San Diego Union Tribune
(Page A-1 )
3 decades after Chavez hunger strike, UFW wages old battles
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Steve Schmidt
STAFF WRITER
08-Nov-1998 Sunday
DELANO -- Before arriving in supermarkets statewide this fall, California's
grape harvest passed through the calloused hands of farm workers like
Angelica Soto.
Near this San Joaquin Valley town every year, she works long hours among
the pregnant vines, bagging clumps of Thompson Seedless and other
table-grape varieties and stacking them in plastic foam boxes.
Sometimes that's the easy part. The 30-year-old farm worker says she has to
keep a close watch on her bosses. Some try to cut corners, like the time
they trucked in portable toilets that hadn't been cleaned in days. Some
fiddle with her wages, trying to short her.
"For seven years, I've worked in the fields," says Soto, sighing. "It's an
honest living, but . . . "
Three decades after United Farm Workers President Cesar Chavez went on a
hunger strike in this rural community, bringing attention to the squalid
conditions facing farm workers, some of the same conditions stubbornly
persist:
A recent federal survey of grape growers and labor contractors in
Central California uncovered significant violations of minimum wage
standards and other labor laws.
A harvest-time housing shortage has worsened. Many growers have closed
labor camps rather than deal with federal laws requiring housing
improvements. Federal funding to develop worker housing also has slowed.
Poverty is up among farm workers. Studies show that when inflation is
figured in, farm wages have dropped more than 10 percent in the last two
decades.
Growers, labor experts and even farm workers agree that conditions are
generally better than three decades ago, when Chavez rallied many Americans
around the issue.
"Oh, my God, yes," says Manuel Cunha, president of the Nisei Farmers
League, an association of valley growers. "We've come a long way."
UFW President Arturo Rodriguez, who succeeded Chavez after his death in
1993, agrees there's been progress.
Still he adds, "There's a lifetime of work that remains to be done."
o o o
Six-forty on a chilly morning and the sky turns from purple to blue. About
45 farm workers, cocooned in jackets and hats, meet along a country road
east of Delano.
They silently slip into a vineyard.
Most of us only see the results of the harvest: The mountains of fruits and
vegetables found at stores year-round. But in California alone, it takes
about 400,000 farm workers to get it there.
The state's largest employer of farm laborers is the grape industry. As
many as 60,000 people are hired each fall to work the harvest.
Raul Garcia is like a lot of them.
The Delano man has worked in vineyards for 25 years, cutting grapes and
handing them to packing crews.
Sure, he says, some things are better. Growers and labor contractors
provide on-site toilets now, and water. Most workers get medical benefits.
Employers are required to pay at least the state minimum wage of $5.75 an
hour.
"But so much," he says in Spanish, "remains the same."
He pockets $250 a week. When inflation is figured in, his pay is less than
it was 20 years ago.
Garcia and his co-workers receive medical benefits, but they are nominal.
Local medical offices charge farm workers hefty fees, perhaps as much as
$25 a visit.
Workers at other farms raise similar complaints, including laborers with
one of the largest table-grape growers in the state, Giumarra Vineyards
near Delano.
In 1967, UFW-led farm workers launched a bitter and protracted strike
against Giumarra over wages and benefits.
Today, several Giumarra workers and others maintain that problems persist
on Giumarra fields. They say toilet facilities are poor or nonexistent.
Workers must pack grapes by kneeling in the dirt, rather than use tables
common at other vineyards.
John Giumarra, vice president of the 8,000-acre vineyard, acknowledges that
the company doesn't use tables but believes overall working conditions for
Giumarra employees and other farm workers in the region are "among the best
in the world."
Farm leaders say it's unfair to paint today's growers as villains.
"I think the UFW needs to get away from these accusations (about poor labor
practices) and accept the point that growers are doing a good job," Cunha,
of the farmers league, says.
Jack King, national affairs manager with the California Farm Bureau
Federation, says growers work far more collaboratively with employees than
in the past.
"A lot has changed since the UFW became a force," King says. "The climate
has changed, attitudes have changed."
But a survey released this fall by the U.S. Labor Department found that
three out of four Central California table-grape growers and labor
contractors broke laws designed to protect farm workers.
Labor officials say about 20 percent of the growers surveyed paid less than
the federal minimum wage. About half of the labor contractors also
underpaid workers.
The survey revealed other problems, including a grower who employed child
laborers without written parental consent and another who kept an unsafe
labor camp.
Cunha disputes many of the survey's findings, complaining that the
questions were badly written and the results make growers appear cavalier.
"It's totally bogus," he says.
UFW leaders aren't surprised by the survey's results, which appear to
underscore the labor group's complaints about many growers.
But the UFW has little leverage on the issue. In the early 1970s, the labor
organization represented about 80 percent of the table-grape workers across
California.
This fall, it represents workers at only one table-grape vineyard in
California -- Nash-de-Kamp farms in Tulare County.
o o o
The UFW's Delano office, in some ways, seems like a ghost of what it was.
Union leaders once drew a giant map on a wall of the rural building to
track farm labor skirmishes in the area. The boycotts. The contracts. The
strikes.
The map is now faded and unused.
The vacant gas station office where Chavez staged his 25-day hunger strike
in 1968 sits empty most of the time. No sign or monument marks the event,
which Chavez held to underscore his commitment to nonviolence amid the
labor strife.
But just behind the station, in a squat building of adobe brick, several
UFW employees push ahead, trying to rebuild the organization.
UFW membership, once 80,000 strong, collapsed in the early 1970s after
growers and the Teamsters union joined forces to oust the organization from
farms valleywide. Membership bounced back in the 1980s, but has yet to
fully recover.
>From the start, UFW leaders have found it tough to build on a labor
movement partly centered on a moving target: migrant workers.
Plus, many workers grew up destitute and are just glad to have a job.
Undocumented workers, in particular, are reluctant to challenge labor
conditions.
"You make of it what you can," says Lupe Martinez, the UFW vice president
who runs the Delano office. "That's the life of a migrant farm worker."
Some younger workers also feel little allegiance toward the UFW, taking for
granted the organization's history of struggles and successes, Martinez
says.
Others believe the UFW has largely won everything it fought for.
"They've accomplished what they wanted to and don't have to flex their
muscles anymore," says Delano Mayor Anthony Martinez.
Yet, in Martinez's own city, a community of 34,000, there are frequent
reminders of how farm workers live and work amid sometimes sorry
conditions.
Delano officials last year discovered 10 farm workers living in a garage.
The laborers used a garden hose to shower.
Thirty-six years after its founding, the UFW is rebuilding membership,
trying to organize workers in the rose and wine-grape industries, along
with others. The labor group is headquartered in the town of Keene, near
Bakersfield.
Since 1994, it has won 17 consecutive elections across the West and signed
21 new contracts with growers.
Membership is up to 27,000, with UFW leaders predicting continued growth as
they campaign to organize strawberry workers along the Central California
coast.
Workers say a UFW contract gives them something even the sweetest-talking
boss can't provide: job security. Job benefits and protections are fixed in
the contract.
"Now we've got something that protects us," says Rudy Velarde, a longtime
irrigator with Bear Creek Production Co. near Delano, the world's largest
rose grower. The UFW and Bear Creek signed a labor pact last year.
The UFW isn't a major player in San Diego County's relatively small farming
industry. Local flower and avocado growers hire few seasonal workers.
UFW leaders say their good relations with Bear Creek management prove their
labor group is in sync with the times.
"We're a different organization than we were 25 years ago," says Rodriguez.
"We are willing to sit down and try to meet the needs not just of workers
but of growers."
Yet, when it comes to workaday worries, many broader problems remain the
same.
Harvest-time housing has always been tight, but experts say it's even worse
today. Federal officials estimate that one out of three farm workers across
the nation lacks adequate housing.
The Clinton administration this year will spend $27.5 million on farm
worker housing projects, far less than the $70 million spent in the late
1970s.
Many growers have closed their labor camps, rather than deal with what they
say are heavy-handed government regulations demanding housing improvements.
Since 1968, the number of worker camps in California has dropped from 5,000
to 1,000.
Some of the remaining camps seem little better than the hovels documented
in the John Steinbeck novel "The Grapes of Wrath" nearly 60 years ago.
At a camp maintained by Giumarra Vineyards, the Romero-Esqueda family lives
in a room smaller than a suburban garage. Beds are provided for the four of
them. The floor is cement.
Their sole source of light in the evening is a 75-watt bulb hanging naked
from the ceiling.
Flies dart about.
"It's OK," Cleofas Romero says in Spanish. "It's comfortable."
The camp, which has changed little in three decades, is inspected annually
by local government housing officials.
Living standards also have stagnated, if not worsened, in farm towns around
the San Joaquin Valley, according to researchers.
A pair of economists at the University of California Davis, drawing on the
latest available census figures, recently uncovered a disturbing increase
in poverty in 65 farm communities.
In the town of Weed Patch, for example, the proportion of people living in
poor families rose from 24 percent in 1980 to 31 percent in 1990.
Others studies indicate a significant drop in farm-worker wages over the
last 20 years, when inflation is figured in.
Such statistics stir Rodriguez and other UFW leaders to push ahead, even as
growers and others question the organization's effectiveness.
"If we weren't around today, it would be far worse," Rodriguez says.
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