When the migrant workers strike, what are the effects on the farm owners?
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Burlington, WA—There is not much love lost between the owners of Sakuma Brothers Farms and Ramon Torres, the president of Familias Unidas por la Justicia. Sakuma Brothers is one of the largest berry growers in Washington state, and Familias Unidas is a grassroots union organized by the company’s workers. Torres used to work in the Sakuma fields. He was fired after the pickers went on strike in 2013.
This month, on September 12, the workers finally voted to demonstrate support for a union after years of organizing. This election is a watershed: Familias Unidas por la Justicia is the first union organized by farm workers in the United States in many years.
The balloting took place over four hours at the company office, two hours north of Seattle, surrounded by Sakuma’s blueberry fields. After all the votes had been cast, Torres and a small group of workers and supporters drove over to the polling place to watch the count. A company manager balked, however. The votes wouldn’t be tallied as long as Torres was on the property, he said.
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After a lot of arguing, the workers retired to a local schoolyard, together with Richard Ahearn, former regional director of the National Labor Relations Board. There, on the tailgate of a pickup belonging to State Senator John McCoy, Ahearn counted the ballots. The result: 195 for the union, and 58 against.
This ended up being an appropriate place to tally the votes after all. “The majority of students at that elementary school are Latino, Senator McCoy has been a fierce advocate for these workers, and this is as much a public victory as a union victory,” said Jeff Johnson, who heads the Washington State Labor Council for the AFL-CIO.
The union is a grassroots organization formed by the pickers themselves, and is led by indigenous Mixtec and Triqui migrants from the southern Mexico states of Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas. A union contract at Sakuma Brothers could give this union the stability and resources needed to make substantial changes in the economic conditions of its own members, and of farm workers across western Washington.
Strikes and organizing among agricultural laborers, especially indigenous migrants, have been on the rise all along the Pacific coast over the last several years. What happened in Burlington will further raise the expectations of thousands of people working in the fields, from northern Mexico to the Canadian border. “This is a new dawn,” Torres said. “When we were celebrating afterwards, people began saying, ‘From now on we know what the future of our children is going to be.’”
During all the walkouts, workers also demanded that Sakuma sign a union contract.
“People are tired of low pay,” Torres said, “but that’s not all of it. Many come up from California for the harvest, getting here broke with no guarantee they’ll get a room in the labor camp, and the conditions are bad there anyway. People feel humiliated, and denied basic respect.”
A 35-member union committee of workers in the field organized the walk-outs. In addition, the union has another 25-member committee shaping anger over conditions into proposals for a union contract.
In 2013, Sakuma’s owners seemed willing to negotiate with the workers, but when those talks failed to raise piece rates, the new union launched a boycott of the company’s berries. The boycott initially focused on local sales under Sakuma Brothers’ own label. But soon the workers discovered that Sakuma was selling berries through one of the largest agricultural marketers in the country, Driscoll Strawberry Associates.
Driscoll’s is the largest berry distributor in the world. It does not grow its own berries, but controls berry production by contracted farmers. It has contracted growers in several countries, and has received loans guaranteeing foreign investment from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a U.S. government agency.
Marketing berries has become highly monopolized. Four shippers control one-third of all blueberry shipments in the United States. During the peak season, Driscoll’s moves 3.8 million pounds of fruit daily, and up to 80 percent of the fruit is shipped on the same day it’s received from growers. Sakuma Brothers has been supplying berries to Driscoll’s for 25 years.
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