COLUMN ONE : When the Foreman Is Dad : ‘Network’ hiring among Latino immigrants is beginning to shape labor relations in California. Union and management leaders alike stress the need to know who’s related to whom in a work force.

At 64 years old and close to retirement, Socorro Venegas has no trouble imagining who will succeed her at the onion factory in tiny King City--where good jobs are kept in the family.

Venegas followed her husband to this Salinas Valley town from Mexico City 13 years ago. Three sons in turn followed them to the assembly line at the factory, Basic Vegetable Products. “Los nietos tambien,” Venegas said, as if her six grandchildren already worked at the plant and weren’t mere elementary school pupils. “Of course they will work there,” she explained. “All the families, we are all like this.”

At Basic, as in countless factories and warehouses throughout California, it’s the rare worker who doesn’t have a brother or a cousin on the floor. Sisters, nephews and in-laws stand side-by-side before giant belts that carry onions and garlic to be dehydrated. They carpool, share lunches and become godparents to one another’s children.

As with the tangled roots of an old tree, the extended families at Basic have grown into something approaching a solid mass--and one that includes future workers as well. And so when managers in early summer proposed a two-tier pay scale in which new hires’ wages would be cut by $3 an hour, Venegas and nearly every other production worker took it personally.

What is normally a routinely applied cost-cutting strategy of imposing reductions on anonymous future workers became a rallying cry for a labor dispute that turned into a strike. More than 750 workers walked out on July 7, and, remarkably, they have not had a single defection in more than two months.

Even attorney Jay Jory, who represents the privately held business, marveled at the strikers’ cohesiveness. “I’ve had more crossovers in plants where we actually cut people’s pay,” the Fresno labor lawyer said. “Something is keeping these people out.”

The answer is simple, said Teamsters officials who represent the workers. “They know the next hire could be their granddaughter,” said the local president, Frank Gallegos, who worked at Basic for 13 years, along with his mother, father, brother, aunt and several cousins. “It’s a very well-knit group.”

Network hiring among Latino immigrants, a trend documented by social scientists for more than a decade, has profoundly changed the composition of California’s blue-collar work force. Now the practice is shaping labor relations as well.

Union organizers and management consultants from urban Los Angeles to the fields of Monterey County said they don’t mount a campaign without first mapping the workplace family relationships--and that includes identifying the natural leaders, outcasts and old rivals.

Networks have changed the dynamics of contract negotiations, grievance procedures and, as in the case of Basic, strikes.

“It is a very powerful hidden dimension of immigration and, increasingly, labor relations,” said Harley Shaiken, a UC Berkeley professor specializing in labor and the global economy. “It’s true all over the country, but particularly in California, where immigrant labor is vital to the future of the economy and pivotal to the future of unions.

“When you know how to use a network, to plug into it, it can be extremely effective,” Shaiken said. “On the flip side, if the boss has brought up five members of his extended family, there’s loyalty that transcends the labor conflict.”

Although tapping family members for jobs is nothing new, immigrants--especially those in recent waves from Mexico and Central America--have shown a special affinity for it. In fact, some California industries have taken in so many relatives and friends that the demographics are now skewed.

In an analysis of 1990 census data, UCLA sociologist Roger Waldinger found that Mexican immigrants were “significantly overrepresented” in two-thirds of the manufacturing industries in Los Angeles--a quirk he attributes largely to networks.

Until recently, the phenomenon generally worked against organizing, helping to explain why recent immigrants, who are most likely to find jobs through family members and friends, have been the least likely to belong to unions.

Unions Learning to ‘Follow the Strings’

But as they adapt to the changing demographics of California’s work force, unions are learning to “follow the strings,” as one organizer put it.

That may be as simple as tracing back a chain of cousins to the most influential family member at a factory, or as complex as visiting the village in Mexico that sent most of those workers north--as several unions have done in recent years.

“There are networks throughout rural and urban California, and that’s why what happens in these teeny-tiny towns can impact an organizing drive in Los Angeles,” said Mike Johnston, a Teamsters representative with more than a decade’s experience in the Central Valley. “People who don’t understand those networks can’t organize in these settings.”

The support of dominant family groups was instrumental in several recent union victories in Los Angeles, including the 1997-98 campaign for a new contract at the 1,000-employee Farmer John pork processing plant in Vernon, which turned a corner when the Maldonado family--with its extensive network of brothers, in-laws and sons--agreed to support the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

The Maldonados continue to play an important role in monitoring the hard-won contract: This month, their testimony helped the union win a $20,000 settlement in a dispute over the use of temporary workers.

“It’s easier to stand up for your rights when you have your whole family behind you,” said Javier Maldonado, who worked alongside his father and still works with a brother and four uncles at Farmer John.

The Justice for Janitors organizing campaign of the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which thousands of immigrant janitors marched in Los Angeles’ streets, benefited from family ties in a different way. Networks crisscrossed the entire industry, with some members in union jobs and others at lower-paying nonunion companies.

“It provided us with an opportunity to show the difference a union can make,” said Triana Silton, a Service Employees International Union organizer, “because a janitor could clearly see that he was doing the same work as his brother, who earned $2 an hour more.”

Just as often, however, extended families present unions with a wall of resistance, casting organizers as meddling outsiders and union sympathizers as traitors to the clan.

Workers who owe their jobs to relatives in supervisory positions can be especially difficult to persuade. “You can get into a very closed situation,” said Rene Castro, an organizer with the UFCW. “People feel secure and they don’t want to upset things.”

That dynamic contributed to several well-publicized union defeats, organizers assert, including the United Farm Workers’ stinging failure to win over 1,300 strawberry workers at Coastal Berry Farms this summer.

The UFW lost the vote for the strawberry workers’ representation to an upstart committee of workers that was headed by the brother of a former field supervisor. Family ties ran deep in work crews that went strongly against the union.

Some researchers chalked it up to simple blood loyalty, but UFW spokesman Marc Grossman cast the event in a more sinister light. “It’s an exploitive relationship,” he said. “The power that the foremen and supervisors have is a function of favoritism, bringing on their relatives and people from their hometowns. They have a stake in the union not being there, because that’s something we do away with immediately.”

Indeed, although many unions have learned to use networks to their advantage, they will often try to eliminate or diffuse them once a workplace is organized. Having many family members in one place is viewed as fertile ground for cliques and conflict.

“In a union setting, you can’t give special treatment to a family member,” said Silton of the SEIU. “As a general rule, we don’t let supervisors supervise family members, just to make sure it’s equitable.”

Many employers follow similar anti-nepotism practices to eliminate questions of favoritism, but an increasing number appear to be moving in the opposite direction.

Hiring by Network Easy for Companies

According to several recent surveys, employers who have tried hiring by network quickly develop a taste for it: It’s fast and easy, and workers brought on by family members tend to be more reliable.

“It’s low-maintenance,” said Wayne Cornelius of UC San Diego, who reports that 80% of the low-skilled workers he surveyed in 1996 found their jobs through friends or relatives. “Their friends will orient them at work, tell them how to dress, even what buses to take. The owner doesn’t have to do anything.”

Cornelius found that workers hired through networks tend to stay on the job longer, even though they typically earn less than those hired through a formal screening process.

Another factor helps explain the high level of networking in California: small entrepreneurial businesses and immigrant-owned businesses are prevalent here, and both are more likely to hire informally.

Networks also account for the high employment rates of low-skilled immigrants--many of whom have less than eighth-grade educations--in an economy said to prize higher education, Waldinger said.

The combination of high productivity and low pay may have helped Southern California hold on to manufacturing jobs that otherwise might have gone to lower-cost places overseas.

Still, the drawbacks to having a large family or two on the payroll can be significant. “It can be a two-edged sword,” Waldinger said. “. . . There’s a chance a large kinship group could turn against you.”

Ask the owners of Basic Vegetable Products and they just might agree.

“There’s been a high degree of hostility at that plant, an us-versus-them mentality, for many years,” said Jory, the attorney for Basic Vegetable Products. “This whole strike is not driven by economics. It’s driven by emotion.”

Jory said the company--which is now busing in replacement workers from 50 miles away--began contract negotiations hoping to form a cost-cutting “partnership” with workers. Basic was losing market share, and consultants warned that the company would have to reduce prices to reverse the trend, he said.

“If there are no concessions, this plant won’t stay open,” Jory said. “We tried to pick areas that have the least impact on our current employees.”

But to Venegas and other workers, who earned $11 to $19 an hour, the proposed starting wage of $7.65 was a slap at the family.

These days, the brothers, cousins and in-laws at Basic trade tips on other jobs and staff the picket line. They pool their daily $55 in strike benefits, trying to help one another prevent evictions.

“We share what little we have,” Venegas said. “At work, we were together like one big family. And that’s the same way we are on strike, very solid.”

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This story has been edited to reflect a correction to the original published text. King City is in Salinas Valley, not Central Valley.

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