University of California

1/24/97 Report -- The San Francisco Chronicle 

Claiming they were fired for refusing to provide sexual  favors to build union membership, two female members of the  United Farmworkers Union sued the organization yesterday.

In a lawsuit filed yesterday in Santa Cruz Superior Court,  Leticia Maravella and Gloria Perales charged that Efren  Barajas, director of the UFW's registration drive in  Watsonville, asked them to have sex with farmworkers as an  incentive to join the union.

According to the complaint, Barajas told Maravella ``If the  farmworkers don't want to sign the union card, go to bed  with them. Who cares if you get a little dusty?''

When the women refused to comply, they said, they were  harassed and then fired from their union jobs.

Union officials disputed the allegations.

``The UFW has never tolerated or in any way encouraged sex  for use as an organizing tool,'' said union attorney  Annabelle Cortez. ``It's an outrageous allegation. This  union has worked for 35 years for the rights of the women in  the fields.''

Cortez noted that three of seven members of the UFW's  national executive board are women. Six female organizers  joined Cortez to insist that they had never seen nor heard  of any such requests being made of UFW women.

Flanked by about a dozen supporters in Watsonville's central  plaza, Maravella and Perales unfurled a hand-painted  bedsheet banner bearing the slogan ``Farmworkers yes, whores  no!''

In passionate tones, Maravella said she sought help from  legendary UFW leader Dolores Huerta, but was told it was a  bad time to raise the issue.

Huerta, UFW co-founder and a world-famous campaigner for  civil rights, firmly denied Maravella's allegations  yesterday, calling them part of a strawberry-industry  campaign to derail the next union registration drive.

``I did talk to (Maravella), and she complained that her  organizing was being criticized,'' Huerta said. ``She never  said anything about these other sex allegations, and if she  had, I'd have raised the roof.''

Huerta said the sex charges are an apparent tit-for-tat by  the berry growers, in retaliation for a 1995 organizing  campaign against a Salinas grower accused of harassing women  field-workers. After the grower's workers voted to accept  the union, she said, the grower plowed his berries under and  fired the workers.

``It's been a campaign of terror,'' Huerta said.

Yesterday's news conference by the plaintiffs dissolved into  near-chaos when the women pointed out a man in the crowd and  denounced him as a union spy. The man tried to walk away but  was chased across the plaza and confronted by a half-dozen  enraged women who cursed him, waved their fists in his face  and chanted ``Respect for women!'' and ``We are not  whores!'' in Spanish.

The women then marched, chanting, to the UFW office two  blocks away. Coincidentally, an anti-union group called the  Strawberry Workers and Farmers Alliance held a press  conference nearby calling for an investigation of the UFW.

With the shouts of the demonstrators audible from the  street, officials at the Watsonville UFW angrily denied the  charges.

The charges come at a critical time for the UFW, which is  kicking off a major registration drive in Watsonville in  April. The drive is this year's top national priority for  the AFL-CIO, said Amy Dean, executive director of the AFL-  CIO's South Bay Labor Council.

The national labor organization is reportedly pouring  millions of dollars into the drive to register some 20,000  strawberry workers in the Pajaro Valley.

Berkeley attorney James Lorenz, who represents Maravella and  Perales, said that the near- evangelical fervor of the UFW  has led to a subculture where women are expected to give  their all for ``la causa.''

``This lawsuit isn't really about money,'' Lorenz said,  although the plaintiffs are seeking unspecified cash  damages. ``It's about the extended family that has been the  UFW for 30 years. Somebody has behaved inappropriately, and  now it's going to stop.''