Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

5/28/99 -- New York Times

LOS ANGELES -- For three years, the United Farm Workers of America has
struggled to organize California's 20,000 strawberry pickers and packers --
who harvest more than 80 percent of the nation's strawberries under often
backbreaking conditions -- in an effort to revitalize the crusading spirit
of the union's founder, Cesar E. Chavez.

But the union's hopes for its most important victory since Chavez's death
in 1993 were thrown into deep doubt on Thursday when the 1,500 workers of
the Coastal Berry Company, the state's single biggest strawberry employer,
failed to produce a majority for either the U.F.W. or a rival group
organized by Coastal Berry workers last year.

That outcome of the unionization vote, held in Watsonville and Oxnard,
Calif., raised the prospect of a runoff election, perhaps as soon as next
week, and all but guaranteed another round in the state's long-running
strawberry wars. In the last year alone, the dispute has produced
anti-union violence and a contested election that the rival union group,
the Coastal Berry Farmworkers Committee, won by fewer than 100 votes last
July. Those results were thrown out by state officials this month because
162 workers who were eligible to vote had not been notified of the balloting.

"We're going to continue in this struggle no matter how long it takes,"
Arturo S. Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers and Chavez's
son-in-law, said today in a telephone conference call with reporters.

"We're not going any place. It's a question of reassuring the workers that
we're committed."

In fact, the United Farm Workers' fight illustrates the complex dynamics of
the state's $600 billion-a-year strawberry industry. The work in its fields
and plants is among the poorest paid, with wages averaging about $230 a
week, or 12 cents to 16 cents a pint, and labor so difficult that most
workers are finished by age 50.

The U.F.W. contends that it is hampered, after 16 years of strong
anti-union sentiment under two Republican governors, by deep skepticism and
lack of union experience among workers, most of them Mexican immigrants,
who are harassed by anti-union foremen and fearful of losing their jobs. In
the early and mid-90's, the United Farm Workers won victories, only to have
growers plow under their crops rather than accept union representation.

Growers counter that working conditions in the agricultural industry have
improved since Chavez began his organizing efforts three decades ago. They
say workers are better paid, more satisfied and reluctant to surrender 2
percent of their wages to a union whose glory days of solidarity are gone.

"I think this is probably the biggest black eye that the U.F.W. has ever
suffered in its history," said Rob Roy, president of the Ventura County
Agricultural Association, a growers' group. "With all the money and the
effort they've put into it, they had every conceivable opportunity to win
this election and they didn't. I don't think they've won the hearts and the
minds of the workers out there."

Indeed, the timing of the election was set by the United Farm Workers,
apparently confident of victory, after it mustered petition cards from 50
percent of the workers last week.

But in secret-ballot voting in the fields on Tuesday and Wednesday, the
United Farm Workers received 577 votes, compared with 646 for the Coastal
Berry Farmworkers Committee. The U.F.W. suggests that the

Farmworkers Committee was organized with the support of anti-union formen
and backing from other growers -- an assertion the committee rejects. There
were 79 votes for no union, and 60 ballots not counted because of
eligibility challenges, most lodged by officials of the State Agricultural
Labor Relations Board, who conducted the election.

The board's regional director now has 48 hours to resolve the challenged
ballots, but if neither side wins a majority of the ballots cast and
accepted, a runoff election will be held, within seven days if possible.

In Oxnard, in the coastal plain of Ventura County about 60 miles northwest
of Los Angeles, the United Farm Workers won a majority of 309 votes to 230
for the Farmworkers Committee.

But in Watsonville, 70 miles south of San Francisco on the fertile central
coast, where anti-union sentiment is stronger and where an anti-union group
attacked United Farm Workers supporters in the fields last summer, the
Farmworkers Committee won, with 416 votes to 268 for the U.F.W.

The United Farm Workers contend that the Farmworkers Committee has taken no
steps to organize its operations and has no proven experience in
representing workers.

One of the workers charged in the violence, Jose Guadalupe Fernandez,
became the first president of the Farmworkers Committee, but he was later
dismissed by the company and the presidency of the group has yet to be
filled. The group's lawyer, James Gumberg, said today that the challenged
ballots alone might give the Farmworkers Committee an outright victory,
without a runoff.

"And I think a runoff clearly favors the committee," Gumberg said. "I think
what you're going to see is the U.F.W. and the company get together to do
everything in their power to stall this election."

In fact, Coastal Berry is hardly hostile to the United Farm Workers. Its
average pay of $8.40 an hour is about $2 above the statewide average. Its
owners, a group led by a suburban Washington, D.C., investor, David
Gladstone, bought Coastal Berry from the Monsanto Company with the support
of the U.F.W. and a bevy of Democratic politicians, including Vice
President Al Gore, on a pledge of neutrality to unionization. The powerful
Western Growers Association has actually accused Coastal of excessive
sympathy for the U.F.W.

"The immediate issue is just putting some finality on a long organizing
campaign," Coastal's president, Ernie Farley, said today. "We've spent an
awful lot of time managing this process rather than managing our business,
and now we're right in the middle of the harvest."

The United Farm Workers chose Coastal as the first big organizing target
because of the presumed sympathies of its new owners, and because it is the
industry's largest direct employer, producing 10 percent of the national
strawberry crop. But the union's real target is Driscoll's Berries, a
consortium that operates here and in Florida and produces nearly one-third
of the nation's strawberries.

If the union had won this week, officials had hoped to begin a public
relations campaign urging consumers to buy Coastal's berries -- and
implicitly to boycott Driscoll's -- in an effort to bring pressure on the
rest of the industry. Now all such plans remain on hold.

But for Dolores Huerta, the co-founder and secretary-treasurer of the
United Farm Workers, who kept vigil at the union's Oxnard office on
Wednesday night awaiting election returns, the mission remained clear, in
the stories of workers who drifted in from the fields after casting their
ballots, their hands and aprons stained with deep red juice that looked
like blood but smelled like shortcake.

As Ms. Huerta listened sympathetically, Silvestre Perez, 56, a picker with
eight years' experience and four months without a missed day of work at
Coastal, told of being dismissed last week after a supervisor accused him
of destroying a strawberry plant. Perez said he was merely removing a dead
plant whose roots were broken, and the union contends that the real reason
for his dismissal was that Perez was wearing U.F.W. buttons.

He says the company still owes him $180 in back pay.

"If we had a union," Ms. Huerta said, "we'd file a grievance and resolve
this and he'd get his job back."