University of California

11/18/98 -- The Bakersfield Californian

Filed: November 18, 1998

By MARTHA MENDOZA
Associated Press Writer

WATSONVILLE, Calif. (AP) — It's planting time in the nation's most productive strawberry fields.

Miles Reiter, a third-generation strawberry farmer, was putting in acres of seedlings this week. By next June, they should be ankle-high and laden with ripe red fruit, ready for workers to pick by hand at about $6 an hour.

Across town, below colorful murals depicting labor union history at the United Farm Worker offices, organizers were rehearsing "home meetings" with each other, preparing to speak with more than 30,000 pickers behind closed doors in a winter-long blitz.

And at the Santa Cruz County courthouse, UFW attorney Annabelle Cortez was pursuing a lawsuit against the area's strawberry growers, whom she accuses of misleading the public and breaking labor laws with a sham union.

All are resigned to another year of walkouts, demonstrations, and perhaps even violence in the state's $600 million strawberry industry despite the efforts of national labor leaders, Wall Street powerbrokers and even Vice President Al Gore to achieve labor peace.

"I'd like to think we can resolve our issues without getting into a legal rigaramole," says Reiter, breaking apart a sticky clump of soil. "I care a lot about the workers."

But Manuel Izquierdo, a veteran farmworker, said pickers need "better wages, better benefits, better protections," and he's planning to spend the off-season having heart to heart talks in his neighbors' living rooms to push for it.

"Organizing is going to bring power to my people," said Izquierdo, a footsoldier in the unionizing effort, which the UFW considers its top national priority.

In the mid-70s and early 1980s, UFW president Cesar Chavez was a familiar face at workers' kitchen tables and in the fields of the Pajaro Valley about 100 miles south of San Francisco. Tens of thousands of workers joined the union.

But that activism faded, and union membership declined precipitously. In the fields, migrant farmworkers and undocumented immigrants were unwilling to risk their livelihoods by alienating their bosses. The UFW had other priorities.

In 1995, the UFW decided to kindle a resurgence, starting in the most difficult place — strawberry fields. A third of the 50,000 strawberry pickers in California migrate from Mexico for the harvest, a higher percentage than other crops. It is entry-level farmwork, the most backbreaking, low-skilled labor available.

The UFW decided to begin with Watsonville-based Coastal Berry Co., the nation's largest employer of strawberry pickers, owned by the huge biotechnical corporation Monsanto Co.

Under pressure from Congress and Gore to resolve its labor problems, Monsanto sold Coastal Berry a year later to two liberal Washington, D.C., investors who did something previously unheard of — they ended efforts to block unions, and even tried to persuade workers that belonging to the UFW just might be a good idea.

After decades of labor-management antipathy, the endorsement of Coastal Berry president David Smith did little to build trust among workers with the UFW. It also backfired with Coastal Berry's supervisors and managers, some of whom actively opposed their own executives by forming an alternative union, backed by other growers.

The organizing effort was already slipping away from the UFW when workers brawled at a July 1 rally that was broken up by Santa Cruz County deputies using pepper-spray. The man who would emerge as president of the grower-organized Coastal Berry Farm Workers Committee, truck driver Jose Guadalupe Fernandez, was arrested for hitting pro-UFW workers. In all, five workers and two deputies were injured, and few held onto hope for labor peace.

After that, the UFW dropped out of the election, and the grower-backed union won. But the election was invalidated on Nov. 5 by the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board because 152 Coastal Berry workers in Oxnard couldn't vote.

UFW leaders said they'll be ready next summer to make sure the Coastal Berry Farm Workers Committee doesn't get another chance, even if it means an industry-wide strike or boycott. Meanwhile, the UFW wants an injunction barring farmers from funding an anti-UFW union. State labor codes ban employers from funding unions.

"We want to make sure that next summer, no grower front group pops up in the middle of our organizing," said Cortez.

Smith, who was hired by the investors who bring a profitable peace to Coastal Berry's fields, said he's still hoping for consensus.

"However," sighed Smith, "I don't think there's any reason to believe that when it comes time to pick the berries we're putting in right now that we're going to see any peace at all."

Copyright© 1998, The Bakersfield Californian