THE PACIFIC COAST FARM WORKER REBELLION
Story and Photos By David Bacon
The Nation, Online edition, 8/28/15
Farm workers and their supporters march to the office of
Sakuma Farms, Burlington, WA.
A burned-out concrete blockhouse - the former police station - squats on one
side of the only divided street in Vicente Guerrero, half a mile from Baja
California's transpeninsular highway.
Just across the street lies the barrio of Nuevo (New) San Juan Copala,
one of the first settlements of migrant farm workers here in the San Quintin
Valley, named after their hometown in Oaxaca.
Behind the charred stationhouse another road leads into
the desert, to a newer barrio, Lomas de San Ramon. Here, on May 9, the cops descended in force,
allegedly because a group of strikers were blocking a gate at a local
farm. A brutal branch of the Mexican
police did more than lift the blockade, though.
Shooting rubber bullets at people fleeing down the dirt streets, they
stormed into homes and beat residents.
By then a farm labor strike here was already two months
old. Some leaders say provocateurs threw
rocks and egged on a confrontation, but the beatings undeniably set off
smoldering rage in the Lomas and Copala barrios. In addition, a government official who'd
agreed to negotiate had failed to show up to talk with strike leaders.
By the end of the day, the police headquarters was a
burned-out shell. One of the armored
pickup trucks (called "tiburones," or sharks) driven by police at
breakneck speed down the dusty alleyways had been torched as well. It would be hard to imagine a more dramatic
demonstration of workers' fury over four decades of hunger wages.
Charred walls and graffiti inside the torched police
station in the barrio of Nuevo San Juan Copala.
And while the most dramatic protest this year has taken
place in Baja California, the same anger is building among indigenous farm
workers all along the Pacific coast, from San Quintin in Mexico to Burlington,
an hour south of the U.S. border with Canada.
Two years ago Triqui and Mixtec workers struck strawberry fields in
Skagit County in Washington State. Two
years before that, Triqui workers picking peas in the Salinas Valley rebelled
against an inhuman work quota, and immigration raids in the town of Greenfield.
The strawberries, blackberries and blueberries sold
everyday in U.S. supermarkets are largely picked by these indigenous
families. Their communities are very
closely connected, all along the agricultural valleys that line the Pacific
Coast. These migrants come from the same
region of southern Mexico, often from the same towns. They speak the same languages - ones that
were thousands of years old when Europeans first landed on this continent. Increasingly they talk back and forth across
the border, sharing tactics and developing a common strategy.
Indigenous farm workers labor for a small number of large
growers and distributors who dominate the market. One of the largest distributors is
Driscoll's. Miles Reiter, retired CEO
and grandson of its founder, says its intention is "to become the world's
berry company." Driscoll's
contracts with growers in five countries, and even exports berries from Mexico
to China.
The farm worker barrio of Santa Maria de Los Pinos. The workers living here are almost all
indigenous Mixtec and Triqui migrants from Oaxaca.
Driscoll's and its Baja partners BerryMex and MoraMex
have a large share of Mexico's berry harvest, worth $550 million annually. Last year Mexico shipped 25 million flats of
strawberries to the U.S. Mexican
shipments of 16 million flats of raspberries and 22 million flats of
blackberries were larger than U.S. domestic production. The company, with headquarters in Watsonville,
California, is a partner with growers all along the U.S. Pacific Coast as well.
Global distributors and growers wield enormous economic
and political power. But farm workers
are beginning to challenge them, organizing independent and militant movements
on both sides of the border.
One of the San Quintin strikers, Claudia Reyes (her name
has been changed to protect her identity), walked out when the movement
started. She works in the huge tomato
greenhouses of Rancho Los Pinos, owned by the Rodriguez family, one of the most
politically powerful in Baja California.
The gulf between her living conditions and the wealth of the grower she
works for is typical of indigenous farm worker families in the valley.
Juanito, whose mother works in the fields, plugs the
recharger for his electric car into a powerless wall socket, in Santa Maria de
Los Pinos. But the government provides
no electrical service to this barrio, so he can't actually recharge the
batteries.
Reyes' home in Santa Maria de Los Pinos is a cinderblock
house with a concrete floor, an amenity many neighbors lack. Several years after building it she still
can't come up with the money to buy frames and glass panes for windows. She's also strung electrical conduit and
plugs up the concrete walls, but the government provides no electrical
service. "We buy candles for light
at night, and I worry that some crazy person might break in and hurt me or the
kids, because there are no streetlights either," she says.
During the six-month work season her family doesn't go
hungry, but they only eat meat twice a week because a kilo costs 140 pesos
(about $8). Eggs cost 60 pesos ($4) a
carton, she says, "so it takes half a day's work just to buy
one." She's paid by the hour,
making 900 pesos a week, or 150/day ($9), for the normal 6-day week.
All along her dirt street neighbors have strung up long
pieces of thin cloth to keep out the omnipresent dust. There's no sewer
service, and although there is a water line, the water is almost unusable. Since the mid-1970s big growers and their
U.S. partners have pumped so much water from the desert aquifer that salt has
infiltrated the groundwater. The largest
growers are now building desalination plants and installing drip-irrigation
systems in huge greenhouse complexes.
In the barrios, however, families live with salty
water. "It makes the children
sick," Reyes says, "and gives them a rash if they wash with
it." At the entrance to her yard
sit two 55-gallon drums. Every few days
a big tank truck fills them with drinking water - for a price.
A bedroom with a dirt floor in Maria Reyes' home.
It was water that led to the creation of the organization
that mounted this spring's strike. Two
years ago community committees in the valley towns formed the Alianza - the
Alliance of National, State and Municipal Organizations for Social Justice - to
fight for better water. They won
promises from the government of extended service hours and improved quality.
According to Bonifacio Martinez, an Alianza leader,
"For years we've been hoping for some kind of change but it never happened." Before starting the strike on March 16,
activists went from one colonia to another, meeting with families after
work. "We asked them, 'Are you
willing to continue living like this?'" he remembers. "What's behind this movement is hunger
and need. To the powerful people here we're just machines to do the work. They
have to see us as full human beings, and respect our rights and indigenous
culture."
Women charge that supervisors harass them. According to Reyes, "They don't say
anything. They just go with the foreman,
but they do it against their will, out of fear." She named several supervisors at large
companies she says have hit on women.
All the companies say they have policies forbidding sexual harassment,
but firings for violations are virtually unheard-of.
Fidel Sanchez, an Alianza spokesperson, charges that the
most basic disrespect is economic. "The companies are paying 10 pesos
(60¢) a box on the piece rate, and an hourly wage of 100 to 120 pesos ($6-7) a
day," he said in an interview at the height of the strike. "How we can survive on these wages?
"
BerryMex, the largest employer of strawberry pickers in
the San Quintin Valley, says it pays much more.
A posting on the company website during the strike claimed workers
earned $5-9 per hour - a top wage equal to California's minimum wage of
$9.
Pickers are usually paid a piecerate, however, both in
Mexico and the U.S. Earnings vary
greatly depending on the time of year, the condition of the field, and how fast
they work. In an interview, BerryMex CEO
Garland Reiter mentioned one worker who made 2800 pesos a week ($185), but
acknowledged the average was probably less.
"But we also pay the employee's contribution [for
government-required social benefits]," he said. "When the employee gets
180 pesos a day we're actually paying 220." BerryMex' piecerate is 14 pesos a box (the
Alianza wanted 20).
Reiter said lower wages in Mexico wasn't the main reason
for developing its San Quintin operation.
"We wanted to compete with Chile, using trucks to get to the U.S.
market in the winter instead of air freight," he said. The company invested in erecting cloth
tunnels over its berry rows, a desalination facility, a clinic, and measures
that doubled worker productivity.
In a final negotiation session between the Alianza and
the government on June 4, authorities announced a new minimum wage in San
Quintin of 150, 165 or 180 pesos a day, depending on the size of the
employer. They also warned they would
enforce the collection of employer contributions for social security, housing
and other benefits.
But the price of a gallon of milk in a Baja grocery store
is the same as in San Diego. At a
minimum hourly wage in a California field, that takes about 25 minutes to
earn. A Baja piece rate worker in a good
field might make it in an hour or two.
At the top daily wage of 180 pesos, it takes almost 3 hours. At Reyes' wage, it takes even more time.
The picking season is only six months long, so workers
have to survive during the months when there's no work. San Quintin's Mixtec
and Triqui laborers originally came as yearly migrants, returning to Oaxaca
after picking ended. Today, however,
most live in the valley permanently.
BerryMex's labor camp houses 550 temporary migrants, but the rest of its
4-5000 pickers live in the towns along the highway. The Mexican government subsidizes some living
costs in the off-season, through an income-based subsidy called
IMSS-Oportunidades (recently renamed IMSS-Prospera). But most families have to get what work they
can or borrow from friends.
Listening to strike leaders explain the negotiations
going on with the government over wages, Vicente Guerero, Baja California
Norte, Mexico.
Families also survive through money sent home by
relatives who work in the U.S. A recent
study estimates that over 12% of San Quintin's farm worker families now have at
least one member living there.
Large corporations increasingly organize that
migration. Sierra Cascade, which grows
rootstock for strawberry plants in Tulelake, California, has a recruitment
office in San Quintin. The company was
sued by California Rural Legal Assistance in 2006 for cheating guest workers
hired under the H2A visa program. In
2007 Sierra Cascade recruited 340 guest workers from San Quintin, 550 in 2010,
and more every year since. According to Laura Velasco, Christian Zlolniski and
Marie-Laure Coubes, authors of From Laborers to Settlers, "the San Quintin
Valley has become a center for the recruitment of temporary migrant workers for
the U.S."
In economic terms, the strike was fought to a draw. Workers originally demanded 300 pesos a day,
and then lowered it to 200 pesos. The
government gave even less. Nevertheless,
wages and benefits will rise for some.
But after negotiations ended, Alianza leaders announced a decision that
will a have greater long-range impact, and will bring them into much closer
alliance with indigenous strawberry workers across the border.
"We will establish an independent national union for
all workers in the fields," Sanchez explained in an interview, "and
sign contracts with the different companies.
What is being agreed today is just a stage on the road to organizing
this new union."
The leaders of the striking farm workers in San Quintin
Valley took busses to the US-Mexico border to draw attention to the fact that
the tomatoes and strawberries they pick are exported to the U.S.
To do this, however, the Alianza will have to break the
agreements, called protection contracts, that growers have with
politically-connected and company-friendly unions. These agreements are signed without input
from workers, who often have no idea they even belong to such a union. When the strike started, these unions quickly
signed new agreements for 15% wage increases (less than what the government
eventually agreed to), and then told strikers to go back to work. Reyes charges the union in her workplace even
paid a bounty of 50 pesos for the names of strikers, which it then turned in to
management. Workers, she says, are told
that if they don't join it they'll be fired.
An independent union in Baja California, however,
contesting for a contract with Driscoll growers, will find allies among workers
in Burlington, Washington. Two years ago
several hundred Mixtec and Triqui strawberry pickers went on strike at one of
the state's largest berry growers, Sakuma Farms. They then organized an independent union,
Familias Unidas por la Justicia (Families United for Justice).
Alianza leader Bonifacio Martinez is a friend of Felimon
Piñeda, the vice-president of FUJ.
"We've talked a lot with Felimon," he says. "They've been
fighting for almost three years, and they've formed a union. We're trying to set up the same thing - a
union that will defend our rights. We're
the same workers, and we're talking about the same kind of union." They also work indirectly for the same
company. Sakuma Farms sells its
blueberries to Driscoll's, which also markets the berries from BerryMex and
MoraMex.
Ramon Torres, head of the strike committee and president
of FUJ, dramatizes to strikers the effort to get the company to sign an
agreement, in Burlington.
Martinez and Piñeda have talked half a dozen times this
year. After the strike started in San
Quintin, Piñeda called Martinez with a proposal. "We are willing to boycott Driscoll's to
help them and to help ourselves too," Piñeda explained. "If we get our contract first, we won't
stop until they get what they're fighting for.
If they win what they're demanding, they will continue to boycott until
we get our contract. That way they get a
contract there and we get one here.
That's what we're thinking of doing."
The workers in Washington State have been organizing
pressure on Sakuma Farms and Driscoll's since they went on strike originally in
2013. That season several hundred
workers left the fields repeatedly in disputes over wages, the conditions in
the company's labor camp and the firing of a worker leader. FUJ demanded $14 per hour, and a piece rate
set so that workers would make at least that minimum.
Managers at first agreed to a process for setting the
piece rate. But when it would have set
higher wages the company would not implement it. That year Sakuma applied for 160 workers
under the H2A visa program, and eventually brought in about 70. Ryan Sakuma said in an interview at the time,
"Everyone at the company will get the H-2A wage for this work." That was about $12 an hour - a wage mandated
by regulations governing the program.
According to Rosalinda Guillen, director of Community to Community, an
organizing project that's been the workers' key source of support, "The
H-2A rate limited what was possible. The
workers had to accept $12 because that's what the H-2A workers got." Some workers said they were earning less -
Washington State's minimum wage of $9.19/hour.
FUJ President Ramon Torres met some guest workers in a
local church, away from the labor camp. "They were very afraid. They said
that they'd been told that if they talked with us they'd be sent back to
Mexico," he charged.
Relations deteriorated and the company fired Torres over
an allegation - later proven false - of domestic abuse. The next spring Sakuma sent strikers form
letters saying they'd all been fired.
The company applied for certification from the U.S. Department of Labor
to bring in 438 H2A guest workers, enough to replace its previous workforce,
saying it couldn't find local workers.
Strikers all signed letters to the DoL saying they were willing to work,
and Sakuma eventually had to withdraw its application. According to FUJ, however, most strikers were
not rehired in the 2014 season.
The union launched a boycott of Driscoll's, saying the
company was obligated to ensure that growers producing its berries respected
labor rights, including the right of FUJ members to their jobs, and to
negotiate a labor agreement. FUJ members
and supporters began picketing Washington State supermarkets selling Sakuma
berries under its own label, and also under Driscoll's label.
This spring the Fair World Project, based in Oregon,
collected over 10,000 signatures on a petition to Driscoll's, asking it to
terminate purchases from Sakuma "until they in good faith negotiate a
legally binding contract."
Driscoll's vice-president Soren Bjorn told the freshfruitportal website
the company had audited Sakuma Brothers Farms.
"There were some legitimate claims a while back and those have all
been properly addressed," he said, adding, "We stand behind them as
long as they continue to meet our standards."
FUJ also criticized Driscoll's because it supports the
H2A program. Bjorn says it fills an
alleged shortage of farm workers.
"Your only mechanism is to bring in H-2A labor," he told
freshfruitportal. "It's the only
way today that growers can really expand their labor pool." Guillen responded bitterly, "Labor in
the fields has got to be as cheap as you can get it and be as easily
controllable as it can be, and the guest worker program provides a way for them
to do that."
Felimon Piñeda and his wife Francisca Mendoza in their cabin
in Labor Camp #2, during the strike at Sakuma Farms, Burlington,
Washington. "I've heard the story
of the Isrealites in Egypt, who were slaves for 400 years, and treated
badly," he says. "God saw how
they were treated and heard their cries, and sent them Moses to free them and
take them to the promised land. I see
our strike like that. The bosses are
like the Egyptians, and just pay us what they want. We're like the Israelites, wanting to be
free."
Driscoll's is just one of many agricultural employers
making a new push for the expansion of the H2A program and relaxation of its
minimal requirements. One Arlington, WA,
grower, Biringer Farms, claimed it could not find local workers despite posting
a notice on Craigslist and in a church bathroom. Others claim they're being forced to raise
wages, and need guest workers to be more competitive. Last year growers imported 116,689 people,
about 50,000 more than in 2011. Joe Pezzini,
CEO of California Artichoke and Vegetable Growers Corp. with 1000 employees,
told the Wall Street Journal "now the highest-priority issue is the
availability of labor."
Nevertheless, Sakuma Farms, whose application for H2A
workers was defeated in 2014, did not make one for the 2015 season. Many FUJ members went to work, and when
picking started so did protests. The
company implemented a pay system requiring workers to pick 35 pounds of
strawberries per hour to earn a $10 minimum wage ($2 below what they'd paid
guest workers in 2013). At first workers
negotiated a cut in the quota with owner Ryan Sakuma. When blueberry picking started at the
beginning of July, however, the quota was raised.
On its website, Sakuma says it pays a production bonus
and a $10/hour guarantee. The website
claims that pickers can earn up to $40 per hour. Workers say the quota changes every day. One recent pay scale puts the minimum at 40
pounds to earn $10/hour. To make $40 a
worker has to pick 100 pounds each hour.
A striking farm worker on a bus from the San Quintin
Valley holds a sign demanding A Fair Wage for Farm Workers in San Quintin.
In two short strikes workers got some concessions, but
not on the quota. On July 2 FUJ
vice-president Felimon Piñeda led strikers back into the field and delivered a
demand for a union contract. The company
called deputy sheriffs. "The police
said they were going to arrest me," Piñeda laughed. "The people asked, 'Are you going to
arrest us all?' So we all left the field
and went to the Costco in Burlington to boycott."
Sakuma pickers walked out a third time on July 24. Then on August 8 a strike broke out at
another company, Valley Pride Sales.
Thirty-five workers left the fields and joined FUJ, asking for a 50¢ increase
per box of blackberries. They complained
there were often no bathrooms or drinking water in the field, and according to
Ramon Torres, they were told to use the restroom at a nearby gas station. After refusing to pick for at the company's
piecerate, strikers were told to leave its labor camp.
Over the last several years, Mixtec and Triqui workers in
California have also organized work stoppages.
One strike by Mixtecos paralyzed Santa Maria strawberry growers in
1999. Four years ago a strike by Triquis
hit the Salinas Valley pea harvest, after workers were fired for not meeting
high production demands. "Their
hands were swollen," remembers Andres Cruz, a Triqui community organizer
in the small town of Greenfield.
"You use your nail to cut the pod from the stem, and the nail can't
handle it sometimes pulls off. We
organized that strike in one day."
Fired workers won reinstatement and a cut in the quota, but leaders were
blacklisted the following season.
As the Triqui and Mixtec population of Greenfield grew,
immigration raids began. "The
police began to hound anyone indigenous," recalled Eulogio Solanoa, a
Mixtec farm worker later hired by the United Farm Workers. When the police chief stopped the harassment
and began meeting with the indigenous community, the city council fired
him. "That was racism towards the
indigenous community. Farm workers
marched in his defense, but Greenfield's longtime residents won. It was an injustice."
Lorena Hernandez, a 20-year-old farm worker and single
mother of a four-year-old girl, picks blueberries in a field in California's San
Joaquin Valley. Workers are paid $8 for
each 12 pound bucket they pick.
That anger is building again. Rosalia Martinez, a Triqui picker in
Greenfield, explained in an interview, "They want you to pick 130 pounds
in ten hours, and we make very little.
The hourly wage is supposed to be $9.50, but on the piece rate it's less
- $100 in a day sometimes, but other times $80 or $70."
The piecerate is physically destructive, she added. "You have to work on your knees, and it
hurts. Sometimes your knees break
down. That's happened to a lot of
people. Their knees go out permanently
and they can't work anymore."
When the strike started this spring in San Quintin,
Martinez began following the news on Facebook.
"I worked there for a number of years," she said. "We agree with what they did. We come from the same towns. We are the same
community. We are indigenous people, and
we have to do whatever we can to keep our children eating, no matter what they
pay. But if we don't work and harvest
the crops, there's nothing for the growers either. We are thinking of doing something here like
they did there."
While the absolute wage level differs substantially
between Burlington and San Quintin, many demands made by workers are similar,
and reflect similar conditions. Piñeda said that when he arrived at the Sakuma
labor camp in 2013 he was given mattresses so dilapidated that he had to wrap
them in plastic, and had to cover the concrete floor in carpet samples. Another Sakuma striker, Rosario Ventura, said
her cabin roof leaked. "They just
stuffed bags in the holes and the water still came in. All my children's
clothes were wet," she remembers.
The pressure to produce on the piece rate is just as
intense on the U.S. side of the border.
"You have to make 'weight,' they say," recalled Ventura.
"If you don't they give you some days off, and if you still can't make it,
they fire you." The pressure of no
income in the off-season is the same. A
large percentage of Sakuma workers live in Madera and Santa Maria, California. Their work in Washington State has to pay the
cost of travel, and then tide families over during the winter. In San Quintin some workers at least qualify
for IMSS-Oportunidades. But in
California the situation of Mixtec and Triqui workers is even more precarious
because they are largely undocumented, disqualifying them from social benefits.
Mixtec and Triqui farm workers in the U.S. and Mexico
also share a common history of labor organizing. Many are veterans of three decades of strikes
and land struggles in Baja California.
Indigenous leaders in both countries recall the first rebellions in San
Quintin, led by the Independent Central of Farm Workers and Farmers
(CIOAC). In the mid-1980s CIOAC sent
organizers to northern Mexico to mount strikes.
These were not always peaceful struggles. In one San Quintin strike a local
packinghouse went up in flames. Later,
as workers began trying to leave the valley's labor camps and build permanent
homes, CIOAC organized movements to take over land and force the government to
provide water, electricity and basic services.
Two leaders, Beatriz Chavez and Julio Sandoval, were sent to federal
prison for leading land invasions. One,
Maclovio Rojas, was killed.
"Our movement did not arise spontaneously in
2015," Fidel Sanchez emphasized.
"We have roots in CIOAC and many of us came out of these earlier
struggles." Sanchez also worked for
some years in the U.S., where he participated in Florida's Coalition of
Immokalee Workers. Other Alianza leaders
belonged to the UFW as migrants.
"We're trying to unearth knowledge of previous struggles, and
incorporate them into the Alianza," Sanchez explained.
Faustino Hernandez, a leader of the FIOB in the San
Quintin Valley, shows the wounds in his arm, received when he was shot by
police during the farm worker strike.
Another group with these roots is the Binational Front of
Indigenous Organizations (FIOB), organized by activists who led farm worker
strikes in Baja California and northern Mexico in the 1980s. Its first members were migrants in
California, but later it organized chapters in Oaxaca and Baja California. Today FIOB has members in almost every town
along the highway in the San Quintin Valley.
They were active in the strike, and one, Faustino Hernandez, was shot by
police in Camalu during the events of May 9.
This spring local chapters began holding workshops teaching the basics
of organizing. FIOB chapters in
California raised thousands of dollars for the strikers, and a caravan of
activists from Los Angeles brought down three tons of food.
"The violation of the human and labor rights in San
Quintin has been going on for years, " explains Rogelio Mendez, FIOB's
Baja California coordinator.
"People have the right to better wages, and they've been fighting
for 30 years to get them. But the
authorities have abandoned any effort to protect labor rights. Workers are going to have to do this for
themselves."
FIOB met with BerryMex and Driscoll's management, after
organizing a picketline with other community groups at company offices in
Oxnard. Garland Reiter said their
accusations against BerryMex were untrue, and then hosted a delegation of
outside observers to inspect conditions in its San Quintin fields and labor
camp. Two observers later issued a
report generally praising them.
FIOB supported the Mixtec and Triqui workers in
Burlington as well. When the strike
started in 2013, FIOB's binational coordinator, Bernardo Ramirez, flew up from
Oaxaca to help. "Foremen have
insulted them, shouted at them and called them 'burros [donkeys],'" he
declared. "When you compare people
to animals, this is racism. Low wages
are a form of racism too, because they minimize the work of indigenous
migrants."
The Alianza, FUJ and FIOB all charge that migration and
low wages impose instability on workers.
FIOB calls for the right to not migrate, or the right to stay home - for
jobs, education and economic development in home communities that would make
migration a voluntary choice, rather than a necessity for survival.
Outside the labor camp in Burlington, the children of
strikers set up their own picket line on a fence at the gate. Their sign reads "Justicia Para
Todos" - Justice for Everyone.
Fidel Sanchez agrees:
"We have had to abandon our lands and transform ourselves into farm
workers, not just here in the San Quintin Valley but in the United States
too. People should not be forced to
migrate in search of a better life."
But since Mixtecos, Triquis and other indigenous people
have had to leave home, and are now trying to settle in communities up the
Pacific coast, they also want rights as migrants and a better economic
status. As they fight to get them, they
are linked both by common indigenous roots and by their work for common
employers. "If companies like
Driscoll's are international now, we the workers must also become
international," Bonifacio Martinez insists. "I want to say to our brothers in the
U.S. - we are crying out for you on our side of the border too. Just like in the United States, here in San
Quintin we've decided to come out of the shadows into the light of the
world."