Epilogue

 

“And if any dues-payer asks, ‘When will it end? When can I knock off?’ the only answer is, ‘Brother, not till we go all the way.’”1

—Harry Bridges

The legendary longshore union leader Harry Bridges knew as well as anyone that nothing is permanently resolved when a strike is settled. It is a temporary truce in an ongoing struggle; its terms are no more than a representation of the balance of power between the contending parties at the time they signed off on them.

The field of “labor-management relations” is permeated with the jargon and mindset of the legal system. But there is a world of difference between a legal statute and a clause in a union contract. The former is supposed to lend our lives a measure of predictability, a set of shared expectations toward the civil authorities and each other. But a union contract, however vital it is to workers under its protection, is at heart a fragile and ephemeral thing, sensitive to any marked change in the economic and political climate. Its actual language is ultimately less important than what it says about the relative strength of workers and their employer.

A few days after the Watsonville settlement, I spoke on the phone with Jim Guyette, president of UFCW Local P-9, whose own strike against Hormel had ended when the UFCW placed the local in trusteeship. Upon learning that Watsonville workers would be earning significantly less than they made when they first walked out in 1985, Guyette wanted to know why their strike should be considered a victory.

Cesar Chavez saw it differently. Noting that Local 912 would be bargaining with the frozen food companies again in less than a year, he predicted that “next February and thereafter they’re going to be able to get more.” Chavez continued,

When they went out on strike they were totally disorganized. There was no rank and file leadership. . . . [But] when they went back in there was strong leadership and a real union. . . .

That union was revitalized. Remember, they went for thirty years without striking in that industry. These women in Watsonville have set a precedent. More than the money, more than the wages, is that they broke that long, long period of no strikes and no fight-back. . . . And the impact will be felt in the whole industry, by all the workers in the other canneries.2

Initially, Chavez’s prediction was borne out by events. When Local 912 elections were held at the end of 1987, Joe Fahey was elected president, and while the personal tensions between him and Sergio López persisted, the two would work together effectively in the years to come. In the same election Gloria Betancourt and Chavelo Moreno ran for business agent; she lost and would not seek union office again, but he was elected and served until he retired. Cuca Lomeli was elected trustee; eventually she would serve as Local 912’s vice president. And, just as Chavez predicted, the local won a forty-five-cent-an-hour raise in its 1988 contract, fighting off initial management demands for a wage cut.

The CWOP, now independent of TDU, saw its own work expand dramatically. Funded with a new grant from the Campaign for Human Development, it opened an office on Main Street in Watsonville. Over the next several years it held regular conferences that routinely drew several hundred workers from across the state. Reyna Guzmán and Chavelo Moreno served on its board of directors, along with activists from Local 890 in Salinas and two cannery locals in California’s Central Valley. Oscar Ríos was its paid organizer. Much of its effort focused on the struggles in the Salinas Valley, where workers were battling the same kind of takeaways that Mort Console had tried to impose in Watsonville.

But it was in the political arena that Watsonville’s cannery workers made their most visible and dramatic gains. In July 1988, the voting rights lawsuit brought by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund on behalf of Cruz Gómez and two others was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The city was ordered to elect its officials by district rather than at large. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the city’s appeal, and elections for a new city council were scheduled for November 7, 1989. All eyes were on Districts 1 and 2, on the older and poorer south side of town, where Watsonville’s Chicano and Mexicano population was concentrated. Oscar Ríos ran in District 2; Cruz Gómez sought to represent District 1.

On October 17, three weeks before the scheduled election, Northern California was hit by the Loma Prieta earthquake. Centered in the Santa Cruz Mountains some twenty miles from Watsonville, the quake did extensive damage throughout the Bay Area. Buildings in downtown Santa Cruz were reduced to rubble. A section of freeway collapsed in Oakland, killing dozens of people. Part of the lower deck of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge likewise gave way, terrorizing rush-hour commuters. San Francisco’s Marina district, built on reclaimed land, saw a barrage of fires from ruptured gas lines. The quake hit just as baseball fans in Candlestick Park were preparing to watch a World Series game between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s; the series had to be postponed.

So did Watsonville’s city council vote, which was rescheduled for December 5. Paule Cruz Takash, a Berkeley graduate student researching the election, noted that while the delay “did provide candidates with more opportunities for exposure, it also provided them with a clearer notion of the enormous tasks before them if elected.”3 The earthquake destroyed 1,000 units of housing in the city and left some 2,500 people homeless. Districts 1 and 2, with older and more dilapidated housing, were particularly hard hit, and “a community of new homeless moved into temporary shelters or outdoors to makeshift tent cities at two local parks.” The inadequate response of local and federal officials to the housing crisis became an issue in the campaign, particularly as Latino victims of the quake perceived that relief efforts had made them a low priority.4

Not surprisingly, both Ríos and Cruz Gómez threw themselves into the fight for more effective and equitable earthquake relief. The Gómez campaign appears to have suffered as a result: Jon Silver, who worked on her campaign, complained that the candidate was largely missing in action during efforts to mobilize District 1 voters.5 Ríos was more successful in integrating his bid for office with the struggle over the city’s earthquake response. He had the advantage of a large, effective campaign organization that tapped the energies of cannery workers and local Chicano high school and community college students; their dogged precinct work helped generate a threefold increase in Latino voter turnout in District 2.

Hopes for a united front of Latino voters were dashed by the lingering mistrust between Ríos and Cruz Gómez. Dan Dodge, a local activist of mixed anglo and Mexican stock, had initially supported Ríos until Gómez prevailed upon him to seek the District 2 seat himself. During the campaign the two of them made an issue of Ríos’s association with the League and charged that his campaign workers were registering noncitizens to vote. “This charge,” wrote Paule Cruz Takash, “was particularly ironic and disappointing to many, coming from a longtime champion” of immigrant rights.6

The attacks do not appear to have hurt Ríos, who won easily; he would go on to serve on the council for fifteen years, including four terms as mayor. Todd McFarren, an attorney who had worked with the Watsonville Strike Support Committee, won in District 4 and assumed the mayor’s office; Ríos would serve under him as vice mayor. María Corralejo, who cochaired the Ríos campaign, was appointed to the city planning commission.

Over the next two years the city council had a four-member progressive majority. But Cruz Gómez was not a part of it. She lost her own race against a former part-owner of Richard Shaw by just ­thirty-eight votes. Frank Bardacke, for one, believed that the failure of herself and Ríos to resolve their differences may well have cost her the election.7 The progressive bloc on the council consisted of Ríos and three white liberals.

The new council majority immediately passed a measure requiring bilingual translations of all council meetings, and began aggressively hiring bilingual staff for city departments. It curtailed city support for the INS. There was a 28 percent increase in Latino representation on local government commissions. Over time, Latinos would emerge as a force to be reckoned with in Watsonville politics; by 2004, three of the council’s seven members would be children of cannery workers.8

But the gains reflected in a more inclusive city government were overshadowed by convulsive changes in the local economy. Citing the experience of African American mayors in cities like Newark and Detroit, historian David Levering Lewis has spoken of “the futility of political power without economic leverage.”9 “Futility” is perhaps too strong a word, but Lewis puts his finger on a problem, and Watsonville provides yet another manifestation. The frozen food industry, backbone of the local economy since the 1950s, was about to undergo a drastic downsizing.

In fall of 1987 the Crosetti family decided to get out of the business. Their company merged with NorCal Frozen Foods, and several hundred jobs were lost in the process. The following year, Richard Shaw was bought out by Dean Foods, an Illinois-based conglomerate that marketed under the Birdseye label. With the Shaw sale, NorCal became the only remaining locally owned plant producing frozen vegetables, and it had always been David Gill’s intention to keep going only as long as it took him to recover his losses from the 1985 strike.

In 1995 Gill followed Shaw’s lead and sold his operation to Dean Foods. NorCal’s new owners “admitted at the time that they didn’t need two facilities in Watsonville, they had clearly bought the plant in order to shut it down.”10 The NorCal plant was closed within three months.

Green Giant had moved its remaining local operations to Mexico the previous year. In 2005 Dean Foods followed Green Giant south of the border, and the old Richard Shaw facility—which had survived mainly because it was the newest and most efficient of Watsonville’s frozen food plants—ceased production as well. The frozen food capital of the world was history.

The industry’s decline is often attributed to growing consumer preference for fresh vegetables. This view has at least some merit in California, where the proximity of rich farmland and large population centers allows for a formidable market for fresh produce. But demand for frozen vegetables has not disappeared. Far from it: there remains a robust institutional market for frozen food, which is purchased in large quantities by the military, schools, hospitals, prisons, and chain restaurants. Supermarket freezer sections still feature elaborate concoctions of “prepared vegetables,” whose share of the frozen vegetable market had already begun to increase dramatically in the 1980s. Watsonville’s plant shutdowns are best explained not by a shrinking product market but by changes in the labor market, brought on by the violent currency fluctuations of a globalized economy.

To understand how this happened, it is necessary to go back to the onset of Mexico’s debt crisis in the early 1980s. Traditionally, Mexico’s food processing industry was relatively small and produced mainly for a domestic market. But in 1982, with the country’s foreign debt spiraling out of control, the value of the peso fell by 80 percent. It suddenly became enormously profitable to sell north of the border; as Juan Borrego has noted, “the people who were in processing and exporting vegetables to the US became extremely wealthy overnight. . . . Other people saw the instant wealth that was generated at the time and they too wanted to get involved.”11

New frozen food plants began cropping up throughout the Bajío region of Guanajuato province. Most operated under the umbrella of US-based transnationals like Green Giant, Birdseye, and United Foods. Mexican landowners who produced grain for the domestic market realized that by switching over to broccoli and cauliflower, both labor-intensive crops, they could take advantage of the yawning labor cost differential between Mexico and the United States. By the mid-1990s, Guanajuato had emerged as a “winter garden” for the United States. Green Giant, then the only transnational corporation with a plant in Watsonville, had begun importing frozen broccoli from Guanajuato in 1983; within ten years it was relying almost totally on its Mexican operations.12

Passage of the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 all but finished off what was left of Watsonville’s frozen food industry. President Bill Clinton pushed NAFTA through a Democratic-controlled Congress where his Republican predecessor had failed to do so—over the opposition of organized labor, whose failure to stop the treaty was seen as yet another example of its declining political influence. Union opposition to NAFTA was couched in terms that were often superficial and occasionally xenophobic, raising the specter of Mexicans “stealing American jobs.”

Local 912, with its overwhelmingly Mexican membership, took a more sophisticated approach. Joe Fahey and Chavelo Moreno both travelled to the Guanajuato city of Irapuarto, where they observed conditions in the Mexican frozen food industry and discussed the possibility of cross-border organizing with representatives of El Frente Autentico del Trabajo, a Mexican opposition union.13 Sergio López made the case against NAFTA to a group of undocumented workers in San Jose who had been organized by the Justice for Janitors campaign. At one point a member of the audience pointed out that he had been forced to come to the United States to find work; he wanted to know what was wrong with US corporations setting up shop in Mexico, if it brought new jobs to Mexico and made it possible for him to reunite with his family.

“I grew up in Mexico,” López answered. “I went to school there, the same as you. I learned our country’s history from the same textbooks. We all know what Standard Oil did to our country. Let me ask you, when has US investment ever brought Mexico anything but grief?”14

And, indeed, once NAFTA had passed, its impact proved equally disruptive on both sides of the border. Not only was there a flood of US manufacturing capital into Mexico’s rural interior, but US–based agricultural conglomerates like Cargill and ConAgra were now able to dump their surplus corn on the Mexican market, driving prices down and forcing tens of thousands of Mexican small farmers off the land. The new army of the dispossessed drove Mexican wage levels down further and prompted a massive wave of emigration to the United States. Small plots were consolidated into giant corporate farms that serviced the frozen food plants in and around Irapuato, where the new regime of industrial agriculture and export-driven food processing drained the aquifers and polluted local rivers with untreated sewage.15

Watsonville was transformed as well. Pajaro Valley growers abandoned broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts and began concentrating on strawberries instead. Within a few years, half the US acreage devoted to strawberry cultivation was located in and around Watsonville. Most of this land was owned by a handful of anglo families, but by 1997 they were leasing their holdings out in small parcels to some five hundred local Latinos, who took responsibility for recruiting the work force and producing the crop. The strawberry fields required only modest capital but a great deal of labor, and both laid-off cannery workers and newly arrived immigrants from Mexico found work there.16

But it was nowhere near enough to counter the impact of deindustrialization on the town, whose population was growing thanks to a new wave of immigration. Plant shutdowns had crippled the local tax base, placed new burdens on city services, and pushed the local jobless rate to twice the countywide average. By the mid-nineties, more than one Watsonville worker in five was unemployed. As Patricia Zavella has noted, “Displaced workers who were often middle-aged competed with younger, more recent immigrants.”17 And the slow pace of rebuilding after the Loma Prieta earthquake led to an acute shortage of affordable housing.

City officials struggled to find solutions. Much of Oscar Ríos’s tenure as mayor was absorbed with vexing conflicts over land use. Real estate developers were less interested in low income housing than in turning Watsonville into a bedroom community for the high-tech mecca of Silicon Valley, some thirty miles to the north. Vacant and underutilized land was at a premium, and there was constant pressure for the city to annex adjoining farmlands and rezone them for development. According to Kim Geron, a political scientist who made a close study of the city’s evolving politics, Ríos’s task was made more difficult by an increasingly fragmented constituency: “The Latino community, which mobilized as one voice for political empowerment, did not coalesce around land use issues. The complexity of the issues involved, the bureaucratic delays, and conflicting pulls to protect farmworker jobs, while also providing more jobs for families and the larger community, has resulted in disunity and confusion.”18

Fights broke out over housing developments, a proposed retail center (opposed by Local 912 because it was expected to attract low-wage employers like Target), and even the construction of a badly needed high school campus to combat overcrowding at Watsonville High. An expanded retail sector promised to bring needed sales tax revenue into the city’s coffers, but the jobs it offered were a far cry from the union pay and benefits of the old frozen food plants. Many in the Latino community who were primarily concerned with job creation found themselves at odds with the UFW, which was organizing in the strawberry fields and aligned with both environmentalists and growers to block city expansion into agricultural areas.19

Ríos dealt with land use issues on a case-by-case basis and managed to satisfy no one. An approach that linked immediate issues with a long-term political strategy would have been welcome, but the League was no longer around to provide it. Though League activists who had migrated to Watsonville during the strike remained active in the community, the League itself dissolved in 1990, having failed to navigate the difficult transition from revolutionary agitation to an ongoing role in the nation’s political life. As for Ríos, he would eventually step down from the city council and devote himself full-time to his job as an organizer for Local 890 in Salinas.

Prospects for a transformed Teamsters union at the national level likewise failed to materialize as expected. Sergio López was one of those who pinned their hopes on Ron Carey, the reform candidate who was elected general president of the Teamsters in 1991 in a federally supervised vote. Carey was an outspoken and effective critic of NAFTA; he challenged the union’s entrenched old guard and encouraged organizing efforts by Latino workers in the Pacific Northwest. His administration made the notion of cross-border organizing seem like at least a possibility. But it all came to an abrupt end in 1997 when three of Carey’s top aides pleaded guilty to misappropriating union funds to pay for their boss’s reelection campaign. Carey resigned in disgrace.

According to Dan LaBotz, “Carey’s moral and political failure . . . had a devastating impact,” since it “discredited and ultimately destroyed . . . one of the most important advances of the American labor movement in more than 50 years.”20 Nearly twenty years later, Sergio López would still speak of it as one of the great disappointments of his union career. TDU, which had supported Carey, regrouped around Tom Leedham, head of the Teamster Warehouse Division. Leedham ran a strong but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to succeed Carey for the union presidency in 1998; Joe Fahey served as his national campaign manager.

No assessment of the strike’s impact is meaningful without some discussion of its impact on the strikers themselves, particularly the women. For many, it was a transformative experience.

Esperanza Torres became a paid organizer for the Teamsters and served for twelve years before being forced out in a union factional struggle.

Gloria Betancourt, who also applied for the organizing job but was passed over because “Sergio didn’t like me,” served as a Jesse Jackson delegate to the 1988 Democratic convention. After NorCal closed down, she clerked in a local chain drugstore until she retired. She remained close to Oscar Ríos and helped him out during several Local 890 campaigns.

Lydia Lerma’s son Santos became president of Local 912 after Joe Fahey retired.

Though Cuca Lomeli went on to hold more than one union office after the strike, she steadfastly refused to see herself as a leader or “big shot.” “I just represent the members,” she told an interviewer. She felt the strike had changed her just as it had broadened the horizons of all the women who went through it together: “I’m proud because I’m growing . . . in my mind, in everything. I travel to different conventions with the union. I learn everything in the conventions for the members—not for me, for the members. I share everything I learn with the workers.”21

Delia Mendez spoke with pride of her students who did their best to help out their parents during the strike, then went on to college and professional careers.

Esperanza Contreras noted that many of the strikers “had no education, no schooling—but they were the stronger ones.” She came from the same village in Mexico as Chavelo Moreno, whose family there was as relatively prosperous as hers was poor. When the strike ended, she embraced him. “I was always embarrassed to talk to you before,” she confessed, adding that their common struggle had “made us equals.” When Moreno died of pneumonia in 2011, she wept, saying indignantly that the doctors had not taken proper care of him.

With Frank Bardacke’s help, Fidelia Carrisoza honed her English language skills enough to land a job as an instructional assistant in the public schools, teaching special-needs children. It was demanding work, but it challenged and inspired her in ways that factory work never had.

Guillermina Ramírez, who played such a crucial role in the early months of the strike, was one of a handful who voted against the final settlement. Rather than return to work at lower wages, she went back to school, got a degree in social work, and wound up working for the county children’s services department. In the middle of an interview for this book, she suddenly broke down sobbing.

“Too many memories,” she explained through her tears. She did not elaborate, but perhaps it was her way of saying that much work remained to be done, and it would necessarily fall to others to do it.