By David Bacon
SALINAS, California — Twenty-eight years ago, at the end of the great Salinas lettuce strike of 1970, virtually all of the valley's largest vegetable growers signed contracts with the United Farm Workers (UFW). Among them was the D'Arrigo Brothers produce company.
For two years, its workers had a union contract, with a hiring hall, medical benefits and wages which set a new standard for agricultural labour. Then, in 1972, D'Arrigo and other growers refused to renegotiate those agreements.
Four years later, hoping to regain what they had lost, the company's workers voted for the UFW in one of the first representation elections held under the newly passed Agricultural Labor Relations Act.
The union met with D'Arrigo's owners repeatedly in the following years. Workers wore union buttons in the fields and marched through Salinas' streets to back up their negotiators.
But the law betrayed them. While it says companies have the obligation to bargain when workers vote the union in, D'Arrigo was never willing to reach agreement.
In late July, the company brought in machines. Workers cutting lettuce and rapini, who had previously worked at their own pace, found themselves following a conveyor belt through the fields at the speed set by the machine's driver.
To make matters worse, the company cut 10 cents from the piece-rate, using the money to pay the drivers' wages.
"We finally just came to the end of our patience", says Efrain Lara, a rapini cutter who heads the union committee. "Twenty-two years is too long to wait anyway. But cutting our wages — that was even more serious."
On August 5, Lara and his co-workers went on strike. Since then, picketers have congregated early every morning on the roads leading into the vegetable fields south of Salinas, trying to keep the company from bringing in workers to harvest its perishable crops.
On one morning two weeks ago, as buses of workers began arriving, some picketers stopped the buses at the entrance to the fields, others opened the emergency doors at the rear of the vehicles and union supporters called out to the workers on board to join the strike.
Some of them did. Others stayed in their seats, squirming uncomfortably, trying not to look at the strikers below.
Monterey County sheriffs' deputies arrived, forcing the picketers to let the buses through. The strikers then formed a line at the end of the road, calling out to the strike-breakers with bull-horns.
Meanwhile, a few union organisers followed the crews to the field and continued the conversation. After an hour, UFW organiser Jesus Corona, holding his red-and-black flag aloft, marched out of the field to the picket line followed by a trail of workers who had decided not to break the strike. Of the 60 workers originally on the two buses, only a handful were left working.
"It was kind of hard this morning, and it took a long time to convince them", Corona later explained, "but we do this every day. And the workers usually support us, once they really think about what we're fighting for. They can see that the strike will benefit everyone."
Corona, Lara and the other strikers have had a lot of success in stopping D'Arrigo crews because the union has been a visible, active presence in the company for all the years since the original contract was signed.
"We've had work stoppages before, when the company did things we didn't like", Lara explains. "In 1986, for instance, they cut the hourly guarantee from $7.05 to $6.00, and we tried to fight that. We always had a committee here to negotiate with the company, and we always fought with them to try to keep our benefits. What's different now is that we've decided to strike until we get our contract."
Once the strike started, D'Arrigo brought in two labour contractors to try to replace the strikers. The union, however, was able to pressure them leave.
The company, which is the US' second-largest vegetable producer, employs up to 1000 people in the Salinas Valley during this season. About 600 of them are currently on strike.
"Every day we go visit D'Arrigo workers at home, to ask them to join us", says UFW vice-president Efren Barajas. "We find family after family living in garages all over the valley. And they work all day for this company, every day. What does it say about the wages here, where you find people living in garages? It says we don't earn enough to even rent a real place to live."