University of California

8/26/98 -- San Francisco Bay Guardian

Striking Back

Story and Photos by David Bacon

WORKERS AT the D'Arrigo Brothers produce company have been trying to negotiate a union contract with the company for 22 years, hoping to stop wage cuts, improve their health plan, and win a pension and grievance procedures. In late July the company brought machines into the fields -- and forced pickers to match the machines' pace. To add insult to injury, D'Arrigo cut 10 cents from the workers' piece rate to pay the wages of the machines' drivers.

"We finally just came to the end of our patience," said Efrain Lara, a broccoli rabe cutter who heads the union committee. "Twenty-two years is too long to wait anyway. But cutting our wages -- that was even more serious." Some 700 workers walked out on strike Aug. 5 (see "Growing Concerns," 8/19/98)

The company, which is the nation's second-largest vegetable producer, employs 900 to 1,000 people in the Salinas Valley during the harvest season. About 600 of them are still on strike, according to the United Farm Workers, which represents the workers.

The company responded by bringing in strikebreakers.

For the last four weeks picketers have congregated early every morning on the dirt roads that lead deep into the vegetable fields south of Salinas, trying to prevent the replacement workers from harvesting the perishable crops.

These photographs, taken at the company's fields the morning of Aug. 10, depict a scene that has been playing out almost daily since the strike's beginning. As some picketers stopped the buses at the entrance to the fields, others opened the emergency doors at the rear of the vehicles. Cries of "Unanse!" -- "Come out with us!" -- filled the semidarkness as union supporters called on the workers on board to join the strike.

Some of them did, climbing out with their lunch bags. Others stayed in their seats, squirming uncomfortably, trying not to look out the window at the strikers below.

Monterey County sheriffs' deputies arrived, forcing the picketers to let the buses through. The strikers formed a line at the end of the road, calling out to the strikebreakers with bullhorns. Meanwhile a few union organizers followed the crews to the field to discuss the situation. After an hour UFW organizer Jesus Corona, holding his red-and-black union flag aloft, marched out of the field to the picket line followed by a trail of workers who had decided not to break the strike.

Of the 60 workers that had arrived on the two buses, only a handful were left working.

"It was kind of hard this morning, and it took a long time to convince them, but we do this every day," Corona said. "And the workers usually support us, once they really think about what we're fighting for. They can see that the strike will benefit everyone."

The strike activists have had a lot of success in stopping D'Arrigo crews because the union has been a visible, active presence in the company since 1970.

"Every day we go visit D'Arrigo workers at home to ask them to join us," UFW vice-president Efren Barajas said. "We find family after family living in garages, all over the valley. And they work all day for this company, every day. What does it say about the wages here, where you find people living in garages? It says we don't earn enough to even rent a real place to live."

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