Union Seeks to Organize Berry Pickers

Backed by several Ventura County leaders, the United Farm Workers on Tuesday announced the creation of a commission that aims to unionize the county’s 5,000 strawberry field workers and draw attention to what they termed appalling working conditions.

“It’s a disgrace that here we are going into the 21st century and farm workers can’t get decent sanitary conditions,” UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta said. “There’s no clean toilets, toilet paper, soap or paper towels. They don’t have clean water to drink or wash their hands.”

Rob Roy, president of the Ventura County Agricultural Assn., countered by saying such allegations were untrue.

“This is nothing but a public relations effort funded by the United Farm Workers,” Roy said. “If things are so deplorable, don’t you think the UFW would be more successful in getting workers to unionize?

“They’ve been trying to get workers to organize [in Northern California] for almost three years. Workers don’t want to be organized, obviously.”

The UFW has made almost no inroads into the strawberry industry statewide, winning only three elections to represent pickers since 1975, Roy said. Two of those cases were in Ventura County--one in 1977 and another in 1995. The third was in Salinas Valley. All of those companies either went out of business or stopped growing strawberries, he added.

A quarter of California’s strawberries are grown in Ventura County, which trails only the Watsonville-Salinas area in strawberry production.

Huerta said the UFW has not called for a union vote at farms in Ventura County in recent years for good reason.

She pointed to a 1995 union victory in which most of nearly 600 workers at Ocean View Produce in Oxnard voted to join. But the company, a subsidiary of Dole Food Co., plowed under its strawberries and laid off 450 workers, claiming it had been losing money on the crop for years.

“We are not going to call for an election at a ranch until that ranch guarantees it is not going to close down or move,” said Cruz Phillips, a UFW staff member.

The union said that several local leaders have joined the new Ventura County chapter of the National Strawberry Commission for Workers’ Rights.

A list of 60 members includes Supervisor Susan K. Lacey and Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez. Neither, however, attended a news conference Tuesday afternoon at an El Concilio office on South B Street.

Huerta said some commission members met last week with local workers who said that children as young as 13 sometimes are used to pick berries. They were told most workers make about a dollar an hour less than their counterparts in Northern California.

They also said sexual harassment against female workers in the fields was common.

“Given that recent multimillion-dollar awards have been given to women who were harassed who work in air-conditioned offices, it is completely unacceptable that sexual harassment is common in agricultural fields in Ventura County,” said Santa Paula City Councilwoman Laura Flores Espinoza, who has joined the effort.

The union’s first commission chapter was created in Watsonville about 2 1/2 years ago. Commissioners there launched a similar public awareness campaign.

The Watsonville group has so far succeeded in organizing in Santa Cruz County only one organic strawberry farm, with 40 employees.

But other strides have been made, organizers said.

The group filed several class-action suits on behalf of employees who claimed they were ordered to work during lunch breaks and were not paid for working overtime. In all, employees so far have been awarded more than $700,000 in back wages, Phillips said.

Also, discrimination against employees who are union supporters has decreased and fewer children are seen toiling in the fields, he said, adding that the sanitary conditions have also greatly improved.

“There are now even mirrors inside their bathrooms, so that’s been a huge victory,” said Phillips of Santa Ynez.

UFW officials voiced concern over sanitation violations by Oxnard-area growers affiliated with Watsonville’s Driscoll Strawberry Associates, the nation’s largest shipper of fresh strawberries. The union said it discovered unsanitary conditions in the bathrooms of some local contract growers.

“Occasionally we find problems and we fix them,” said Phil Adrian, a spokesman for Driscoll in Watsonville. “We tell the contract company to fix the problem or else we will not ship your fruit.”