BETWEEN 2013 AND 2015, Mixteco and Triqui berry pickers repeatedly struck one of the largest growers in Washington State—Sakuma. Berries and apples had made Washington a force in global produce, especially in Japan. And as the fruit market boomed, farmers drove their field hands harder and harder. Pickers labored without breaks, earned paltry wages, and slept in leaky bunkhouses, wet and cold when the Northwest rains fell.
Washington’s migrant berry pickers organized for years before the strikes began. Oaxacan migrants Ramon Torres and Filemon Pineda led the efforts. Sakuma claimed to pay $10 an hour, said Pineda, “but they demanded fifty pounds per hour to get to ten dollars. . . . Only workers who work fast could get that.” Workers said the company engaged in systematic wage theft. Sakuma insisted this was a computer glitch. The pickers were unconvinced: “These ‘glitches’ have been going on for years.”
Constant pressure to pick faster was aging them prematurely, they said. “When my body’s all used up, they’ll dispose of me (fire me or deport me),” one worker said. “I’ve been coming here to pick berries since I was fourteen. I’m twenty-five now. This company has taken my youth.”1
The pickers wanted $14 an hour, watertight housing, clean water and bathrooms in the fields. Basic stuff, but Sakuma would not budge. Instead they brought in seventy “guest workers” on temporary H-2A visas. Sakuma fired Torres and hired an anti-labor public relations firm to spread misinformation about the organizers. They asked police to remove Pineda from the fields and brought in TransWorld Security Services to ensure that union organizers stayed out. A global labor control outfit, TransWorld sent Sakuma a familiar figure—Rhett Searcy.
Security posts soon ringed the berry fields. Workers had to enter and leave each day through electrified gates. Armed guards patrolled the fields wearing uniforms emblazoned with the words “Food Defense and Safety Officer.” The “officers” quickly moved beyond the fields, following organizers, spying on families, recording conversations.2
The pickers sued Sakuma for interfering with their legal right to organize, entering into evidence a phone conversation in which Searcy had threatened force against strikers. Owner Steven Sakuma testified that he had never told Searcy to use force. The judge ordered Sakuma to cease and desist, to withdraw the security guards, and to let workers organize.
But before the decision, Sakuma applied for and was granted guest workers. When they arrived, the company laid off all pickers involved in organizing. The workers sued again. This time Sakuma was cited for lying on its guest worker application by saying that there were no labor disputes prompting their request. It is illegal to use guest workers to break a strike.
As the situation evolved, the berry pickers organized an independent union—Familias Unidas por la Justicia (Families United for Justice)—and demanded that Sakuma recognize it. They also reached out to friends, family, and comrades working in the San Quintín Valley in Baja California, where most guest workers for US farms are recruited. Pickers are connected all along the Pacific Coast, says Juvenal Solano, because “we have relatives in the fields everywhere.” Having followed the crops from Baja to British Columbia, migrants know the conditions on many different farms.
Solano’s story is typical. He migrated with his parents from Oaxaca after NAFTA made it impossible for them to remain on their own farm. Baja’s San Quintín Valley was their goal. The site of massive irrigation and desalinization projects, it had become the center of strawberry production in Mexico.
“I began work in the fields when I was seven. We started every day at four or five every morning,” he recalls. “They would drive workers in an open truck and you had to jump on while it was moving.” He remembers “running, and my father would reach down and lift me into the truck. Only people who made it to the truck would have work that day. You had to be fast.”
Living conditions were primitive. “There was no water in workers’ houses. We would take water from the irrigation tanks. My mom boiled the water as a remedy for bacteria. There was a lot of mistreatment and injustice, and very low wages.” Alfreda (not her real name), a Zapoteca migrant, says she had to “carry water like I was a camel. We had to buy gallons and gallons to drink, to bathe in, to wash our clothes.” Sadly, both say, conditions did not improve much over the years.3
By the twenty-first century, Baja’s industrial farms were growing more berries than US farms, earning fortunes for Mexican and transnational companies. Many Mexican state legislators were Baja strawberry growers, and so they got away with paying subminimum wage and not contributing to social security. Driscoll’s affiliate BerryMex obeyed state laws, investigators reported. But workers said picking quotas were brutal and the hours inhuman.4
Lack of clean water was what finally moved them to organize. “They say what they offer is safe,” said Alexandra, “but it tastes like pond water and it has green slime on it.” People get “a tremendous sore stomach” from drinking it. Decades of industrial agriculture had drained the aquifer till salt seeped into San Quintín’s groundwater. Workers’ children got sick when they drank it and developed rashes when they used it to bathe. In the spring of 2015, San Quintín pickers formed the Alliance for Social Justice. Their first demand was clean water.5
But they soon moved beyond that. The $6 daily wage that was standard in Baja berry fields in 2015 had not increased since 1994. The amount they received per box had last been raised in 2001. Still, a gallon of milk cost the same in Baja as it did in San Diego. Baja workers wanted a $13 daily wage, drinkable water in their homes and fields, and an end to sexual harassment and violence. And they wanted employers to start paying into social security, so workers could eventually retire and draw pensions.6
This was the first independent union Mexican farmworkers had organized in generations. Very different from the corrupt, government-dominated “yellow” unions that had long controlled Baja farmwork, it was strongly influenced by farmworkers’ activism in the US. Leader Bonifacio Martinez consulted with Sakuma organizer Filemon Pineda to create a “union that will defend our rights. We’re the same workers, and we’re talking about the same kind of union.”7
Other San Quintín organizers had worked for the UFW or for Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers. In the 1990s, San Quintín leader Fidel Sanchez worked in Florida, where he joined CIW. That helped him see how profitable a commodity berries were. He believed that big supermarket chains would press growers to improve conditions and pay more if they struck. (Indeed, Walmart would soon do that.) Sanchez also organized for the UFW in Washington’s apple orchards. “Cesar Chavez was an example I learned from,” he said, “that we shouldn’t live submissively.”
San Quintín activist Justino Herrera knew how dangerous organizing in Baja could be. His brother was assassinated in the 1990s building a union. Herrera was radicalized. He led a “work stoppage against an abusive labor contractor” in Oregon. Later he helped build the movement in Baja. Finally, there was Eloy Fernandez, sixty-five. He too had organized for the UFW, back in the 1970s.
These men urged Baja berry pickers to form an independent union, different from the corrupt unions that had long held power in northern Mexico. Indigenous identity was central to their organizing. “We’re not the Indian lying against a nopal cactus sleeping with the hat over his head,” Fernandez said. “We want to be heard.”8
On March 17, 2015, after farmworkers and government officials failed to reach an agreement, Baja berry pickers walked out of the fields. There had been food and labor protests in San Quintín before, but the 2015 uprising was like nothing Mexico had seen for decades. Over fifty thousand farmworkers struck, immobilizing berry production for two months.
Thousands of strikers soon shut down the Transpeninsular Highway on which Mexican produce is shipped to US markets. They staged sit-ins over 120 kilometers (about 75 miles). They piled roads high with burning tires. They drove a farm truck onto the highway, set it aflame, and left it there.
The twelve largest farms in Baja were paralyzed. Walmart, Costco, Safeway, and other large chains reported shortages of strawberries, tomatoes, and other Mexican produce. The strike cost BerryMex $20 million. Driscoll’s CEO, J. Miles Reiter, stepped down two weeks into the strike.
Baja’s governor came. The Mexican federal government sent police and soldiers who shot rubber bullets, teargassed workers, and made two hundred arrests to open the highway. The growers offered a raise but it was insulting, workers said, just one dollar a day more. Growers insisted the state’s produce industry would collapse if they paid $13 a day, as workers wanted. Thousands marched to state offices in anger. Their banners said: “We Are Workers, Not Slaves.”
To make sure that US companies got the message—especially Driscoll’s and Walmart—strikers rode buses to Tijuana and marched to the US border with fists raised. “We deserve a just wage,” they shouted. A few weeks later, some growers came back with a more respectful offer. Hungry, many returned to work. But thousands stayed out, insisting that the proposed increase was not enough. Strikers continued to block farms and roads, slowing the flow of produce north toward the border.
On May 9, Mexican police in armored trucks called tiburónes (sharks) roared down the dusty streets of Baja’s farmworker barrios. They stormed into houses and beat parents in front of their children. They shot into the backs of fleeing strikers.
Worker rage exploded. Strikers burned a local police station and occupied government buildings, calling for Baja’s governor to step down for sending police to attack workers. Again, they blocked a major highway. They set fire to fields. Like South Africa’s grape workers, they were unrepentant. Baja’s government only cared about them when fields were burning. Workers could smell the profits going up in smoke.
Sakuma workers joined their friends and family in San Quintín to organize an international boycott of Driscoll’s. “Why target Driscoll’s?” they were asked. Precisely because it was, as it self-identified, “the world’s berry company.” Distributing around the globe, Driscoll’s had the power to influence wages, hours, pesticide use, and pretty much everything to do with the industry.9
In June the strike was settled, and Baja workers got a 50 percent raise. The Los Angeles Times called the deal historic. While not the 100 percent raise strikers had asked for, it was far more than the 15 percent that growers initially offered. It brought Baja pickers’ wages to between $9 and $11.50 a day. Growers committed to pay into social security and provide some benefits. Baja’s government promised to enforce the agreement. Walmart offered to monitor.10
Since consumer pressure on Walmart, Costco, and Safeway had encouraged growers to settle, pickers along the Pacific Coast continued to boycott Driscoll’s, Sakuma, and Häagen-Dazs ice cream, the largest buyer of Sakuma berries. Like Florida tomato pickers and Vermont dairy workers, Sakuma field hands went on tour to tell consumers about the people who harvested their breakfast berries. Farmworkers and students picketed supermarkets. Seattle’s Puget Consumers Co-op, the country’s largest cooperative grocery, took Sakuma and Driscoll’s off their shelves.
In the fall of 2016, Sakuma gave in. They allowed a union election. Workers voted overwhelmingly to unionize. As part of the settlement, Sakuma paid $900,000 in back wages.11
Conditions also improved in Baja, but union activist Gloria Gracida Martinez said in the fall of 2016 that pickers there had not yet achieved justice. The long-term goal is for Driscoll’s to sign an agreement for workers on all “partner” farms from Baja to British Columbia. It’s a long shot but indigenous people think long-term, says Oxnard activist Irene Gomez. “We try to educate our community that you must speak loudly about your rights, many times—or nothing will change.”12