University of California

5/28/99 -- Yahoo News

Setback for UFW in Fight to Organize Strawberry Pickers

Friday, May 28  3:56 PM ET

LOS ANGELES -- For three years, the once-mighty 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 Chavez.

But the union's hopes for its most important victory since Chavez's death in 1993 were thrown into deep doubt Thursday when the 1,500 workers of the Coastal Berry Co., the state's single biggest strawberry employer, failed to produce a majority for either the UFW 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 vote 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 Rodriguez, president of the UFW and Chavez's son-in-law, said in a telephone conference call with reporters Thursday. "We're not going any place. It's a question of reassuring the workers that we're committed."

In fact, the UFW's fight illustrates the complex dynamics of the state's $600 billion a year strawberry industry. The work at strawberry companies is among the poorest paid, with wages averaging only about $230 a week, or 12 to 16 cents a pint, and labor so stooped and difficult that most workers are finished by age 50.

The UFW 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-90s, the UFW 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 UFW has ever suffered in its history," said Rob Roy, president of the Ventura County Agricultural Association, a grower 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 UFW, 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 UFW received 577 votes, compared with 646 for the Coastal Berry Farmworkers Committee. The UFW suggests that the Farmworkers Committee was organized with the support of anti-union foremen 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 of them 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 UFW 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 UFW supporters in the fields last summer, the Farmworkers Committee won, with 416 votes to 268 for the UFW.

The UFW contends 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 Thursday 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 UFW and the company get together to do everything in their power to stall this election."

In fact, Coastal Berry is hardly hostile to the UFW. Its average pay of $8.40 an hour is about $2 above the statewide average. Its owners, a group led by a suburban Washington investor, David Gladstone, bought Coastal Berry from the Monsanto Co., with the support of the UFW 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 UFW.

"The immediate issue is just putting some finality on a long organizing campaign," Coastal's president, Ernie Farley, said Thursday. "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 UFW 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.

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