PHOTOGRAPHY IS NOT MEANT TO HANG ON WALLS

PHOTOGRAPHY IS NOT MEANT TO HANG ON WALLS

By David Bacon

Jacobin, 4/16/15

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/photography-social-documentary-modotti-diego-hagel/

Workers' Parade, Tina Modotti, Mexico City, 1926

A hundred years ago, one revolution had been upending the social order just south of the U.S. border and another revolution was about to begin halfway around the world. These revolutions did more than expropriate the property of the wealthy. They discarded old ideas and created a field in which new ones took their place. This was especially true with photography.

Mexico before its Revolution was a country dominated economically by the U.S., and on its cultural periphery. Through the turn of the 20th century, the main aesthetic framework for Mexican photographers was defined by a Pictorialist tradition that asserted the medium's status as "art."The Pictorialist and Photo-Secession movement, led by Alfred Steiglitz and popularized through Camera Work, established New York City as the center of the photographic world in North America.

The Mexican Revolution, a decade-long conflict in which one of every seven Mexicans died, officially ended in 1920 with the termination of its civil war and the destruction of its old social order.New ideas about art and culture flourished in Mexico City's post-revolutionary ferment, particularly in photography. Suddenly the unipolar photographic world of north America, dominated by Pictorialism and Photo-Secession, became a multipolar one, with a very different approach emerging in Mexico.Photographic ideas developed outside New York City, both about how photographs should be constructed, and about the role of photographers themselves.Artists who saw themselves as agents of social change rejected the old vision and sought a new one.

This period began an exchange of ideas between the U.S. and Mexico about photographic technique, aesthetics, and the stance of the photographer. These ideas did not develop in a vacuum. Instead, the dialogue took place within a context of social movements that grew and waned. The shift was part of a larger debate about the role of photographers, writers, journalists, and painters in relation to those movements -- the post-Revolutionary leftist movements among workers and peasants in Mexico, and later, the rising labor movement in the U.S. in the 1930s.

"What was the center and what was the periphery changed," says John Mraz, a historian of Mexican photography.Mraz is Research Professor at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (México).He curated the national exhibit for the Centennial of the Mexican Revolution, Testimonios de una guerra, and has written a number of books on Mexican photographers and photojournalism.He suggests that the social cataclysm in Mexico created a new climate of ideas, including aesthetic ones. (1) By the mid-1920s, for instance, painters like Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros had rejected their pictorialist training and replaced it with a muralist tradition, promoting in a dramatic new graphic style the social movements unleashed by the Revolution. The muralists viewed artists as participants in those movements, even organizing a union of painters and sculptors (later depicted in a photograph by Tina Modotti) to express the new social stance they believed artists should take.(2)

Mraz calls this a cultural effervescence, in which new social ideas mix with new aesthetic ones in an environment of rapid social, political, and aesthetic change. (3) This effervescence was not confined to Mexico. The Soviet Revolution started in 1917, and its civil war ended in 1924. Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Mexico City all became places where this new climate of ideas flourished.

Into this maelstrom came Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, arriving in Mexico City from California in 1923-24. Weston, not at all political himself, was nevertheless determined not to create stock-in-trade pictorial depictions of colonial churches and exotic (or noble) "savages."

"Weston introduced modernist photography into Mexico," Mraz says. "But he didn't bring it from the U.S. because he didn't do any modernist photography there. He only discovered it and started doing it here in Mexico. The modernist way of photographing is connected to the anti-exotic. Exoticism comes from Pictorialism, like a nineteenth century painting. No ragged edges, no sharp angles. Everything's perfect, the way it ought to be. A very European idea." (4) Weston found himself in the middle of an incredible aesthetic revolutionary ferment in Mexico, which transformed his photography. After a few years, he returned to the U.S., but continued with the same straight, direct approach he had honed in Mexico.

Modotti, originally Weston's student, stayed behind to become one of the most influential photographers, not just in Mexico, but also in U.S. and European photography. She took Weston's approach to form, and gave it a social content. At first she took still lifes in the Weston formalist style that included platinum prints of roses, and abstract experiment compositions beginning in 1924. (5) But as she became more involved in the political ferment of the city, she made one of her first efforts to give social meaning to this modernist form, in the photograph, /Workers Parade/, taken in 1926.

Here, a crowd of marchers is shot from above, creating a scene of men in white sombreros, headed for a destination outside the image. Art historian Leonard Folgarait argues that Modotti does more than document the event as a photojournalist. "Modotti has engaged in the documentary aspect of photography . . . but she has balanced that sense of a visual record by manipulating its information in such a way that it has become an interpretation of the event, with that interpretation becoming a historical occurrence as well." (6) She selected the scene for political purposes, discarding "neutrality," and creating an image whose purpose is to show the strength of workers in their collective numbers, and also their nationality and culture as shown in the sombreros. In today's culture, where each person is inundated by thousands of images, it's easy to forget that this is one of the first efforts to document mass working-class protest, and that it's done, not just to record the event, but to inspire similar activity. In his book, Folgarait quotes journalist Carleton Beals, who knew Modotti:She "no longer contents herself with perfect platinum prints for wealthy collectors but has become desirous of a wider audience." (7) That audience (workers and farmers) was defined by the politics of the Mexican Communist Party, which she joined the following year.

In a modernist departure from recording events, Modotti created another series of images, in which she sought to graft together Mexican nationalist sentiment, strong in the Revolution's wake, with Communist ideology. First she created a striking and stark photograph of a hammer and sickle, the Communist emblem, which bore clear evidence of heavy toil. Then in another image she placed these objects on a sombrero, giving these international left symbols a specifically Mexican context. Finally she mixed symbols even further: a sickle and a bandolier of bullets with a guitar, or an ear of corn. And finally she discards both hammer and sickle, depicting the corn, bandolier and guitar without them.

 Mexican sombrero with hammer and sickle, Tina Modotti, Mexico City, 1927

Bandolier, corn, guitar, Tina Modotti, Mexico City, 1927

In the Communist movement of the late 1920s, which prized political orthodoxy, reinterpreting its most important visual symbol must have caused some controversy.But Modotti's images were widely circulated at the time. They were published in the radical leftwing periodicals that flourished in Germany and the U.S. /Mexican sombrero with hammer and sickle/ was the cover image for the October 1928 issue of /New Masses/, a socialist cultural magazine published in New York City. (8)Her ideas dovetailed with those popularized in the Soviet photographic ferment that followed its revolution, not just her modernism in style, but also her stance as a committed political actor.

She and other photographers of the left in this period were influenced by Soviet photography, which rejected "photography as art" and insisted on its use in connection with social change. Alexander Rodchenko wrote, "art has no place in modern life," and that "we must take photographs from every angle but the navel." (9) Rodchenko, and his fellow photographers in Moscow, pioneered the use of extreme angles, along with diagonal composition and close-ups, as a means to shake the viewer's perspective and liberate them from complacency. This strategy was similar to that put forward by the earliest works of Communist playwright Berthold Brecht, written during the same period. Brecht felt that drama should stimulate people to question social reality in a critical way, and should not just tell stories. (10) "Rodchenko believed that it was necessary to educate people to /see/ rather than simply to /look/, and proposed that ordinary familiar things be photographed in new ways, from new angles and perspectives, effectively 'defamiliarized,'" according to Robert Deane, honorary researcher in photography at the National Gallery of Australia. Additionally, Soviet publications, especially Ogonyok (which began publishing in 1923) "established many of the techniques of the illustrated magazine, such as the use of large visually striking cover images, now considered commonplace." (11)

Modotti did not invent the idea of the photographer as a committed participant in social change. In his book, /Photographing the Mexican Revolution/, Mraz documents the fact that many Mexican photographers became supporters of different factions in the civil war, one of the world's most photographed political upheavals of the time. The style they used came from their prior training and the way they made a living, primarily as studio photographers or working for magazines. "Although the subjects that appear in the images were radically 'other,' it seems that the ways of photographing them were established prior to the rebellion," Mraz speculates. (12) He links specific photographers to particular groups active in the revolutionary struggle: Manuel Ramos with the overthrown dictator Porfirio Diaz, but also Heliodoro Gutierrez and Geronimo Hernandez with Francisco Madero, who overthrew him. Amando Salmeron was Emiliano Zapata's photographer, while Antonio and Juan Cacho were part of Pancho Villa's army. Other photographers similarly took sides, and often those sides warred with each other. (13) Agustin Victor Casasola became the best known, and the Casasola archive is today the repository of a great deal of both his work and that of other photographers working at the time.

Peasant Zapatistas, members of a Mexican insurgent group, are fed breakfast at the famous restaurant Sanborns, Agustin Casasola, Mexico City, 1914.

The revolution had an enormous impact on the left in the U.S.Its precursor battle, the uprising in Cananea in 1907, was planned by Mexican anarcho-syndicalists in Los Angles and St. Louis. Many of their political associates went to Mexico to join the fighting. Radical journalist John Reed covered the battles of Pancho Villa, and his dispatches became the basis for his first revolutionary book, /Insurgent Mexico/. (14) Reed then went on to St. Petersburg, where he wrote the story of the insurrection that ultimately brought the Soviets to power in /Ten Days That Shook the World/. (15)

Reed had no desire to be an impartial observer. He took part in labor struggles in the U.S. (notably the Paterson N.J. silk workers strike), and then traveled through the new Soviet Union in its first years, promoting the Revolution. He died there and is buried in the Kremlin wall. His stance, as a journalist and writer covering a movement in which he participated, was a common choice for many artists in the U.S. until McCarthyism deprived most leftwing cultural workers of the ability to earn a living.

Modotti too chose politics over art. The Mexican government, as it moved to the right, cynically accused her of involvement in the assassination of her lover, Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella. It deported her to Europe. There she gave up photography, and went to work for the Communist International, eventually shepherding refugees out of Spain after the victory of the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.Even before she left Mexico, she wrote Weston, explaining, "Since the element of life is stronger in me than the element of art I should just resign to it + make the best of it..." (16)

That political stance is as much Modotti's legacy to photography in Mexico (and in the U.S.) as the social content and formalism of her photographs, but it was not taken up by everyone. The U.S. documentary tradition of the 1930s that followed included photographers with a wide diversity of political perspectives.Some saw their role as showing the devastating impact of the Depression, but hesitated at linking their photography to the radical social movements actively trying to change existing economic and political conditions. For example, at the Farm Security Administration, Roy Stryker would not hire photographers he viewed as too left, fearing the backlash from right-wingers in Congress who targeted his funding. (17)

But there were other photographers working at the time who participated in leftwing social movements. John Gutmann left Germany in 1933, where he had already been influenced by the radical photographers of the Weimar Republic, and of the Soviets before them.Some of his photographs were direct warnings of fascism on the horizon, such as /The News Photographer, San Francisco City Hall/, 1935. In this image, a huge U.S. flag is draped beside the Nazi swastika and the flag of fascist Italy, just as the city fathers greet officials from those two countries, while a newsman takes the picture.

The News Photographer, San Francisco City Hall, John Gutmann, 1935

Alexander Alland also came to the U.S. from Europe when fascism rose to power. Here, he connected the rise of the right to domestic racism, and took photographs of anti-racist demonstrations, as well as the Hooverville settlements of the unemployed and homeless. (18)

The two most committed "movement photographers" of the period were Otto Hagel and Hansel Mieth. Both left Germany at 15, and went to work as laborers and farm workers on their arrival in the U.S. They photographed the huge farm worker strikes of the 1930s, and were close to the dockworkers union when the San Francisco general strike in 1934 radicalized U.S. labor.(19)

Outstretched Hands, Hansel Mieth, San Francisco, California, 1934

Their photograph, /Outstretched Hands/, 1934, became an icon of the union, showing the desperation and humiliation of longshore workers trying to get hired in the despised daily shapeup, an abusive system that the union eventually abolished. Mieth also took photographs in the Heart Mountain concentration camp for Japanese "internees" during World War II, where photography was virtually forbidden.

After the war, however, the U.S. lost its socially committed documentary tradition to McCarthyism. Alland was blacklisted in the late 1940s, as the cold war began. After they were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Mieth lost her job as a staff photographer for /Life/ magazine, and Hagel's freelance career ground to a halt. He photographed a pioneering work on longshoremen, however, /Men and Machines/; the International Longshore and Warehouse Union was one of the few organizations that would still give him work. (20) Nevertheless, the whole idea of photographers connected to radical social movements ended because they couldn't work, while leftwing social movements themselves were on the run.

In Mexico, successive administrations moved to the right during the cold war as well, and pressured media outlets to use photography for their political glorification.Nevertheless, the tradition of documentary photography, carried on by politically committed photographers, lived on. The Mayo brothers, who fled Spain at the end of the Civil War, became the most productive photojournalists in Mexico City. While most of their work wasn't overtly political, they had close ties with the Mexican left. (21)

Manuel Alvarez Bravo became a photographer during the cultural and political ferment in which Modotti was active. But Alvarez Bravo was not a political militant or an activist photographer, despite images such as "Death of a Striker," purportedly showing the violence of the social turmoil of the time. In a long career he combined documentary work, surrealism, nude photography, and other visual genres. His first wife, Lola Alvarez Bravo, became a pioneer documentarian of the country's indigenous cultural roots, using a realist style to combat the exoticism of the Pictorialist tradition.

Nevertheless, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the Mexican photographer best known to U.S. audiences, was the mentor of others who did document social reality. Their work was published, despite the fact that the publications in which their work appeared needed to stay on the good side of the government. The work of Nacho Lopez, Hector Garcia, and their colleagues, rebelled against depicting either false cheer or the exploitation of indigenous pre-Hispanic cultures as exotic fare for Europeans and tourists. Lopez' most dramatic images were taken in the police stations (delegaciones) of Mexico City, showing clearly peoples' poverty and powerlessness. But he treated his subjects as human beings, with dignity, rather than representing them as helpless victims.(22) Lopez famously remarked that, "Photography was not meant as art to adorn walls, but rather to make obvious the ancestral cruelty of man against man." (23)

Woman Standing Before Book in Delegacion, Nacho Lopez, 1954

Hector Garcia, who died in 2012 at the age of 89, also tried to use photography as a way to help dissident social movements break through the wall of official silence. He grew up on the streets and went to work on the railroad in the U.S. as a bracero contract worker in the 1940s. After Alvarez Bravo took him under his wing, he began work as a photojournalist. At the same time, he took photographs of social protests in which he also participated, even starting a newspaper that carried his images of student marches.Both Garcia and the Mayo brothers documented the high point of rebellion in the 1950s-the 1958 railroad strike-which led to the imprisonment of its leaders Demetrio Vallejo and Valentin Campa.

One striking Garcia image shows two steel workers, their dark glasses, and cloth wrapped around their noses and mouths as their only protection from fumes and sparks. When muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros was imprisoned in 1960 during Mexico's anti-Communist purge, Garcia took a famous image showing him with his hand raised, behind the bars of the Lucumberri Prison. The image brings to mind Mieth and Hagel's famous photograph of imprisoned labor activist Tom Mooney-a stylized portrait of his face behind the bars of California's San Quentin prison-taken around 1936.Both are direct frontal portraits. In the Hagel and Mieth portrait Mooney face is framed by the bars, while Siqueiros holds up his hand, palm forward, in a gesture undoubtedly meant to say "Stop!" Both portraits clearly convey the idea that these are not passive prisoners, but ones who are resisting an unjust imprisonment.They are profoundly political images."What I've done practically all my life," Garcia explained, "is to be a witness and to make graphic testimonies of the movements and struggles of the social classes in Mexico. This continues to be the most important motive I have to do photography." (24)

David Alfaro Siqueiros, Hector Garcia, 1960

Tom Mooney, San Quentin Prison, Otto Hagel, 1936/1938

At twenty years old, Mariana Yampolsky left her native U.S. in 1945. She became the first woman in the Taller de Grafica Popular (the People's Graphic Workshop), an anti-fascist project started in the late 1930s by Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O'Higgins, and Luis Arena. Yampolsky was a socialist, close to the Mexican Communist Party. She worked for many years with the Secretariat of Public Education during the period, when the office was staffed by progressive educators dedicated to bringing schools and literacy to rural areas, especially in indigenous communities. She published art and children's' books, including textbooks for schools, and documented indigenous community life in a realist style. One of her best-known photographs, /Martel/, shows a disused railway station -- half a railroad car -- as empty tracks lead to nothing in the distance. The composition's strong graphic elements show her skill as a printmaker, paring reality down to a few essential elements. The image dates from the years when passenger rail service still existed in Mexico, although it's now long since gone. In its atmosphere of abandonment, the photograph is evocative of the migration issues of today. Yampolsky said, "If I have to define my photography, I'd say my studio is the street." (25)

Martel, Mariana Yampolsky, Mexico,  1968

Yampolsky was friends with the U.S. photographer, Milton Rogovin, one of the few U.S. photographers who maintained a commitment to social documentary photography during the cold war. Rogovin, who photographed in Mexico in the early 1950s, knew Yampolsky when she worked at the Taller Grafica. He was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1958, and his optometry practice was virtually destroyed, something, he later said, that forced him to make a greater commitment to photography.(26) In the following decades, Rogovin took several series of photographs documenting working people, especially African Americans, in Buffalo, New York, and in Appalachia. "I just use the camera as a way of expressing my thoughts about society," he said. "It is the political awareness of what's happening to people that drives me into the direction of my photography." He cited Brecht's question: "Who built the Seven Gates of Thebes?Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stones?" and responded, "I wanted to show who did the toughest work in industry. I wanted to show them because nobody does."(27)

In 1988, Yampolsky took Rogovin to Pachuca, Mexico, where he took photographs of coal miners. His extensive body of work on miners eventually included workers in ten countries, including Cuba, China, and Czechoslovakia. The images were straightforward and direct, showing the subjects' lives both at work and at home. (28)

Family of Miners, Mexico, Milton Rogovin, 1988

Trabajadores, Hector Garcia, 1950s

By the 1960s, the pressure for social change had built to crisis point in Mexico, the U.S., and much of the rest of the world. In the U.S., the civil rights and anti-war movements gave social protest new life, and with the rebirth of radical social movements came the rebirth of movement photography. In Mexico, battling repression was more difficult. Hundreds of students were shot down in the Tlatelolco plaza in 1968, and others were killed in Mexico City streets in 1973. The government launched a "dirty war," murdering leftists it viewed as political enemies.

Yet in Mexico too, the social movements that grew nonetheless gave new life to social documentary photography. The New Photojournalism movement produced photographers like Pedro Valtierra, and today Antonio Turok, Victor Mendiola and Yuriria Pantoja. (29) Periodicals like /Uno Mas Uno/ and /Proceso/, and later /La Jornada/, were willing to publish their work. A new generation of indigenous Mexican photographers, including Leopoldo Peña, Antonio Nava, Miguel Bravo, and others now work on both sides of the border, as do U.S. photographers like David Maung, Francisco Dominguez, myself, and others.

"I think we have had an influence on photography in the U.S., not just in this digital age, but going back into our history," concludes Valtierra. "Mexican photographers kept alive certain ideas. They were close to social movements. They documented migration all the way back to the 1940s, and the original cultures of indigenous people, which have both become major themes for modern photography."(30)

According to Folgarait, "Mexican photographers influenced U.S. and world photography because of their political engagement: human action with social relevance." (31) "I think there is a way of seeing that is Mexican," adds Valtierra. "Whether it is its heart or its look, I can tell it from others." (32)The use of the camera has a point to make, a critique. As Lopez says, it was not meant to adorn walls.

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[1] <#_ftnref1>John Mraz, interview with author, Mexico City, January 31, 2014.

[2] <#_ftnref2> /Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo with members of the artists' union on the May Day march, Tina Modotti, Mexico City, 1929/

[3] <#_ftnref3> John Mraz, interview with author, Mexico City, [Add month and day here], 2014

[4] <#_ftnref4> Ibid.

[5] <#_ftnref5> /Roses, and Experiment in Related Form (Glasses), Tina Modotti, Mexico City, 1925/ reproduced in /Tina Modotti: Aperture Masters of Photography/ (Koln, Germany: Konemann Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 1999), 21, 59

[6] <#_ftnref6> Leonard Folgarait, /Seeing Mexico Photographed: The Work of Horne, Cassola, Modotti, and Àlvarez Bravo/ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,2008), 48.

[7] <#_ftnref7> Ibid., 125.

[8] <#_ftnref8> Patricia Albers, /Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti/ (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999) 240-241

[9] <#_ftnref9> Alexandrr Rodchenko, "Trends in contemporary photography", in Varvara Rodchenko and Alexandr Lavrentiev, /The Rodchenko family workshop/ (London: The Serpentine Gallery, 1986), 86.

[10] <#_ftnref10> Martin Esslin, /Brecht: The Man and His Work/ (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1961), 124.

[11] <#_ftnref11> Robert Deane, "The New Photography 1920s-1940," in /Occasional Papers/ (Canberra, Australia:National Gallery of Australia, 2012) 6

[12] <#_ftnref12> John Mraz, /Photographing the Mexican Revolution/: /Commitments, Testimonies, Icons/ (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 17.

[13] <#_ftnref13> Ibid., 2.

[14] <#_ftnref14> John Reed, /Insurgent Mexico/ (NY and London: D. Appleton and Co.), 1914.

[15] <#_ftnref15> John Reed, /Ten Days That Shook the World/ (NY: Boni and Liverigh, 1919).

[16] <#_ftnref16> Folgarait, /Seeing Mexico Photographed/, 126.

[17] <#_ftnref17> Mary Warner Marien, /Photography: A Cultural History/ (NY: Prentice Hall, 2002), 278.

[18] <#_ftnref18> /University of Chicago Students Prepare Placards for a Demonstration against Racial Discrimination in the Medical School, Chicago, /and/Hooverville, Alexander Alland, 1946 and 1938/ , reproduced in /Reframing America/ (Tucson, Center for Creative Photography, 1995) 21, 29

[19] <#_ftnref19> For more on the work of Mieth and Hagel, see Janet Zandy, /Unfinished Stories: The Narrative Photography of Hansel Mieth and Marion Palfi/ (Rochester NY, RIT Press, 2013), and Nancy Schiesari, /Hansel Mieth: Vagabond Photographer/ (video documentary, shown on Independent Lens, PBS).

[20] <#_ftnref20> Otto Hagel, /Men and Machines/: /a photo story of the mechanization and modernization agreement between the International Longshoremen's & Warehousemen's Union and the Pacific Maritime Association now in operation in the ports of California, Oregon, and Washington,/(San Francisco: International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, 1963).

[21] <#_ftnref21> John Mraz, /Nacho Lopez, Mexican Photographer/ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press2003), 7-8, 20.

[22] <#_ftnref22> Ibid., 127-150.

[23] <#_ftnref23> Nacho Lopez quoted in Blanca Ruiz, "/Travesias / Muestran los fetiches de Nacho Lopez"/ (Mexico City: Reforma, July 16, 1999)

[24] <#_ftnref24> Quoted on the webpage of the Southwestern and Mexican Photography Collection, the Witleff Collections, http://www.thewittliffcollections.txstate.edu/collections/southwestern-mexican-photography/artists/garcia.html

[25] <#_ftnref25> Quoted on webpage, Jesse Kitt Photography, http://photokitt.com/galleries/series/

[26] <#_ftnref26> Milton Rogovin and Cheryl Brutvan, /The Forgotton Ones/ (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985), 10

[27] <#_ftnref27> Ibid, 13-14.

[28] <#_ftnref28> See Milton Rogovin, Social Documentary Photographer, http://www.miltonrogovin.com/photoseries/familyminers.html (accessed March 1, 2014).

[29] <#_ftnref29> Mraz, /Nacho Lopez, Mexican Photographer/, 169-170.

[30] <#_ftnref30> Pedro Valtierra, interview with the author, Mexico City, January 5, 2014.

[31] <#_ftnref31> Leonard Folgarait, telephone interview with the author, January 3, 2014.

[32] <#_ftnref32> Pedro Valtierra, interview with the author.

MINERS AND FARMERS CHALLENGE MEXICO'S COPPER GIANT

MINERS AND FARMERS CHALLENGE MEXICO'S COPPER GIANT

By David Bacon

Al Jazeera America, 4/15/15

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/4/15/unlikely-alliance-in-the-copper-mining-town-of-cananea-mexico.html

Miners from all over Mexico march in Cananea to support the strikers and farmers.

Traveling west across the Sonoran desert, just south of the U.S. border on Mexico's Route 2, La Mariquita peak dominates the horizon for miles.  Just below it rise huge ochre mountains of tailings from the world's second largest copper mine - Cananea.  

As the highway approaches town, it passes a huge white concrete water tank and adjacent pumping station.  Normally its huge pipes would be humming from the water flowing through them to the mine.  For two weeks, though, the pumps have been silent and the flow halted.  Instead, in what is normally empty desert, tents and busses line the highway.  Dust and smoke from cooking fires fill the air.  Hundreds of people walk about, listen to speeches, or just talk among themselves.

This planton, or occupation, has successfully shut most operations at the mine.  Cananea must consume huge quantities of water pumped from 49 wells across the desert in order to process crushed ore into copper concentrate.

Sergio Tolano

Many of the planton's residents are miners who went on strike in 2008.  Two years later the mine was reopened by massive police intervention.  Since then it has been operated by contracted laborers recruited from far distant parts of Mexico.  Now, for the first time in six years, 80% of the mine is again paralyzed.  This time, however, strikers didn't stop the operation by themselves.  Half of the people with them here are farmers -- residents of the Rio Sonora valley, angry over a toxic spill that upended their lives in August last year.

This winter groups of miners fanned out to the small towns along the river, talking about that disaster's impact.  Strikers and community leaders called meetings in the town plazas, making speeches through jerry-rigged speakers on the back of pickup trucks.  Finally, on March 18, busses headed from the towns toward Cananea.  Mine managers, hearing they were coming, called out hundreds of police to keep strikers from blocking the mine gates.

The protestors outflanked them.  Instead of heading through town to the mine itself, they roared down the highway to the pumping station.  Facing hundreds of angry miners and farmers, the operators shut down the pumps and fled.  And as the pumps grew quiet, so did operations at the mine itself.

The planton

 The first battle of the Mexican Revolution was fought here, when a miner's insurrection challenged the mine's U.S. owner, Colonel William Green, in 1906.  That earned the town its reputation as "Revolutionary Cananea."

Over the years since, the mine first belonged to U.S. corporations, and then was taken over by the Mexican government.  It's union, Section 65 of the national miners' union, the Mineros, had a strong contract.  Work in the mine, while dangerous, paid better than most jobs in Mexico.  Miners built small homes in the town at the foot of the mountain.

In 1990, however, the mine was sold to Grupo Mexico, a corporation owned by German Larrea, for $475 million, less than a quarter of its market value.  Larrea bought the privatized national railroad as well.  Capitalizing on his friendship with then President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, he became one of the wealthiest men in Mexico, worth over $15 billion.

Reyna Valenzuela and her family

Grupo Mexico produces two-thirds of Mexico's copper and has the largest copper reserves in the world.  It bought the U.S. mining corporation American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) in 1999, and now owns mines in Arizona.  It operates the world's fifth largest copper mine in Peru, and is negotiating to buy others in Spain. 

Corporate expansion, however, came at a price.  In 1998 miners struck in Cananea to stop reductions in the workforce to cut labor costs.  After Grupo Mexico asked the government to call in troops to break the strike, 800 miners were laid off.  Union leaders were blacklisted.  According to Carlos Navarette, one of the organizers of the planton, "the company blacklisted us throughout the whole country." In one job interview, he charges, "the person interviewing me asked me where I was from, and I told him from the south.  But then he saw my name on his computer.  He said, 'There's no work for you here.'"  

Anger mushroomed in 2006 when 65 miners died in an explosion at Grupo Mexico's Pasta de Conchos coal mine.  Workers had complained of gas leaks, and struck repeatedly over safety concerns.  After five days, however, the company halted rescue efforts, and the government announced the mine would be closed.

Laura Gutierrez, from the river town of San Rafael

The head of the Mineros, Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, accused the corporation and government of "industrial homicide."  Within weeks the conservative administration of President Vicente Fox charged him with fraud, and Gomez left Mexico to escape arrest.  Since then all charges against him were found groundless, and he has been reelected union president several times.  Nevertheless, he continues to stay in Vancouver, Canada, worried that the government and Grupo Mexico will find another pretext for jailing him should he return. 

In 2008 miners in Cananea went on strike again, over health and safety concerns.  They charged that the company had disconnected the huge fans and pipes that extract dust from the buildings where the ore is crushed.  Dust buildup can cause silicosis, permanently damaging miners' lungs.  A study by a team of U.S. and Mexican health and safety experts found "substantial elevations in the prevalence of respiratory symptoms" among miners and that "a significant percentage of this population may have radiologic silicosis."  In one area acid mist was so prevalent it had eaten away at the structure of the building.

Under Mexican law, an enterprise that is on strike cannot continue to function, so the mine stopped operation.  But Grupo Mexico asked the administration of Mexico's next president, Felipe Calderon, to declare the strike illegal.  In spite of court decisions upholding its legality, the government complied.  Three thousand federal police drove miners from the gates and the mine was then reopened.

Sergio Martinez and Juan Velasquez, two striking miners in front of the pumping station

Grupo Mexico created a new business entity, Buenavista de Cobre, to hire workers through contractors to replace the strikers.  Sergio Martinez, who worked in the foundry for 13 years, says that before the strike miners got a base pay of 1800 pesos for working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week.  With a productivity bonus, they earned at least 3000 pesos ($215).  Today the contracted employees earn 1200 pesos ($85) a week, and work 12 hours a day instead of 8.  Adjusted for inflation, the average wage in mining nationally is 21 percent lower today than it was in 1978.

Says another miner, "If you say you're from Cananea, you can't get a job.  Ninety percent of the people now working in the mine are from far away.  This is very humiliating for people here.  You have kids and there's no work for them either - even more humiliating."  Like many others, this miner crossed the border without documents to find work in Arizona.  "I left my family here.  The pain of our separation can't be compared to anything," he laments.

Then last August 40,000 cubic meters (10.5 million gallons) of concentrated sulfuric acid and heavy metals was released from a holding pond at the mine into the headwaters of the Sonora River.  Arturo Rodriguez, of the office of the Attorney General for Environmental Protection, told the Associated Press that the cause was lax supervision at the mine, along with rains and construction defects.  Grupo México didn't respond to requests for comment, but according to Yahoo News, Juan Rebolledo, vice president for international relations, said that the acid wasn't toxic and "there's no problem, nor any serious consequence for the population, as long as we take adequate precautions."  Grupo México's solution was to pour calcium into the river to neutralize the acid.

Heriberto Verdugo, a miners' union leader, talks with a group of farmers

Miners charge, however, that Grupo Mexico was using a contractor, Tecovifesa, to work on the dam.  "Before the strike, experienced union members, who were direct employees, did all the work," according to Martinez.

And although the spill began on August 6, the company didn't tell the river communities until August 8.  Many only discovered what had happened when the river turned orange.  "Our children were at the river that day," remembers Reyna Valenzuela, from Ures.  "We didn't know they would be affected because the company didn't tell anyone."  The children got extreme rashes, and doctors finally told her they were due to heavy metal exposure.  Other residents began to experience more serious health problems.

The family's business making sweets and cheese folded when customers in the state capital didn't want to buy any products from the river towns.  Valenzuela went to the mine to ask for money to take the kids to Phoenix for tests. "The miners helped us and gave us a place to stay," she recalls, but when they went to the mine's director, José Julián Chavira, "they wouldn't even talk with us." She became one of the first residents of the planton.

Jose Angel Villa Peralta, a farm laborer from the river town of Distancia de Aconchi

Another was Laura Gutierrez.  "Our town, San Rafael, is made up of farmers," she explains. "We plant corn and peanuts, and we didn't harvest anything last year. The crops were just thrown into the trash.  Now we have nothing to live on.  That's why we're here."  Farmers there and elsewhere along the river aren't planting this spring because they fear the water is contaminated.  So do customers for their crops.

"This was an extremely toxic brew that went into the river," according to Garrett Brown, director of the Maquiladora Health and Safety Network, and former inspector for CalOSHA.  "Lead causes serious and permanent damage to children.  Cadmium is a known carcinogen.  The spill deposited heavy metals along hundreds of miles, which wind up along riverbanks and leach into the aquifer.  People eat the food that's grown with water from the river and aquifers.  That has long term implications for their health."

Approximately 24,000 people live along the river.  Three hundred wells were closed after the spill.  Grupo Mexico's website displays photos of pastoral scenes along the river and posts articles that describe its efforts to clean it up.  It says the company has distributed 164 million liters of water, and installed 58 tanks of 5,500 gallons each in schools.  The company set up a $150 million fund to pay damages to residents, and paid a fine of $2 million. 

Jesus Rios Leon holds a list of all the heavy metals found in a test of his blood.

Many river residents, however, say they haven't received anything.  "We didn't go talk with the town people right after the spill, because many believed in the promises," says Sergio Tolano, general secretary of Section 65.  "But months later most saw they would get nothing, and were willing to take action."

The purpose of the planton, he says, is not just to stop the mine's operation.  The union and residents have organized a coalition, the Sonora River Front.  It is demanding that the government force Grupo Mexico to clean up the river and take responsibility for the health and lost income of residents.  It also seeks to restore the strikers to their jobs.

Some elected officials recognize that their political future could be at stake if people vote against a government they perceive as too friendly to Grupo Mexico.  Alfonso Durazo, a Federal deputy from the leftwing MORENA party, came to the planton to show support.  When he tried to turn his speech into a campaign event for local candidates, however, an angry crowd told him to speak to their concerns, not his own.

"Because the miners are supporting us, we're supporting them," Valenzuela says. "If we all get together, we can do something here.  The whole Rio Sonora is with them." 

Strikers burn in effigy a picture of German Larrea, owner of Grupo Mexico

Part of this effort also includes the U.S. union for copper miners, the United Steel Workers (USW). Manny Armenta, a USW representative, has helped the local union in Cananea since the strike started.  The night the police broke the lines at the gate in 2010, he led families out of the union hall to safety. 

"You could smell the tear gas all over, " he recalls.  "It was like a military occupation."  At the march to the pumping station, Armenta spoke to the crowd.  "The government and Grupo Mexico are making history," he charged, "but backwards, taking away the right to strike and the right to industrial safety."

The U.S. union is trying to renegotiate a contract with Grupo Mexico.  As a result of buying ASARCO, the company is now the new owner of mines where the Steel Workers represents the miners.  Two years ago the Mineros and the USW agreed to join to form a single union.  The merger has not been completed, but they now support each other in dealing with their common employers, and look to the day when their bargaining can be coordinated.

Tolano credits this alliance with keeping the strike in Cananea alive.  "Some of us have had a very hard time, but due to our tradition of supporting each other we've been able to take care of ourselves," he says.  "There have been divorces.  Some people have lost their homes.  But we're still here."

GROWERS MOVE TO GUT CALIFORNIA'S FARM LABOR LAW

GROWERS MOVE TO GUT CALIFORNIA'S FARM LABOR LAW 

By David Bacon
Capital and Main, 4/7/15
http://capitalandmain.com/latest-news/issues/labor-and-economy/growers-move-gut-californias-farm-labor-law/



When hundreds of people marched to the Los Angeles City Council last October, urging it to pass a resolution supporting a farm worker union fight taking place in California's San Joaquin Valley, hardly anyone had ever heard the name of the company involved. That may not be the case much longer. Gerawan Farming, one of the country's largest growers, with 5,000 people picking its grapes and peaches, is challenging the California law that makes farm workers' union rights enforceable. Lining up behind Gerawan are national anti-union think tanks. What began as a local struggle by one grower family to avoid a union contract is getting bigger, and the stakes are getting much higher.

The Gerawan workers got the City Council's support and, on February 10, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education passed a resolution that went beyond just an encouraging statement. The LAUSD purchases Gerawan's Prima label peaches and grapes through suppliers for 1,270 schools and 907,000 students. The LAUSD's resolution, proposed by board member Steve Zimmer, requires the district to verify that Gerawan Farming is abiding by state labor laws, "and to immediately implement the agreement issued by the neutral mediator and the state of California."

Verifying compliance, however, may not be easy.  In mid-March a hearing on Gerawan's violations of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) ended after 104 days of testimony by 130 witnesses. According to the Agricultural Labor Relations' Board's general counsel, Sylvia Torres-Guillén, and its regional director in Visalia, Silas Shawver, Gerawan mounted an intense campaign against the United Farm Workers after the union requested bargaining in October 2012.  According to the board, Gerawan sought to "undermine the UFW's status as its employees' bargaining representative; to turn its employees against the union; to promote decertification of the UFW; and to prevent the UFW from ever representing its employees under a collective bargaining agreement."

The conflict at Gerawan Farming has been building for 26 years. In 1990 over a thousand workers voted in a union election in its fields near Madera, in the San Joaquin Valley, choosing the United Farm Workers. The company was not neutral towards its workers' efforts to organize, however.  After the 1990 election the ALRB issued two complaints against the company - for laying off workers in 32 crews to eliminate them from the voting list, and for firing one crew because workers were UFW supporters. A state hearing officer found the company guilty of tearing down six labor camps to intimidate them.

Five years after that election, having exhausted legal efforts to overturn it, Mike Gerawan finally sat down with UFW representatives. Instead of negotiating, however, he told them: "I don't want the union and I don't need the union."  That ended bargaining before it even started. Over the next 17 years, with no contract, Gerawan Farming grew to become one of the nation's largest growers, exporting its Prima label fruit globally.

Hardball tactics towards unions in the fields have been typical of California growers. Although the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975 gave farm workers the right to vote for unions, the law had no teeth to force unwilling growers to negotiate contracts afterwards. According to UC Davis professor Philip Martin, workers were unable to win agreements in 243 of 428 farms where they'd voted for the UFW between 1975 and 2002.

Federal law has never covered farm workers.  Outside of California, no state has a law giving farm workers a legal process for recognition and bargaining. The few union agreements that exist in other states are the products of long campaigns and boycotts. As a result, less than one percent of the nation's farm workers have union contracts.  Wages and conditions in farm labor are worse than in almost any other occupation.

In 2002, however, California's legislature passed two bills that amended the original law.  Today the ALRA allows a union to ask for a mediator if a grower won't reach agreement on a first-time contract. Once the Board adopts the mediator's report it becomes a contract. The process is called mandatory mediation.  Growers challenged this process and lost at the state court of appeals in 2006. The UFW has since used the law to negotiate contracts at several large employers, covering about 3000 workers.

In 2012 the UFW made another demand for bargaining at Gerawan.  This time, according to the labor board, the company unleashed a sophisticated drive, not just against the union but against the law itself.  In that effort, it's acquired the help of some of the country's most conservative advocacy groups and think tanks. Losing mandatory mediation would be devastating to the UFW. No real union can survive indefinitely without being able to win contracts, and through them, gain members and improve wages and conditions.


A Dirty Election


The UFW says it continued working with Gerawan workers to improve conditions during the 17-year hiatus between 1995 and 2012. According to Gerawan's publicist, Erin Shaw, "The UFW abandoned Gerawan employees without ever negotiating a collective bargaining agreement."

Nevertheless, the UFW renewed its bargaining demand in October 2012, and union workers chose a negotiating committee.  This time the company sat down at the bargaining table - from January to July of 2013.  But when bargaining went nowhere, the union filed for mandatory mediation. Gerawan still claims there is no negotiated agreement. But according to UFW negotiating committee member Agustin Rodriguez, "We negotiated a contract. The company refuses to implement it."

Gerawan did not want about 2000 workers hired through labor contractors covered by any agreement.  Those workers are paid less than the company's own employees.  The company sought to keep a medical plan that only 13 of its workers could afford, Rodriguez says.  "In the company rulebook," he told Capital and Main, "they can fire you with or without a reason. With the union, they can only fire you for just cause. This is what the company doesn't want. It has power right now and it doesn't want to lose it."

A key allegation in the ALRB complaint charges Gerawan Farming with manipulating wages to keep the union out.  The company boasts it pays $11.00/hour -- $2 above the state minimum -- and says it shows workers are better off without a union. Fifteen-year employee Severino Salas believes, however, "it's the pressure from the union" that got the company to raise wages. "They're not giving us $11 for nothing," adds Rodriguez. "Until recently they'd accuse whole crews of not working fast enough and fire them."

In June 2013, while bargaining was going on, Gerawan rehired Silvia Lopez, a previous employee whose boyfriend was a company supervisor, and whose daughter and son-in-law also work there. Lopez "began her involvement in anti-union activities at Gerawan before she started working for the company," according to the ALRB. Almost immediately she became a client of Paul Bauer, a lawyer for a Fresno firm representing employers in labor disputes.

Lopez began to collect signatures on a petition for a decertification election to get rid of the UFW.  Companies can't assist such efforts, but Lopez and her friends collected signatures during work hours, and rarely even worked a full day picking grapes. The company set up a supportive website, helpfarmworkers.com, that announces, "This website is [the workers'] effort to insure that their voices are heard in Sacramento, and they get to make their own decision."

Salas charges foremen told workers the company would uproot trees and vines if the union came in.  "They'd just plant almonds and pistachios that don't need many workers. People were afraid to support the union, even though they wanted it, for fear of losing their jobs," he recalls.

In August 2013 Dan Gerawan invited Lopez and her friends to go with him to Sacramento, to testify against a bill that would have strengthened mandatory mediation. On September 18, as the mediator prepared to issue his report, Lopez turned in her petitions. Shawver and his staff compared the signatures to the employee list and found there weren't enough.

By then, Sylvia Lopez had an additional lawyer, Anthony Raimondo, who also represents Gerawan's two largest labor contractors, Sunshine Agricultural Services and R&T Grafting Labor. He asked for more time, and signature collection went into overdrive. Of the additional signatures he turned in, an exhaustive investigation found at least 100 were forged, allegedly from workers employed by Raimondo's contractor clients. The ALRB found many foremen and forewomen had participated in collecting signatures. In just one case, "after explaining the petition and sending the employees to work, [supervisor] Sonia Martinez went row by row and provided the employees in her crew with the signature sheet," according to the ALRB complaint. The decertification petition was dismissed.

A second decertification campaign was immediately launched. On September 27 the company gave time off to hundreds of workers, to leave their crews and go to Visalia to demonstrate outside the ALRB office. According to the ALRB, the following Monday supervisors shut down work entirely, blocked entry to the fields and packing sheds, handed out petitions and demanded that workers sign. A statement by Gerawan claims "1500 workers walked out of the fields," and describes this as "the largest ever seen in California's agricultural industry."

Two days later the California Grape and Tree Fruit League, a grower organization, supplied busses, food and anti-union tee-shirts to Gerawan workers, taking them to Sacramento to lobby for decertification.   A lawyer at McCormick Barstow LLP (Raimundo's Fresno law firm at the time) ordered four busses and snacks, costing $6,366, from Classic Charter, listing Sylvia Lopez as the contact person.

That order was paid with the credit card of Barry Bedwell, president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League.  His card statement includes a charge for a similar charter for $3,466.  He additionally paid $3512.70 for burritos, and bought 1,170 tee-shirts for the demonstrations.  In total he spent $19,234.70.  The League's board of directors includes Gerawan vice-president George Nikolich along with some of the biggest family names in California agriculture: Giumarra, Pandol, Bagdasarian, Zaninovich and others.

Meanwhile a media campaign produced TV and newspaper stories alleging workers were being denied the right to vote in a decertification election. The labor board in Sacramento, whose appointed members have final say over the agency's decisions, seesawed back and forth.

First it delayed approving the contract drawn up by the mediator.

But then Shawver and Torres-Guillén rejected the second petition as well.  When the company appealed, the labor board ordered them to conduct the decertification election anyway, despite the charges of company interference.

Workers voted on November 5, 2013. Their votes were impounded, however.  Legally, they cannot be counted unless an investigation concludes the company had nothing to do with organizing the decertification campaign.

After the election, the ALRB finally approved the mediator's contract. Gerawan Farming refused to implement it, and Torres-Guillen formally charged the company with violating the mandatory mediation law.

Gerawan then asked a judge at the state court of appeals in Fresno to declare mandatory mediation unconstitutional, overturning the 2006 decision upholding it. Joining Gerawan were the Western Growers Association, the California Farm Bureau Federation and the California Grape and Tree Fruit League (now the California Fresh Fruit Association). Even Lopez and Raimondo filed an amicus brief.

A Gerawan statement claims, "We support [workers'] right to choose, but the ALRB staff and the UFW do not.  Our sole message to our employees has never wavered:  'We want what you want.'  There is now only one correct and just solution to ensure employees' rights are protected. Count the ballots."

According to veteran labor lawyer David Rosenfeld, who teaches law at the University of California's Boalt Hall Law School, "Gerawan has all the money in the world, and doesn't lose anything by appealing.  In the meantime, they can delay implementing the contract for at least a couple of years."  The company's problem, he believes, is that the state supreme court is generally favorable to workers' issues.


Conservative Groups Gather Around Gerawan


As this fight unfolds national anti-union organizations are moving in. The Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence joined the appeals case. This far-right legal institute holds that "The right to acquire, protect, and enjoy property was considered to be one of the fundamental, inalienable natural rights of mankind." In recent years the Center has joined the Harris v. Quinn suit against the Service Employees International Union in Illinois, sued the California Labor Commissioner on behalf of employers, argued for Hobby Lobby Stores against birth control, and supported the initiative to end affirmative action in Michigan.

Much of the San Joaquin Valley is conservative Republican territory. In "The Perfect Fruit," author Chip Brantley quotes Ray Gerawan: "My philosophy is survival of the fittest," he says. "In this family, we're real big on free enterprise."  He says his ambition is "to put my competitors out of business ... because that makes us all stronger."

The Gerawan's local congressman, Devin Nunes, is a grower who criticized President Obama for opposing the use of torture. Republican Kevin McCarthy is the House Majority Leader representing neighboring Bakersfield. Both are allies of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a key opponent of mandatory mediation funded by Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS and the Koch brothers, among other conservative sources.

The Center for Worker Freedom, headquartered in ATR offices in Washington DC, publicized the pro-decertification demonstration outside the Visalia ALRB office.  The Center's director, Matt Patterson, wrote an editorial for Forbes.com, extolling Lopez and charging, "farm workers in California's Central Valley are finding their civil liberties stripped from them today - by a government agency ... [that] wants to force the union on Gerawan until the election is 'investigated'."  Last year Patterson bought billboards to attack the United Auto Workers at the new Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Copying the same strategy, the Center then bought billboards in Sacramento attacking the UFW and the ALRB.

This year the Gerawan's local state assembly member, Republican Jim Patterson of Fresno, introduced AB 1389.  It would allow groups like Sylvia Lopez and her friends to inject themselves into mandatory mediation proceedings on the same basis as the union's elected negotiating committee.  Further, it would allow growers to decertify unions that "abandon" workers for three years, an obvious reference to Gerawan.  Both measures would make mandatory mediation essentially unworkable.

When the Gerawans are criticized, they react with hardball tactics. When Berkeley passed a resolution like Los Angeles', it got a swift and threatening response. Company attorney David Schwarz wrote a four-page letter to its city council. "Republication of libelous statements," he fumed, "whether in newsletters, press releases, constituent updates, or speeches outside the legislative chamber, is not immunized from liability..." Katy Grimes, who writes for the Watchdog Wire blog (a project of the pro-free-market Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity), called the resolution's authors "liberal busybodies."

Last June former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso coauthored an op-ed piece with UFW President Arturo Rodriguez, urging the company to negotiate with its workers. Reynoso was formerly director of California Rural Legal Assistance, the state's legal advocacy organization for farm workers. In 1981 Jerry Brown, in his first stint as governor, appointed him to the state Supreme Court. In 1986 growers and rightwing Republicans spent $7 million to recall him and two other justices.

After seeing Reynoso's op-ed, Dan Gerawan sent him a threatening letter. At the end of eight pages it demanded "that you disavow authorship of the article. If you refuse to do so, then we ask that you correct the false and misleading statements made in the article, and retract these defamatory statements. The retraction must be complete and unequivocal." Reynoso politely refused. "I respectfully decline to disavow authorship nor do I find any statements to be false, misleading or defamatory," he countered.

Despite the threats and name-calling city councils in New York City and Washington D.C. are taking up measures like Los Angeles'. The grower's biggest buyer is Wal-Mart, an inviting target for people already angry at that chain's treatment of its own workers.  After the LA City Council vote, Maria Elena Durazo, at the time still the head of the county labor federation, warned Gerawan Farming of a possible boycott: "You will not be welcome in the stores of Los Angeles if that's the next thing these workers ask us to do."

Boycotts can take time to have an effect -- the original UFW grape boycott lasted five years.  And once started, they're hard to stop. But targeted boycotts have been very successful in recent years at forcing garment companies selling clothes on college campuses to recognize unions in sweatshops.   The Farm Labor Organizing Committee won an agreement covering thousands of North Carolina farm workers several years ago by successfully boycotting Mount Olive pickles.  By taking on the largest consumers of Gerawan's Prima brand fruit, like school districts, the UFW could make a big dent in sales.  Cesar Chavez believed that cutting off 5% of sales was normally enough to make a boycott successful.


The Impact of Decertification


Decertification is more than just the key to undoing the original election that required Gerawan to bargain. If holding an election can't actually lead to a contract, there's not much reason for workers anywhere to risk their jobs supporting a union. Growers far beyond Gerawan, therefore, have an interest in the outcome - the reason why the Grape and Tree Fruit League and national conservative groups are paying attention.

A stronger union in California fields could raise wages (and growers' labor costs), which are far lower now than they were thirty years ago when the UFW was at its strongest. One recent study found that tens of thousands of Mexican indigenous farm workers in California receive less than minimum wage. It is common today to find workers sleeping in cars in parking lots during the grape picking season, or even under trees and on hillsides. Outside the state wages and living conditions are often worse.

The ALRB's responsibility is to make the election and negotiation process work. This March Governor Jerry Brown appointed William Gould IV chair of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board. Gould is an African American emeritus law professor at Stanford University, and former chair of the National Labor Relations Board under President Clinton. In answering questions from the legislature, Gould expressed concern over long delays and the low number of petitions for representation. "Enforcement of collective bargaining agreements as imposed upon the parties through the Mandatory Mediation and Conciliation ... must be expedited by the Board," he urged.

In the Senate Rules Committee hearing on his nomination, he told legislators that he wanted "to make mediation and conciliation more streamlined, so parties don't wait months."  In the case of labor law violations he advocated using temporary injunctions to get relief "without waiting years for them to play out."

The board's operations, however, are constrained by reduced budgets.  To make the process work faster the ALRB needs more hearing officers and staff, which means Gould will have to use his political skills to convince the Governor and legislature to give it more money.

Meanwhile, enforcement of the mediator's contract at Gerawan seems far away to the company's workers.  While the grower continues to operate without it, UFW supporters like Salas say they face retaliation. "I've worked for Gerawan since 1999," he told Capital and Main. "The foreman realized I was for the union when they began passing around the petition and I wouldn't sign it. " He was denied work along with his wife in their normal crew. "What the company really wants is for us to quit," he charges.

STUDENTS AND PARENTS OF DISAPPEARED AYOTZINAPA STUDENTS MARCH IN SAN FRANCISCO

STUDENTS AND PARENTS OF DISAPPEARED AYOTZINAPA STUDENTS MARCH IN SAN FRANCISCO

Photos by David Bacon

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 4APRIL15 - Two students, Angel Neri and Josimar Cruz de Ayala, of the Ayotzinapa teachers training school in Guerrero, Mexico, and the parents of two others, Blanca Luz Nava Velez and Estanislao Mendoza Chocolate, march with supporters in San Francisco to protest the disappearance of 43 students from the school last fall, and the murder by police of three others. The four are part of a caravan traveling through U.S. cities to publicize what happened in Ayotzinapa.