Labor Leaders Retreat

Reflecting slow progress in their ballyhooed campaign to recruit California’s 20,000 strawberry pickers, labor leaders say they won’t seek any union representation elections in the industry this year. Instead, they now talk about holding elections beginning in 1998.

That marks a retreat from several months ago, when officials of the United Farm Workers vowed to call for government-supervised voting in 1997 to give strawberry pickers the chance to bring in the union.

Industry-backed groups gleefully cited the new timetable as evidence that the union is failing to win worker support. Many workers don’t want to pay dues to a union that they believe would do nothing to improve wages, benefits or job security, said Antonio Perez, a spokesman for the Agricultural Workers Committee, a group that receives money from strawberry growers.

Perez said union organizers also have antagonized workers by exaggerating farm labor problems by claiming, among other things, that many pickers lack bathrooms and clean drinking water.

But Marc Grossman, a union spokesman, countered that the UFW already has scored “extraordinary” successes, including prompting some growers to raise wages, offer medical insurance and provide paid vacations.

“Everyone knows that if we were to go away tomorrow, so would that progress,” he said. Grossman also said that, despite industry denials, strawberry growers have fiercely contested the UFW’s recruiting efforts by firing and otherwise coercing union supporters.

Even though one major grower, Coastal Berry Co., has agreed not to oppose the union, Grossman said that others in the industry have dispatched union busters to intimidate the company’s pickers. “You don’t turn that around overnight,” he said.

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Times staff writer Stuart Silverstein can be reached by phone at (213) 237-7887 or by e-mail at stuart.silverstein@latimes.com