Labor organizing has rebounded nationwide in the past few years. But in California’s fields, which supply about half of the produce grown in the United States for the domestic market, such efforts have found little traction.
Veronica Mota marched under the sweltering sun, hoisting a cloth banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe above her head for miles.
The union is a shadow of what it was decades ago. Membership hovers around 5,500 farmworkers, less than 2% of the state’s agricultural workforce, compared with 60,000 in the 1970s. In the same period, the number of growers covered by UFW contracts has fallen to 22 from about 150. The march last summer stood as a reckoning of sorts for a union desperate to regain its relevance.
“Where we do not have a union contract, there is no respect,” she said in Spanish on a recent morning from her ranch-style home in the farming town of Madera. Three years later, it was a key force behind the Delano grape workers’ strike, in which thousands of Mexican and Filipino farmworkers walked off their jobs, demanding raises to $1.40 an hour from $1.25, as well as elections that could pave the way for unionization.
The grape workers’ strike stretched into the summer of 1970, when widespread consumer boycotts forced major growers to sign on to collective bargaining agreements between the union and several thousand workers. The bill faced opposition from growers, who contended that the measure would allow union organizers to unfairly influence the process. Newsom initially voiced reticence but signed the measure into law after Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker at the time, and President Joe Biden publicly pushed him to do so.
She reflected on the dormant season, in December and January, when she prunes pistachio and almond trees, and the rainy months, when it’s sometimes hard to find work. But then come the prosperous citrus and grape harvests, through the spring and the fall, which always make her think of the families who will eventually toast with wine squeezed from the fruit she plucked from the vine.
You might like Oscars 2023: Where to watch the 'Best Picture' nominees in the Bay Area The Academy Awards' top films return to select theaters this week. “With a union contract, workers are educated about their rights and empowered to defend them,” said Teresa Romero, the union’s president. “It’s evolved more into an advocacy organization and walked away from the more difficult work of organizing,” Pawel said. Referring to the 1975 labor relations act, she added, “They have the most favorable labor law in the country and have barely taken advantage.”
Indeed, a report by the University of California, Merced, Community and Labor Center found that 36% of farmworkers said they would not file a report against their employer for failing to comply with workplace safety rules and that 64% cited fear of employer retaliation or job loss. He said he had little trouble finding field hands, including migrants who move from farm to farm with each season. And he noted that in the Salinas Valley — closer to the coast, where housing is more expensive — many growers rely on H-2A visas, which let them bring workers, often from Mexico, for just a few months of the year.
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