only to see the employers halt production of their strawberry crops and throw pickers out of work.

The concern about employers’ retaliation against union supporters runs deep in UFW bastions such as the dilapidated San Andreas labor camp on the outskirts of Watsonville. At the camp, where most of the adult residents are strawberry pickers, pro-union signs are planted in the dirt in front of many of the ramshackle homes.

Samuel Martinez, a 35-year-old camp resident and UFW backer who has picked berries for 16 years, said about half of his neighbors openly support the UFW. He thinks the others are behind the union too, but he said: “They fear that if their bosses find out, they won’t get any more work.”

Elsewhere, some workers at higher-paying farms with better working conditions want to hold on to what they have and worry that the union could change matters for the worse. That attitude is more common at farms such as those affiliated with Watsonville-based Driscoll Strawberry Associates, the industry’s biggest marketing concern.

“It’s a lie that the union is going to help us,” said Miguel Calderon, 29, a picker on a Driscoll-affiliated farm in the Salinas area, where many workers say they earn $10,000 to $13,000 over the harvest season.

Calderon added that in past years, “at farms where the union got in, the farms went broke. That’s one of the reasons we don’t want the union.”

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With the harvest season just getting underway in the Watsonville-Salinas area, the UFW--with unprecedented backing from the AFL-CIO, the parent group for the nation’s major unions--is moving into full swing with its campaign to win over the strawberry workers.

Over the next few weeks, about 100 Spanish-speaking union organizers will fan out into the farm worker neighborhoods of Watsonville, Salinas and nearby parts of southern Santa Cruz and northern Monterey counties.

The AFL-CIO, trying to revitalize the American labor movement by focusing on low-paid, minority workers, is pouring money and staff into the UFW effort and has made the drive one of its top organizing priorities.

Even the Teamsters union, a onetime UFW enemy that dispatched burly thugs into the fields in the 1970s to beat up UFW activists, is helping out. If the campaign fails, though, it would mark a major setback for organized labor’s strategy for turning itself around by recruiting immigrant workers.

In addition to union backing, the UFW has drawn statements of support from 14 supermarket chains, including Compton-based Ralphs. So far, no one is calling for a boycott, however.

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Never before has the storied UFW tried industrywide organizing in the strawberry business, the way it did with table grapes and lettuce in the 1960s and 1970s. But in recent years the strawberry industry became an attractive union target because of its rapid growth, geographic concentration and emerging worker activism.

California produces 85% of the nation’s strawberries every year, and 50% to 55% of the state’s roughly $500-million crop comes from the Watsonville-Salinas area.

Although its efforts are focused in that region now, the UFW also eventually plans to organize California’s other strawberry-growing centers: the Oxnard and Santa Maria areas, along with parts of Orange and San Diego counties.

The union organizers mainly emphasize the low pay, along with alleging that foremen commonly are cruel to workers and frequently subject women pickers to sexual harassment. They also charge that growers often fail to provide clean toilets and drinking water in the fields.

Strawberry marketers and growers “look at us like second-class citizens,” said Arturo Rodriguez, president of the UFW and son-in-law of the legendary UFW leader Cesar Chavez. “Who else has to go out and fight to get decent drinking water?”

In fact, the living and working conditions of California strawberry pickers vary substantially, with most abuses occurring on sharecroppers or small growers’ farms.

Sensing that most pickers today would vote against joining the UFW, strawberry industry marketers and growers are challenging union leaders to set up representation elections immediately.

“We’d love for them to let the workers decide,” said Gary Caloroso, spokesman for the industry-supported Strawberry Workers and Farmers Alliance. “We just don’t want an industry to continue to be dragged through the mud.”

But Rodriguez fires back that there’s no way to hold a fair election until the growers end their “intimidation and coercion” of workers.

Frank Bardacke, a Watsonville teacher and UFW supporter who is writing a book about farm workers, accused the growers of “incredible hypocrisy.”

“They say ‘let’s have elections,’ at the same time they’re hiring people to tell workers ‘you’ll lose your job if you vote for the union,’ ” Bardacke said. Industry officials deny hiring union busters or engaging in any unfair labor practices to defeat the union campaign.

Lately, many growers have increased hourly wages and added or improved health insurance programs, although they deny doing it to head off the union organizers. “We would have done it sooner if it hadn’t been for them,” said Daryl Valdez, the Watsonville-based human resources director for Gargiulo Inc., a unit of Monsanto Corp. and the area’s biggest grower of strawberries.

Gargiulo, which acknowledges that it held its base hourly pay for its 1,000 pickers to $5.75 for many years, boosted the rate to $6.50 in January. The company is defending itself against a recent private lawsuit charging that it forces workers to put in unpaid, “off-the-clock” hours.

Government figures underscore how tough the lot of a strawberry worker is, even by grim farm labor standards.

The most recent state figures show the average strawberry worker making $6.44 an hour, the second-lowest out of 19 categories of California agricultural workers.

Labor law and workplace health and safety violations appear to be far more common in the strawberry industry than elsewhere in agriculture. By one independent analysis, California strawberry growers have accounted for one in every four farm labor violations in the state--roughly four times what would be expected, based on the size of strawberry farmers’ payrolls.

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The high rents and short supply of housing, particularly in the Watsonville area, aggravate the pickers’ financial plight. In Santa Cruz County, there is a waiting list of eight to 10 years for government rental assistance.

To be sure, in some cases pickers at the higher-paying farms, particularly those with two or more wage earners in the family, have managed to buy modest homes. But also widespread are situations where two or three large farm worker families crowd into small apartments.

In 1991, strawberry pickers were discovered living in caves in northern Monterey County. Moreover, strawberry pickers and their families have been living in deplorable conditions at labor camps such as San Andreas for years.

Tuberculosis ran through the camp in 1993 and 1994. Just last fall, when the camp went into receivership and Santa Cruz county officials assumed control, raw sewage was found trickling down the main road, near where children played.

The influx of union organizers into the Watsonville-Salinas area and the union leaders’ portrayal of working conditions, however, has stirred some resentment.

A group calling itself the Ag Workers of America--and branded a front group for employers by UFW activists--held a demonstration against the UFW in Watsonville last year and drew an estimated 5,000 people. For others, the union campaign represents a chance for a better life. Rojas, a UFW supporter, last year earned a little more than $8,200--about the same he has made most of the years since he left Mexico in 1979 to start picking strawberries in California.

His hope is that the union will bring better pay, health insurance and more respectful treatment from the foremen.

Rojas also is looking for better protection from the pesticides sprayed heavily in the strawberry fields. Aside from worries about the long-term cancer threat to workers, Rojas says the chemicals sting his eyes, irritate his skin and sometimes make him dizzy. Growers say that in keeping with legal requirements, they don’t let pickers return to work after fields are fumigated until the potentially harmful vapors have dispersed.

At home, Rojas has a married 21-year-old son, Cesar, who also picks strawberries and helps pay the family’s $750-a-month rent.

But Rojas’ two teenage sons see strawberry picking as a hard life, and want to go on to something else. The elder of the two, 16-year-old Jose Jr., is hoping that a union contract will mean that his father will earn enough money to help him pay for college.

He’d like to become a math teacher. “It’s one of my dreams,” the teenager said.