UFW struggle

[Charles Brown]

THE UFW BATTLES A COMPANY UNION IN WATSONVILLE
By David Bacon

        WATSONVILLE, CA  (7/28/98) -- Three years ago, Watsonville
strawberry growers began implementing one of the most sophisticated
union-fighting strategies in postwar labor history -- an elaborate all-out
effort to stop the United Farm Workers.
        This year, in late July, the growers' counterrevolution reached its
critical moment.  Cashing in their markers with Governor Pete Wilson, whose
political career they've largely financed, the barons of California
agribusiness forced the state labor board to hold a union election at the
largest strawberry company in Pajaro Valley.
        But it was not the election for which the union and its supporters
have organized for many months.  The UFW did not even appear on the ballot.
Instead, workers were presented with a radically different alternative.
They could vote for no union at all.  Or they could cast their ballots for
the company union growers have been patiently constructing for two years.
        In the balloting which followed a string of violent attacks on UFW
supporters, 410 workers voted for no union, and 39 votes were challenged.
The Coastal Berry Farmworkers Committee got 523 votes.
        The election, which was immediately attacked by the union and many
state legislators as fraudulent, poses a threat far beyond the UFW 's drive
in the strawberry industry.  Company unions, having received the green
light from state officials despite the violent tactics used by its backers,
may now appear elsewhere in California agriculture.  A growing use of
company unions has confronted union organizing drives in other industries
as well.  If growers succeed in Watsonville, the strategy is likely to
become widespread.

        Since the beginning of the 1996 strawberry harvest, the UFW has
mounted the largest bottom-up union organizing drive in the country today,
trying to break the hold companies wield over the 15,000 berry pickers of
the Pajaro and Salinas Valleys.  Last year, that campaign made an apparent
breakthrough.
        At the beginning of the season, Watsonville's largest grower,
Gargiulo Corp., a division of Monsanto Corp., led other ranchers in
blacklisting UFW militants.  Delfina Corcoles, a union supporter, said that
at the Monsanto operation field office "they told me they were thinking of
not recalling any anyone who signed a card with the union."
        As picking started in April, 30,000 farmworkers and their
supporters converged on Watsonville from around the country.  Marching
through the barrio of this small Central Coast community, they demanded
that growers rehire the fired workers and respect their right to organize
freely.
        Across the country following the march, the AFL-CIO organized
delegations to supermarket managers, asking them to sign a pledge demanding
that growers use 5¢ from the sale of each basket of berries to raise wages,
provide medical insurance, and improve working conditions.  They, too,
demanded that growers rehire union supporters.  Over 3000 stores, including
Lucky's, Ralphs and other chains signed the pledge.
        The pressure paid off.  AFL-CIO President John Sweeney arranged a
meeting between UFW President Arturo Rodriguez and Monsanto CEO Robert
Shapiro in June.  Together, they arrived at a neutrality agreement,
cracking the growers' united front.
        Union supporters were rehired.
        But while Monsanto, a major manufacturer of agricultural chemicals,
wanted to get out from under pressure from the UFW and the AFL-CIO, it
could hardly afford to antagonize growers.  The problem was solved when two
investors, Landon Butler and David Gladstone, agreed to buy its strawberry
operation, and run it as an independent company, Coastal Berry Corp.
        Both men have a long history of working with the AFL-CIO, pooling
union pension money for investments in real estate.  Butler was deputy
chief of staff in the Carter administration, and White House liaison to
organized labor.  While he asserts that no union or pension funds were used
to purchase the company, the AFL-CIO did play a behind-the-scenes role in
putting the deal together.
        Growers were infuriated at what they saw as a betrayal.  What
worried them was the possibility of a UFW-organized strawberry boycott.  If
Coastal Berry were to sign a UFW contract, supermarkets could satisfy their
customers by buying its fruit, while boycotted strawberries of anti-union
growers languished in cold storage.  This would be a repeat of the table
grape boycott of the 1960s and 70s, when Coachella grower Lionel Steinberg
made a fortune as the only union, non-boycotted grape grower.
        Coastal Berry became the target of the growers anti-UFW campaign.

        Gladstone and Butler signed the neutrality pledge, and secretaries
from the company office read it to crews of pickers at the beginning of the
season.  But to the company's foremen and ranch managers, who run the crews
and day-to-day operations, the pledge meant little.  On at least one of
Coastal Berry's three ranches, the foremen had been given the power to hire
workers into the crews, and used it to give jobs to relatives and friends.
The prospect of a UFW contract, which eliminates that power through
union-administered hiring halls, was an immediate threat.
        "My foreman told me how to talk to other workers in my crew,"
recalls Efren Vargas, who at the time was not a UFW supporter.  "They told
me how to make trouble for the UFW organizers when they came to the field
to talk to us."
        Coastal Berry foremen also had a base of support among the
company's truck drivers, and the loaders and box-counters in the crews.
These jobs, which pay better wages than those received by pickers, were
handed out as plum assignments.
        Once the harvest was in full swing, they began an open campaign
against the UFW.  On the morning of June 24, company truck drivers, who
bring the fruit into the packing house, refused to work.  They gathered in
front of the office, shouting anti-UFW slogans, demanding that the company
oppose the union's organizing campaign.  Coastal Berry President David
Smith, who oversees Watsonville operations for Butler and Gladstone, sent
all company workers home.
        Then, on July first, the truckers stopped again, and barricaded the
office with other anti-UFW workers and foremen.  When a group of UFW
supporters on one ranch began picking, the anti-UFW group arrived and
assaulted them.  Three UFW supporters were beaten and taken to the
hospital.
        Vargas, who by then was a UFW activist, says that a group of
foremen, including Joel Lobato and Roberto Chavez, as well as Siliman Ranch
manager Enrique Leal, egged on the violence.  Vargas was hit in the head,
knocked to the ground, and kicked repeatedly.  A wife of another Lobato
brother slammed pro-UFW worker Sandra Rocha in the head with a box of
strawberries.
        "I asked Leal and Lobato why they didn't stop the violence," Vargas
says.  "They said, 'because we told them to do it.  You're not supporting
us, so we're going to teach you a lesson.  You deserve it.'" According to
Vargas, "these people are putting pressure on David Smith.  They don't want
union organizers to have access to us, and they don't want the company to
sign a UFW contract."
        When sheriffs arrived, a leader of the anti-UFW group, Jose
Guadalupe Fernandez, was arrested for hitting a deputy.  No other arrests
were made, and charges were never pressed against Fernandez.
        UFW President Arturo Rodriguez and Secretary Treasurer Dolores
Huerta led a march the following day against the violence, and demanded
that Smith and Gladstone discipline the foremen and workers responsible.
The company took no action.
        In the days following, Fernandez and his associates went to the
Salinas office of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, and asked ALRB
agents to prevent UFW organizers from speaking to workers at home or in the
fields.  While the labor board was unable to take any such action, ALRB
representative Jenny Diaz did tell Fernandez how to draft a petition to
file for a representation election, on behalf of a hitherto unknown
organization, the Coastal Berry Farmworkers Committee.
        In the days following, according to sworn statements given by
workers, foremen circulated the petitions along with other anti-UFW
activists in the crews.  Some workers allege that they were asked to sign
blank petitions.
        On July 16, Fernandez filed the representation petition with the
ALRB, and was listed as the committee's representative.  The UFW
immediately protested, and demanded that the board investigate the violence
at the company, and the ties between the committee and company management,
before allowing any election.  While the ALRB's general counsel stated that
there was a basis for the UFW's complaints, the board nevertheless went
ahead, and voting took place on July 23.
        The UFW refused to participate.  "We won't give any legitimacy to
this company union by appearing on the ballot with them," explained
Rodriguez.  The UFW urged workers to vote for no union.  The following day,
700 Coastal Berry workers refused to work in protest of the election.  The
UFW filed objections, charging that balloting was conducted in a climate of
violence and intimidation, that the ALRB had permitted a company union to
file a petition, and that 180 workers in Oxnard, two hundred miles away,
had not even been notified that voting was taking place.  Their votes could
conceivably have produced a no union majority.
        In an NPR interview following the election, Fernandez stated that
he did not plant to demand any changes in wages or benefits from Coastal
Berry.

        Fernandez has been a long-time activist with another shadowy group,
which has functioned as a company union on other Watsonville strawberry
ranches, the Agricultural Workers of America (AgWA).  This organization has
roots that go back to the first efforts by Watsonville growers to fight the
UFW.
        In 1995, five days after workers voted 332-50 for the UFW, VCNM, a
large Watsonville strawberry company, plowed under the Silacci Ranch -- a
quarter of its operations.  By the end of the season the rest of its fields
had gone under the disc, and the company disappeared.  In 1996, VCNM paid
its former workers $113,000 to settle charges that it had illegally laid
them off in retaliation for the union vote.
        The plowing of the VCNM fields has become an apocryphal story in
Watsonville, told and retold by anti-UFW campaigners.  In their rhetoric,
the traumatic incident serves to prove their accusation that the union is
"anti-industry," and will cause growers to go out of business.  The UFW
also argues that the case proves that without the kind of neutrality
agreement it tried to negotiate at Coastal Berry, growers will simply plow
their field under rather than recognize the union.
        One of VCNM's major partners, however, remains very much in
business.  Timothy Miyasaka is today one of the three owners of the
Well-Pict cooler, one of Watsonville's largest strawberry distributors.
Well-Pict was the cooler for VCNM, and through 1997, was a concentrated
base of support for AgWA.
        Representing both VCNM and Well-Pict is one of the largest, most
anti-union law firms in the country, Littler, Mendelssohn, Fastiff and
Tichy.  The firm has a reputation not only of supplying legal advice to its
clients, but offering them strategic planning in combating union drives.
Littler attorneys were deeply involved in representing a building cleaning
contractor in Sacramento, Somers Building Maintenence, which set up a
company union to fight Justice for Janitors, the national organizing effort
by the Service Employees International Union.
        Joe Sanchez, a labor consultant used by Littler clients, played a
key role in the development of AgWA.  Sanchez originally came out of the
strawberry industry in the early 1970s, and set up his own union-fighting
business in 1982.  His ex-wife, Viviana Sanchez, still works in the office
at Clint Miller Farms, a large, anti-UFW Watsonville grower.
        Sanchez brought a friend, Sergio Soto, to Watsonville from Oakland,
where he had been working for a garbage company.  Soto claims he was
embittered by his own experience as a UFW member in Fresno years ago.  He
says he knows lots of strawberry workers who asked him to come help fight
the union.
        "Workers came to me," Soto explained, "saying they didn't want the
union.  When they asked me what they could do, we came up with the idea of
a march.  We wanted to give the union a message, that they were not
wanted."
        This constellation of individuals and organizations organized two
large marches in Watsonville, designed to create the impression that the
community was rejecting the union.  The UFW itself has a history of using
worker marches as one of its bedrock organizing tactics.  It kicked off its
strawberry campaign with one, organized another march at the end of the
1996 season, and built up to a huge one in April last year.  Some
organizers criticize the union for using these demonstrations from the very
beginning, rather than quietly building organization in the crews before
going public.
        The growers' march tried to turn the tactic of public marches
against the union.  The company union went on to imitate other familiar UFW
organizing techniques.
        In the first march, about 4000 workers and company personnel were
mobilized into Watsonville's streets.  The ability of anti-UFW forces to
bring out so many people reflected real divisions in the strawberry
workforce.  "In every company," says Efren Barajas, the UFW vice-president
coordinating the strawberry campaign, "there are permanent truck drivers,
checkers, and assistants, who are very close to the foreman, and get much
better wages and treatment.  The growers use that group."
        The role of anti-UFW foremen become a key element in the anti-UFW
strategy at Coastal Berry.
        At the end of the 1996 march, Soto and his associates organized a
group called the Pro-Workers Committee, and made statements to the press as
representatives of Watsonville strawberry workers, accusing the UFW of
being anti-business.  Soto says the organization was originally supposed to
educate workers about their rights, especially their right not to belong to
the UFW.
        After the 96 harvest ended, the organization underwent a
transformation, and resurfaced in January, 1997, as the Agricultural
Workers of America.  Soto went to work for it as a staff member.  Guadalupe
Sanchez, its president, and Oscar Ortega, its treasurer, are employed by
Dutra Farms, a grower for the Well-Pict cooler.
        Guadalupe Sanchez described AgWA as "an organization of workers who
want to be free of the UFW."  George Schaaf, Well-Pict's chief financial
officer, admitted that "the industry has had meetings with AgWA."
        According to Sanchez, its activities were financed by sales of caps
and tee-shirts, along with donations "from industry, commerce and the
public."   AgWA didn't have to file financial reports with the Department
of Labor, since it didn't formally claim to represent workers for the
purpose of collective bargaining.  But when the UFW eventually sued the
group, it unearthed in discovery proceedings large checks from growers to
AgWA.  Both Clint Miller Farms and the Western Growers Association each
gave over $1000 to the company union.
        The UFW suit tied AgWA to the Strawberry Workers and Farmers
Alliance, a creation of the Dolphin Group public relations firm.  The
Dolphin Group was set up in 1974 by political consultant Bill Roberts, who
helped manage Ronald Reagan's original campaign for California governor in
1966.  In 1976, Roberts defeated the UFW-backed Proposition 14, which
sought to strengthen the newly-passed Agricultural Labor Relations Act.
        In the 1980s the Dolphin Group fought the grape boycott from its
offices in west Los Angeles, accusing the union of trying to destroy the
grape industry.  The "anti-industry" charge has become a recurring theme of
California growers' campaigns against the union.
        Backing the Strawberry Workers and Farmers Alliance is the Santa
Cruz County Farm Bureau, whose president, Elia Vasquez, states that the UFW
has "failed completely" to win the support of strawberry workers.  The
union tried to destroy the grape industry, she said, warning strawberry
growers that "we farmers and our workers are the milk cow this time
around."
        Soto split with AgWA in May of 1997, accusing the organization of
firing him without paying his salary.  Meanwhile, management involvement in
the organization increased.   At an AgWA meeting in June of last year, a
Dutra Farms supervisor, Virgilio Yepez, was running the show.
        At the end of the 1997 season, on a Sunday in mid-August, the
growers marched again. Jose Guadalupe Fernandez, Sanchez, Yepez and other
AgWA activists led the march.  Three ex-UFW organizers, converted by the
companies into anti-union propagandists, sang satiric verses to the tune of
the farmworkers' hymn, De Colores.
AgWA President Guadalupe Sanchez ended the demonstration with a cheer for
the bosses that went "Rancheros, rancheros, (growers, growers) rah! rah!
rah!"  The growers march was filled with placards condemning Monsanto for
selling out, and numerous banners proclaimed the presence of Coastal Berry
foremen and workers.
        As the UFW lawsuit moved closer to trial this spring, AgWA suddenly
declared bankruptcy.  By then, however, the action had moved into Coastal
Berry itself.

        Despite the recent election, "we are not walking away," Rodriguez
says.  "We are committed to the long haul to ensure improvements for
workers.''  The week after the vote, the labor subcommittee of the
California State Senate held hearings on the ALRB's actions in allowing it.
"The ALRB is dysfunctional; it's clearly in collusion with the growers,"
announced committee chair Hilda Solis, after hearing testimony from workers
and ALRB representatives.  Neither Coastal Berry nor the Coastal Berry
Farmworkers Committee appeared.
        Solis called on the board to invalidate the balloting.  She said
that the committee would look at the possibility of cutting the board's
budget, as well as the need for changing the labor act itself.
        California will elect a new governor in November. Republican Dan
Lundgren will undoubtedly receive extensive agribusiness support, as did
current Governor Pete Wilson, and ex-Governor George Deukmejian.  If
Democratic candidate Grey Davis beats Lundgren, the union and its
Democratic allies in the legislature will push for new personnel to
administer the law.
        In the meantime, however, if the ALRB certifies the Coastal Berry
Farmworker Committee as the legal representative of the company's workers,
the UFW will be barred from seeking a new election for a year.  That would
give crucial time to growers to consolidate their hold, not only on Coastal
Berry workers, but over strawberry pickers throughout the Pajaro Valley.
        "If growers see that they can use violence against workers who
support the union, and then have an election with the blessing of the board
to legitimize a company union, they won't stop here," Rodriguez warned.

        - 30 -

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david bacon - labornet email            david bacon
internet:       dbacon at igc.apc.org      1631 channing way
phone:          510.549.0291            berkeley, ca  94703
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