Dark Days

At the end of a narrow country road, downwind from a local golf course and the yacht clubs at the Ventura Harbor, trouble is growing in a sunless world set deep inside a series of cinder block bunkers.

From the road, you see only a few drab, whitewashed warehouses.

They are the kind of buildings easily unnoticed, but home to one of the most unusual agricultural operations in Southern California--the Pictsweet Mushroom Farm.

Here, workers spend their days turning loads of horse manure, trucked in regularly from the Santa Anita racetrack, into a nutrient-rich compost that sprouts more than 20 million pounds of mushrooms a year.

The farm is a factory in the fields, a year-round operation where workers labor in near total darkness, wearing miners’ helmets to light their way and guide their movements.

Indeed, it is a lot like working in a coal mine.

The hours are filled with difficult and potentially dangerous toil, as workers scale wooden planter boxes up to 8 feet high to harvest the crop, hooking themselves to cables--like spiders dangling from webs--in case they slip and fall.

Whether they are picking button mushrooms or portabellos, the pay is the same--46 cents a bucket. So the workers scramble, their hands ablur and sweat slicking their faces, at what is described as one of the largest and most successful mushroom operations in the nation.

But trouble has been building behind these cinder block walls, an escalating conflict between big agribusiness in Tennessee and the 300 people who work here.

On one side is United Foods Inc., of Bells, Tenn., a nationwide grower and distributor of fresh and frozen vegetables, which recorded $200 million in sales last year. The company’s principal brand name is Pictsweet.

On the other is the United Farm Workers union, trying to win a new contract for workers who have been without one for more than a decade.

It is a battle over pay and benefits and job security--a fight punctuated in recent weeks by calls for a boycott of Pictsweet products and a UFW campaign to convince grocery stores and other customers to contact the grower and encourage talks with the union.

So far it has resulted in 32 layoffs, with the possibility of more.

Another round of negotiations is scheduled for Monday, but few workers hold out hope of a quick ending.

The UFW first won a contract at the Olivas Park Drive mushroom farm in 1975 but lost it 12 years later when United Foods purchased the plant.

However, the UFW has continued to represent the workers, trying a number of times over the years to hammer out a new contract before kicking the campaign into high gear earlier this year.

Union representatives say they want the company to provide dental and vision coverage for the workers, less-costly medical insurance and a pension plan. They also want the company to boost wages by 5% for hourly employees and 5 cents a bucket for pickers paid at a piece rate.

Company Refuses to Discuss Talks

A company spokesman refused to discuss details of the ongoing negotiations but said workers at the Ventura facility have been treated fairly since United Foods took over and already receive wages and benefits comparable to those at other mushroom farms.

Mushroom picker Francisco Guerrero doesn’t see it that way.

He knows that pickers earn up to $10,000 a year less than their counterparts at like-sized mushroom plants under UFW contract, according to union officials.

And, he says, the company’s medical plan forces him to pay so much out of pocket that he can barely afford to go to the doctor or take his three children when they are sick.

Most distressing, Guerrero says, is what he perceives as a hostile attitude by management in recent months aimed at derailing the drive for a new labor pact.

Workers who are sick or injured on the job are paid little attention and treated with little respect, he said. The mind-set, he added, is that the mushrooms are more important than the workers.

“We have put many years of our lives into earning money for the company, and all they do is ignore our concerns,” said Guerrero, 44, who earns about $24,000 a year after more than two decades of toiling in Pictsweet’s rank-smelling growing houses.

“We are not asking for much,” he said, “just enough to support our families.”

At corporate headquarters in Bells, United Foods spokesman Don Dresser said he believes the company already does that and more.

In addition to paying competitive salaries and benefits, workers receive three weeks of paid vacation annually and raises every two years.

When it plucked the mushroom farm from bankruptcy 13 years ago, Pictsweet also instituted a profit-sharing plan, in which 20% of the plant’s pretax profits are funneled back to workers every three months, he added.

In fact, Dresser contends that wages and benefits are better at the Ventura farm than they are at a Northern California mushroom plant where the UFW hammered out its most recent contract.

Moreover, Dresser said it has been the UFW, not the company, that has canceled the last two negotiating sessions. And he said union representatives have refused to say where they stand on the company’s latest proposal.

“We can’t negotiate if the other side doesn’t show up,” Dresser said. “The UFW is more enthusiastic about making noise and making a name for themselves than in actually getting anything done.”

Now, with the union increasingly pushing for a new contract, Dresser said the labor struggle is beginning to take its toll.

Already, he said, the union’s call for a boycott of Pictsweet products has prompted one of its largest customers, Vons, to stop doing business with the company, forcing the plant to cut production and lay off workers.

And he noted that the battle has divided the labor force, with an opposition group launching a petition drive to decertify the union.

In a complaint filed last week with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, UFW organizers accused United Foods of promoting the decertification effort. But Dresser said the company has no part in the campaign and will honor whatever decision workers make.

“There is an issue that employees need to resolve among themselves, which is whether to be represented by the United Farm Workers,” Dresser said. “That is their issue. The company has no role in that.”

Estimates of where the workers actually stand vary dramatically. Decertification proponents have estimated that two-thirds of the workers want the union out. Union proponents say it’s the opposite.

To be sure, the UFW does not have universal support.

One employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal by union stalwarts, said the company was taking care of workers just fine before the UFW started stirring up trouble.

“This is the best job I’ve ever had, and I don’t want to put that in jeopardy,” said the worker, a former stoop laborer lifted out of the fields by full-time, year-round employment at the mushroom farm. “We all have families to feed and rent to pay. The union should just let us get on with that.”

But longtime employee Alfredo Zamora, 41 and the father of six, said it is precisely because workers have families to feed and rent to pay that the drive for a new labor pact is necessary.

Like many in this largely immigrant work force, his job picking mushrooms is the foundation on which he built a life for himself and his family.

And like other workers, who have stooped in the fields for far less money, he thought he would never complain about a job that for decades has provided steady work and solid paychecks.

It comes down to a question of equity, Zamora said: Is it right for the company to reap millions of dollars annually while his pay has gone up only a few pennies per bucket since he started in 1979?

“They have bought new forklifts, new tractors and new machinery, but nothing for the workers,” he said, holding a red-and-black UFW flag outside the plant at a recent rally. “It just isn’t right.”

Plant Has a History of Labor Strife

Labor battles are not new to this 40-year-old mushroom farm, bordered by strawberry fields that slant toward the Santa Clara River.

Some of the same workers were on hand in 1975 when the UFW initially won a contract at the mushroom farm.

The agreement 25 years ago was the first of its kind in the industry and paved the way for the union to negotiate contracts with half a dozen other mushroom growers in California and Florida.

Many of the workers also were on hand during the early 1980s, when the work force went on a 15-month strike to protest wages and working conditions at the facility, then owned by West Foods.

That was perhaps the darkest period at the mushroom farm, a time when workers lost homes, had cars repossessed and struggled with faltering marriages.

With the help of a boycott similar to the one currently underway, the workers eventually won a new contract in 1983 that put pay and benefits on par with the rest of the industry, said former UFW organizer Karl Lawson, who now works for Oxnard’s housing department.

But just as important, Lawson said, workers five years later won nearly $1 million in back pay as settlement of a labor lawsuit stemming from the job action.

“It was one of the most successful strikes in UFW history,” Lawson said. “We got everything we wanted.”

Lawson said that when United Foods bought the mushroom farm a few years later, contract negotiations hit a dead-end because of the company’s insistence that it be free to fire workers without UFW approval and also to bring in contract laborers whenever it desired.

The same issue--open shop versus closed shop--remains one of the sticking points during the current negotiations, say union leaders, who have recently escalated protest activities.

Workers have shown up with homemade banners and placards in front of Pizza Hut stores--one of the nation’s largest purchasers of Pictsweet’s product--to pressure company officials to contact the mushroom grower and urge talks with the union.

And they have taken their fight to the inner cities, forming protest lines on street corners from Oxnard to East Los Angeles to tell consumers about their plight.

On a recent afternoon, mushroom picker Baltasar Luna, 49, put in a full day on the job and then headed to East Los Angeles, where UFW supporters had set up a “human billboard” on a busy street corner in the shadow of the King Taco restaurant.

It was the kind of protest impossible to miss. Workers held up signs, waved UFW flags and shouted slogans--”What do we want?” “Justice!” “When do we want it?’ “Now!”--as motorists honked their horns in support.

A passerby with paint on his pants and tattoos on his neck dropped by to ask what all the fuss was about.

“We’ve been struggling for a long time,” explained Luna, sunlight glinting off the Aztec eagle button pinned to his green work shirt. “Now we want a contract.”

The passerby picked up a picket sign and joined the demonstration.

Workers say they have been receiving the same kind of support wherever they go. They won unanimous backing earlier this month when they ventured to Fresno to ask delegates at the UFW’s national convention to endorse the Pictsweet boycott.

UFW representatives, in the midst of a larger campaign to reverse more than a decade of declining membership and dwindling influence, say they are surprised by how quickly the boycott took off.

Some even acknowledge that it likely prompted the decision by Vons’ parent company, Safeway, to discontinue orders for Pictsweet mushrooms--the move that triggered Pictsweet’s related action in laying off workers.

But some union members say UFW leadership fully explained the consequences of calling a boycott. And they say it was their choice to go forward, seeing it as their best chance to draw attention to problems at the plant.

Even now, some of those who have been hardest hit by staff reductions say they have no regrets. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t starting to feel the pinch.

Francisco Palomino, 47, still has his job at Pictsweet, although his hours have been reduced. But his wife, Maria, and son Gustavo were both laid off around Labor Day.

Because the workers are not on strike, the UFW says it cannot dip into its strike fund to support them.

However, community members, local stores and the workers themselves have started a collection--they generated $855 the first week--to support those who have been laid off.

Still, Palomino wonders how he will be able to make the car payment or pay the $500-a-month rent at the spare studio apartment that houses his entire family of six.

“All we want to do is be able to earn more money and live better,” said Palomino. “It’s hard to tell how it will all turn out. We can do it, but there’s no telling how long it will take.”