‘Fruit Of The Devil’ Overworked, Underpaid And Frequently Harassed, Strawberry Pickers In California Fight For Representation, With Few Friends In Sight

The immigrant strawberry pickers toiling in the fields surrounding this California central coast town would seem to be ripe for the plucking by union recruiters.

Most of the pickers, despite a relatively long harvest season lasting around eight months, earn no more than $9,000 a year. Some worry about the impact of their exposure to the heavily applied chemicals, including known carcinogens, that keep pests from destroying the strawberry crop.

The work itself is completely nonmechanized and physically punishing, requiring pickers to remain stooped most of the day. When workers get up to take an occasional stretch, 40-year-old picker Jose Rojas said, the field foremen “yell at us. … They always want us bent over.”

“It really is back-breaking labor,” added Miriam Wells, a University of California, Davis, anthropologist and author of a 1996 book on the strawberry industry. “They call it ‘the fruit of the devil’ because of the toll it takes on people.”

Yet here in the heart of the nation’s strawberry industry, amid a historic campaign led by the rejuvenated United Farm Workers to unionize California’s more than 20,000 pickers, organized labor faces an uphill fight.

The stiff challenge facing labor organizers partly reflects the unyielding anti-union stance of the strawberry industry. At the same time, some pickers at the better-paying, more humanely managed farms are skeptical about what the UFW can do for them.

Perhaps most of all, the UFW’s aims are complicated by fears among the most economically vulnerable pickers that supporting the union will cost them their jobs.

Those fears - an obstacle for decades to union organizers trying to combat miserable working conditions in California agriculture - also are based partly in recent UFW history.

Twice in the last three years, workers on separate farms voted in the UFW only to see the employers halt production of their strawberry crops and throw pickers out of work.

With the harvest season under way in the Watsonville-Salinas area, the UFW with unprecedented backing from the AFL-CIO, the parent group for the nation’s major unions - is moving into full swing with its campaign to win over the strawberry workers.

Over the next few weeks about 100 Spanish-speaking union organizers will fan out into the farm worker neighborhoods of Watsonville, Salinas and nearby parts of southern Santa Cruz and northern Monterey counties.

The AFL-CIO, trying to revitalize the American labor movement by focusing on low-paid, minority workers, is pouring money and staff into the UFW effort and has made the drive one of its top organizing priorities.

Even the Teamsters union, a one-time UFW enemy that dispatched thugs into the fields in the 1970s to beat up UFW activists, is helping out. If the campaign fails, though, it would mark a major setback to organized labor’s strategy for turning itself around by recruiting immigrant workers.

On top of union backing, the UFW has drawn statements of support from 14 supermarket chains.

Never before has the storied UFW tried industry-wide organizing in the strawberry business, the way it did with table grapes and lettuce in the 1960s and 1970s. But in recent years the strawberry industry became an attractive union target because of its rapid growth, emerging worker activism and geographic concentration. California produces 85 percent of the nation’s strawberries every year.

The union organizers mainly emphasize the low pay, along with alleging that foremen commonly are cruel to workers and frequently subject women pickers to sexual harassment. They also charge that growers often fail to provide clean toilets and drinking water in the fields.

Strawberry marketers and growers “look at us like second-class citizens,” said Arturo Rodriguez, president of the UFW and son-in-law of the legendary UFW leader Cesar Chavez. “Who else has to go out and fight to get decent drinking water?”

In fact, the living and working conditions of California strawberry pickers vary substantially, with most abuses occurring on sharecroppers or small growers’ farms.

Sensing that most pickers today would vote against joining the UFW, strawberry industry marketers and growers are challenging union leaders to set up representation elections immediately.

“We’d love for them to let the workers decide,” said Gary Caloroso, spokesman for the industry-supported Strawberry Workers and Farmers Alliance. “We just don’t want an industry to continue to be dragged through the mud.”

Industry officials deny hiring union-busters or engaging in any unfair labor practices to defeat the union campaign. Lately, many growers have increased hourly wages and added or improved health insurance programs, although they deny doing it to head off the union organizers. “We would have done it sooner if it hadn’t been for them,” snapped Daryl Valdez, the Watsonville-based human resources director for Gargiulo Inc., a unit of Monsanto Corp. and the area’s biggest grower of strawberries.

Gargiulo, which acknowledges that it held its base hourly pay for its 1,000 pickers to $5.75 for many years, boosted the rate to $6.50 in January.