TROUBLE IN THE TULIPS

TROUBLE IN THE TULIPS
Organized Farmworkers Win Basic Demands in a Quick Strike
By David Bacon
Labornotes, March 30, 2022
https://labornotes.org/2022/03/trouble-tulips-organized-farmworkers-win-basic-demands-quick-strike

 Tulip workers take a vote. Photo: Edgar Franks


MT. VERNON, WA - Tulips and daffodils symbolize the arrival of spring, but the fields are bitterly cold when workers' labors begin. Snow still covers the ground when workers go into the tulip rows to plant bulbs in northwest Washington state, near the Canadian border.

Once harvesting starts, so do other problems. When a worker cuts a daffodil, for instance, she or he has to avoid the liquid that oozes from the stem-a source of painful skin rashes.

Yes, the fields of flowers are so beautiful they can take your breath away, but the conditions under which they're cultivated and harvested can be just as bad as they are for any other crop. "Tulips have always been a hard job, but it's a job during a time of the year when work is hard to find," says farmworker Tomas Ramon. "This year we just stopped enduring the problems. We decided things had to change."

On Monday, March 21, their dissatisfaction reached a head. Three crews of pickers at Washington Bulb accused the company of shorting the bonuses paid on top of their hourly wage, Washington's minimum of $14.69. Workers get that extra pay if they exceed a target quota set by the company for picking flowers.

The parent company of RoozenGaarde Flowers and Bulbs is Washington Bulb, the nation's largest tulip grower.

"We've had these problems for a long time," explains Ramon, who has cut tulips for Washington Bulb for seven years. "And the company has always invented reasons not to talk with us."

Workers stopped work that Monday and waited from eight in the morning to see how the owners would respond. The general supervisor was sick, they were told. Someone from the company would talk with them, but only as individuals. "We didn't want that," Ramon says. "We're members of the union, and the union represents us."

Union Wherever They Go

Over two-thirds of the 150 pickers for Washington Bulb work at the state's largest berry grower, Sakuma Farms, later in the season-where they bargain as members of Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), an independent union. Starting in 2013, farmworkers there struck and boycotted, and finally won a contract after four years. They formed Familias Unidas. At Washington Bulb there is no union contract, yet. But to Ramon and his workmates, they are members of FUJ wherever they go.

When the company wouldn't talk on that Monday, 70 workers voted to strike the following day. Another 20 joined them the next morning, when they again demanded to talk with the company. This time one of the owners told them he wouldn't talk if the president of Familias Unidas, Ramon Torres, was present.

"So we said, 'If you won't talk with our representative, we won't talk without him,'" Tomas Ramon remembers. "'We have a union and you have to make an agreement with him.' So the owner got angry and left."

That Wednesday the flowers were just waving in the breeze, waiting for someone to pick them. The day after, the company lawyer was on the phone to union attorney Kathy Barnard. With a commitment to begin negotiations, workers agreed to go back into the rows after the weekend, and talks got started.

"By the first day of the strike the workers had already met, elected a committee, and put their demands in writing," said FUJ's political director Edgar Franks. "After the four years of fighting for the contract at Sakuma Farms, they knew how to organize themselves quickly. They had community supporters on their picket lines after the first day. They had their list of demands, and finally forced the company to accept it."

Rubber Band Time

When the workers committee and Torres met with Washington Bulb president Leo Roosens on Friday, they went point by point over their 16 demands. Roosens made an oral commitment to resolve all except the demand over wage increases.

 

Worker leader Tomas Ramon.  Photo: Edgar Franks

 

 "The most important one for us was that they pay us for the time we spend putting rubber bands on the ring," Ramon says. Workers have to snap a rubber band around each bunch of flowers they cut, from hundreds of bands held on a ring. Each worker harvests thousands of bunches a day, so putting the bands on the ring takes a lot of time.

"There's never enough time, and supervisors don't want people to stop during work time. So on breaks and at lunch we're still filling the ring. They even give us a bag of bands to take home and do it there."

The company doesn't pay this extra time, so demand #7 says, "All work using rubber bands to bunch flowers will be performed during working time, excluding lunch and rest breaks. This work will not be performed off the clock." "Workers knew they had a right to this, because the union won a suit forcing Washington growers to pay for break time, even for workers working on piece rates or bonuses," Franks says.

Parking, Ointment and Bathrooms

Workers often have to walk half a mile from where they park their cars to the rows where they'll work, which the company also won't pay for. So point 3 says, "Workers will be paid the hourly rate from the time they leave their vehicles in the company's parking lots until they return to their vehicles...at the end of their daily shifts."

Gloves are $30 a pair, according to Ramon, and working without them means getting rashes from liquid from cutting daffodils. "The company has cream you can put on to help with that, but it's in the office and they often won't give it to you. Even if they do, they just give you a tiny bit, not enough." So another demand is for company-provided protective gear, and ointment available in the fields.

Of the eight people on the union committee, two are women. There's often just one bathroom for a crew of 50-60 people, and they included a demand for four bathrooms per crew, two for women and two for men, cleaned every day. They also insisted on a demand for better treatment, prohibiting favoritism from supervisors, who "will be trained to treat workers with respect ... and not pressure workers to pick flowers at unreasonable speeds."

The last demand is that the company recognize Familias Unidas por la Justicia as bargaining representative for Washington Bulb workers. If agreement is reached on that point, it will make the company the second in the state with an FUJ contract.

Strategic Timing

The annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival is set to start on April 1, and runs for a month. The lightning job action less than two weeks before presented the Roosens, the most prominent family in the tulip industry, with the prospect of picket lines in front of fields, as tourists arrive to take photographs and buy flowers.

Almost all Washington Bulb workers have at least three years doing this work, and some as many as 15. They knew the importance of timing and the company's vulnerability. The fact that they were already organized made it easier to reach a quick decision on a job action.

The decision process relied on the collective traditions of the two indigenous groups from Oaxaca and southern Mexico who make up the workforce, Triquis and Mixtecos. Ramon, a Triqui, explains that "each community talked within itself. Each community has its own process, but we have the same kind of problems and the same experience. We all wanted to make things better, so we reached agreement." In that process community members meet, discuss, and arrive at a decision on behalf of everyone.

At Sakuma Farms, women were not elected to the union's leadership, and within the communities, women took a back seat. At Washington Bulb, however, two women were elected to the union committee, and made specific demands. "That's a big step forward for us," Ramon says. It also gives women in the fields suffering sexual harassment the ability to bring complaints to women in the union leadership, instead of men.

The Bosses' Biggest Fea

"Direct action is what makes things move," Franks says. "People put up with a lot because they're scared that they could be unemployed. But when workers go on strike, they lose that fear, they push back, and that's what makes things move. Direct action is the most valuable tool we have, and the bosses' biggest fear. When workers take that leap of faith they can see the world in a whole new say, and recognize their own true value."

Today in western Washington, a growing number of farmworkers have had that experience, and FUJ is following them into new places and farms as a result. It's not a new idea-in the 1940s, Larry Itliong followed Filipino cannery workers from Alaska, where their pitched battles formed Local 37 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, back to their work in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley. There, they became the heart of union organizing until the great grape strike of 1965. They eventually joined with Latino workers to form what is now the United Farm Workers.

"We're trying to make sure not to force the issue with workers here," Franks said. "The union is ready to support them once they're ready to take the step. The issues have been present for 20 years, but now, because of Sakuma, there's an ecosystem they can rely on. They can see workers winning and feel better about taking action than they would have years ago. They have a growing leadership, and don't have to put up with this anymore."

NOTE: At press time negotiations with the company had reached agreement on the workers' list of demands. While the union is not the official bargaining agent, the company agreed to treat the union committee as the representative of the workers. Workers were set to vote on the agreement on March 29.

Striking in the tulips.  Photo: Edgar Franks

PHOTOGRAPHS OF PORTSMOUTH SQUARE - A TRIBUTE TO PAUL STRAND

PHOTOGRAPHS OF PORTSMOUTH SQUARE - A TRIBUTE TO PAUL STRAND
Photographs and text by David Bacon
Stansbury Forum, 3/13/22
https://stansburyforum.com/2022/03/13/photographs-of-portsmouth-square

In presenting these images of Portsmouth Square, in San Francisco's Chinatown, I've tried to keep in mind some of the ideas of Paul Strand, the great modernist and realist photographer.  

Strand was a radical, a founder of the Photo League in New York City in the 1930s, and a teacher who guided its work. After World War Two, as McCarthyite hysteria gripped the country, and especially the world of media and the arts, he was put on a blacklist (along with the Photo League itself) by the U.S. Justice Department.  He went into exile in France, never returning to live in the U.S.  For the next three decades he photographed people in traditional communities, and in newly independent countries during the period of decolonization and national liberation.

Strand was one of the founders of modernism in photography - the idea that photographs had to be connected with the world and depict it cleanly and simply.  He combined those visual ideas with social justice politics, not in a dogmatic or simplistic way, but in an effort to create socially meaningful art with its own philosophy and set of principles.

Strand's books were documents about place, presenting people in the context of their physical world.  The subject of this set of photographs is also a place, one very familiar to me over many years - Portsmouth Square in San Francisco. These photographs were taken over 20 years.  I've sequenced them, as Strand might have done, I think, in an order that emphasizes their social, as well as visual, content.

I was an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  We set up a Garment Workers Center on Commercial Street, a block from the square.  The workers who came into the center were Chinese women and men who worked in shops all over the city, from outer Third Street to Chinatown itself.  I was just beginning to take photographs in a conscious way in those days, and because I was a union organizer, there was never a possibility that the sweatshop owners would let me inside to document the conditions.  I was a union militant, interested and committed to documenting work, so this was a big regret.  But walking through Portsmouth Square every day gave me a sense of the lives of people in this community, in the hours they spent outside the sewing shops.

In those years the number of unhoused people on the streets was much smaller than today.  I would see perhaps one or two people sleeping on the sidewalk in the twenty blocks I traveled between our union's central office and the square, and rarely anyone sleeping the square itself.  Today that has changed.  Like any San Francisco park, Portsmouth Square has been made a home, or at least a sleeping place, by several people with nowhere else to go.  The first series of photographs shows a few of these individuals, in their relationship to the facilities of the square, including its benches, castoff cardboard boxes, and the sidewalk itself.

As an organizer I came to realize that Portsmouth Square is home to many activities, and has many levels of meaning to the people of Chinatown.  They relax, play cards and enjoy themselves on the benches whenever the city's notoriously uncertain weather permits.  Over the years I've often returned to take photographs and been struck by how many people play games here.   On one level, it is a place where people get together, in a community where many live with many family members sharing small apartments.  Portsmouth Square means space to breathe, to be noisy and extroverted, to play the games people were taught by mothers and fathers in the generations that came before.  It is a deep expression of the history and culture people share.

 
Organized cultural events also take place in the Square.  On a recent walk I was pulled towards the performance space by the music of the erhu and other traditional Chinese instruments.  An ensemble of musicians, organized by A Better Chinatown Tomorrow, had assembled to give a concert for the card players and the families wandering through the square.  One woman sang while another danced - stylized voice and motions in humble street clothes.

The culture of Chinatown includes the social movements in which people organized support for revolutions in China itself, and protests over the oppressive conditions and discrimination that people have faced at work.  It is an old history.  A few blocks away, in St. Mary's Square, a statue of Sun Yat Sen by Beniamino Bufano honors the fact that part of the Revolution of 1911, which overthrew the dowager Manchu empress, was planned by Chinese exiles, including those in San Francisco.   

Chinatown is one of the politically most vibrant communities in San Francisco, and Portsmouth Square has always provided space for demonstrations, marches, meetings and leafleting.  When the bombing began in Afghanistan, and the media began its deafening war drumbeat that preceded the invasion of Iraq, Chinatown's internationalists gathered in Portsmouth Square.  There they held signs calling for peace, and for spending on human needs instead of bombs.  After listening to speeches in Chinese, the contingent marched down to Market Street and joined thousands of others from homes across the city, protesting what became a 20-year war.

Perhaps Strand, who took his photographs slowly and deliberately with a large view camera, might have had conflicting feelings in seeing these photographs.  In taking them I took advantage of the mobility of a small camera, moving much more freely than he could with his large apparatus.  He carefully constructed his images, seeing them on the large ground glass at the rear of the camera.  I try to be conscious of the image and its elements as I take my pictures too.  But sometimes I feel that not everything happens on a conscious level.  Working quickly, I depend on a less conscious part of the brain to order the visual pieces of the image..  Perhaps that was also true for him.

But what I take from Strand, and what he might have seen as a commonality in our work, are his aesthetic and political principles.  In his idea of dynamic realism a successful photograph has to encompass three ideas.  It has to be partisan - committed to social change and seeing that change as necessary and possible.  Especially after he left the U.S. during the worst of the Cold War years, he worked in collaboration with radical, often Communist, activists.  They brought him to the communities he photographed, and wrote text accompanying the photographs.

Strand was a committed realist, but he believed that a successful photograph had to do more than just record the reality in front of the lens.  Mike Weaver says in his description of Strand's philosophy, "Certain realities of the world had to be made clear.  To be deeply moved was not enough."  Strand's concept of specificity meant that an image of a particular person had to go beyond her or his individuality, to encompass a more universal truth.  Commenting on a Dorothea Lange photograph he said, "The cotton picker is an unforgettable photograph in which is epitomized not only this one man bending down under the oppressive sky, but the lot of thousands of his fellows."  

Strand did not deny the individuality of the people in his images.  None could have had more dignity, or been photographed with greater care or in more detail.  But without being able to see beyond the individual to greater universality, "photography collapsed into record making, emphasizing the exceptional at the expense of the universal ... One person who has been studied very deeply and penetratingly can become all persons.  Therefore it seems to me that art is very specific and not at all general."

Strand's third principle was dimensionality, referring both to the qualities of the image itself, and how they resonate with its social content.  In an image different elements have a relationship to each other, just as the photograph has a relation to the reality it depicts.  That relationship, within the image, has to have a sensation of movement, he believed.  Even a very still, posed photograph has to have "a sensation of movement through the eye ... simply a reflection of the material fact that everything is in movement ... It is the reflection that in the world things are actually related to each other, even though sometimes we cannot readily see it."

These images of Portsmouth Square been assembled into a sequence, as Strand did in his careful juxtaposition of the images in his books  Some were taken twenty years ago and the most recent just a few weeks back.  Over this period of time I was able to work, and see Portsmouth Square, as an activist myself - an organizer and participant, or sometimes a supporter at a distance, of some of the community's social movements.  The images document the reality of people enduring the pain of marginalization, of the social networks and culture centered on this place, and the efforts to change social reality and fight for justice.

Whether the images succeed in attaining Strand's goal of specificity, or universality, and how well they work as images internally, is up to the viewer to judge.  But taking and sequencing them has forced me to reexamine my own process as a photographer.  I've always considered myself a realist and materialist.  I've paid a lot of attention to the relationships that make my work possible, and I hope socially useful.  But I've given less thought to the aesthetics or the principles behind their conception.  It's seemed enough to say that a photograph either works or it doesn't.

Strand, however, demands a greater commitment.  He voiced a political philosophy that provides a coherent way to analyze photography that is deeply connected to the world.  That forced me to give more attention to the way politics and aesthetic ideas interact in my own work.  Here's his reaction to the unconsidered and unthought realism (photojournalistic and otherwise) of his day (he died in 1976):

"We must reject both this venal realism as well as the mere slice-of-life naturalism which is completely static in its unwillingness to be involved in the struggle ... towards a better and fuller life.

"On the contrary, we should conceive of realism as dynamic, as truth which sees and understands a changing world and in its turn is capable of changing it, in the interests of peace, human progress, and the eradication of human misery and cruelty, and towards the unity of all people.  We must take sides."

Thanks to "Dynamic Realist," by Mike Weaver, in "Paul Strand, Essays on his Life and Work", Aperture, 1990

BAY AREA CALLS FOR PEACE IN THE UKRAINE AND YEMEN

BAY AREA CALLS FOR PEACE IN THE UKRAINE AND YEMEN
Photos by David Bacon
To see the full selection of photos, click here:
Ukraine rally:  
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72177720297173982
Yemen rally:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72177720297147140

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 06MARCH22 - Demonstrators oppose the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and the expansion of NATO. In solidarity with the people of Ukraine, under the direction of artist David Solnit, protesters recreated a painting by beloved Ukrainian painter Maria Prymachenko, "A Dove Has Spread Her Wings and Asks for Peace." Members of the Musicians Action Group played during the rally, and protesters marched along the Embarcadero. The demonstration was organized by Code Pink and other peace organizations and took place simultaneously with rallies in countries around the world.

OAKLAND, CA - 5MARCH22 - Bay Area organizations protested the war on Yemen and call for Rep. Barbara Lee, Rep. Ro Khanna, and Speaker Pelosi to publicly commit to supporting the DeFazio-Jayapal War Powers Resolution, and to withdrawing U.S. support of the Saudi-UAE coalition before the 7th anniversary of the war..  This action happened in coordination with 70 organizations in several states protesting U.S. involvement in Yemen. The demonstration was organized by the Yemeni Alliance Committee, Hands Off Yemen, Arab Resource and Organization Center, Palestinian Youth Movement, Malaya Movement San Francisco, Code Pink Golden Gate, DSA and other organizations.

SAN FRANCISCO:

 

 
OAKLAND: