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[Editor’s Note: These farmworkers picked the strategic point—harvest time—to strike for a wage increase, and they won even though they had no formal collective bargaining agreements with the growers.]

Farmworker organizations have sometimes undertaken campaigns whose goal is not to form a union immediately but to improve workers’ lives in a particular area. The aim of the Taco Bell boycott organized by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, for example, is to increase wages for tomato pickers (see Chapter 11 of A Troublemaker’s Handbook 2 or www.ciw-online.org).

Such campaigns do not add dues-paying members right away but have a tremendous positive impact on the legitimacy or “street credibility” of the organizations involved.

A campaign by an Oregon farmworker union provides a dramatic example of the importance of strong community roots. Gathering for their annual assembly in late 1994, members of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United) decided their union should celebrate its tenth anniversary by raising wages in the strawberry fields, where the piece rate had stagnated at 12¢ a pound for more than a decade.

Leone José Bicchieri, one of the main organizers of the campaign, credits the union’s success partly to an early start. A study guide put out by PCUN notes, “Though the first strike did not occur until early June, the concept for a huge organizing campaign was developed the previous September, the membership approved it and decided its focus in November, the first calls for contributions and volunteers went out in December, organizer identification and recruitment started in January, lining up food and equipment donations began in February, leafleting got under way in March, fundraising house parties, presentations to unions, and a second general call for volunteers and donations occurred in April, and mass meetings were held with farmworkers in Woodburn [Oregon] on April 30 and with supporters in Portland on May 1.”

The union contacted churches and community organizations months before the harvest, seeking broad support at different levels of commitment. “We put out a menu of things we thought were useful,” explains Bicchieri. Some organizations, for example, committed to putting up workers who might be thrown out of the labor camps; some pledged to raise money or to make contributions from their food pantries; others volunteered to provide cots or other resources. Throughout, Bicchieri says, the emphasis was on building relationships that would continue to provide support long after this particular campaign had ended.

”I know a lot of organizers that I respect a lot, but they’re pretty cut-and-dried—it’s, like, you’re with us or against us,” he explained. “You’re either out at that strike or I’m going to paint ‘Sell-out!’ on your church door. That’s a good way to make enemies.”

ADVANCE TEAM
PCUN organizers traveled to California to greet the migrant workers who would work their way up to Oregon in the months ahead, handing out leaflets in several languages explaining the campaign. “We visited Fresno and Madera several times in the early part of 1995, because the strawberries come in earlier there and it’s a huge Oaxacan community,” Bicchieri says. “We took Oaxaqueño members of ours and we had flyers in English, Spanish, Mixteco, Zapoteco, and Triqui,” and supplemented the printed material with radio broadcasts. “Basically workers were reached by word of mouth, so they would do tons of house meetings, on Sunday go to the plaza and call everyone together--just hundreds of workers.”

The publicity efforts were so effective, word of the strawberry campaign filtered all the way to Mexico. Says Biccheri, “Workers were prepared to demand a higher piece-rate from the moment they stepped foot in Oregon.”

Back in Oregon, meanwhile, “even before the first strawberry was picked there was a huge amount of hype going through the valley. We postered every freaking telephone pole in ten counties—police were often coming by and tearing them down, and we would just go and put them back up again,” Bicchieri continues. “We had everything under surveillance. People came into the camps and we were there right away talking to them,” with PCUN organizers visiting 60 camps and apartment complexes before a single strawberry was picked.

STRIKES
The impact was immediate. By the time the harvest started, most growers were already paying one or two cents more per pound. But the goal of the campaign was higher still--15 cents a pound--so PCUN cranked up the pressure with two major strikes and a dozen work stoppages in 1995. The next year saw 24 more work stoppages to defend the campaign’s achievement, according to PCUN literature. “It was many, many work stoppages—workers would walk off for two, three, or four hours,” Bicchieri recalls. “That’s a lot for strawberries,” a fragile crop that must be harvested quickly.

The main strikes were organized at meetings in the camps, in people’s homes, even at laundromats. PCUN organizers would run through various options and make recommendations, but the final decisions were made by the workers in each field. Their arsenal was sophisticated. For example, most farmworkers lived in camps on a grower’s property, making them vulnerable to evictions. During a strike at Zoelinski Farms, workers presented a list of demands for improvements to their living conditions—taking advantage of an Oregon law that bans eviction of tenants while they are seeking property improvements.

Older workers would frequently be more militant than their younger counterparts, reminding them that they hadn’t received a raise in ten years. ”Those old-timers would come out and say, ‘I know that a lot of you say that if I keep my mouth shut and work hard that I’ll get ahead, but I can tell you that’s how I used to think. I’ve got 20 years in this valley, and got pretty screwed by the pesticides and hard work, and face it, what you think is just not true,’” Bicchieri says. “So it was, like, sooner or later we’re going to make a stand.”

Many of the work stoppages were spontaneous actions. “I had a bullhorn,” says Bicchieri, “and I simply asked how much they were making. ‘How much are they paying you?’ ‘Twelve cents.’ ‘How is it?’ ‘It’s terrible picking. Compañeros, let’s stop picking!’ And we weren’t saying anything, we were just doing a poll to see what the growers were paying them, and everyone’s pouring over the fence. That happened a couple of times, just taking a poll.”

The farmworkers also got a big lift from the support they received from religious people, students, organizers from other unions—“that made a big difference for the workers,” Biicchieri says. “They really felt like there was a big movement. Workers wouldn’t say, ‘I want to know we’re going to win,’ they’d say, ‘I want to know I’m not going down alone.’”

In fact, solidarity among the workers was so tight that it defeated several divide-and-conquer tactics. When one grower made an offer that most of the organizers thought was a great victory, a lot of the workers pointed out that it failed to meet their target and insisted on holding out for the higher wage—and so they did. And when Morehouse Farms offered the exact rate the workers had been demanding, but only on condition that it be accepted without PCUN’s participation, the workers replied they wouldn’t negotiate without their union representatives.

Bicchieri recalls, “They said, ‘Even if we don’t pick, even if we suffer more, we must show them that when we’re organized you will talk to the people we tell you to talk to.’”

Ultimately, Bicchieri believes, PCUN’s long-established presence in the area proved a decisive factor in the outcome. “Those workers knew they were not alone, period. Rain, sun, it wasn’t like we had special treatment and got to go stay in a mansion while they had to stay out at the camp,” he says. ”We ate together, hung out together, we did everything together. I’m not going anywhere and no one’s going anywhere until this is decided.”

[Teófilo Reyes, a former director of Labor Notes, is an organizer for the Transnationals Information Exchange, which brings together worker activists in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He facilitated the formation of the National Coalition for Dignity and Amnesty for Undocumented Workers and serves on the board of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras and the Executive Committee of Labor Notes.]