UFW Launches Organizing Drive in Ventura County

The United Farm Workers union has kicked off its Ventura County campaign to organize thousands of strawberry pickers as part of a statewide effort to bring 20,000 new members into the rejuvenated union.

About half a dozen UFW recruiters talked with pickers and handed out leaflets at three Oxnard-area farms Tuesday and Wednesday, the first flurry of activity in an uphill effort to organize an estimated 2,000 or more local laborers.

“It’s going pretty good,” said Gilberto Rodriguez, manager of the UFW’s Oxnard office. “We’re encouraged. We tell them about the big march we had in Watsonville [in April], and we ask them how they are treated.”

The union has served 13 local strawberry growers--about half the total--with notices required by the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board so organizers can come onto private property to speak with workers, Rodriguez said. The others will be served in the days to come, he said.

The growers, however, are not worried about the UFW’s efforts so far, said Rob Roy, president and general counsel of the Ventura County Agricultural Assn.

“We’ve had reports that a lot of workers didn’t even stop to talk,” Roy said. “Others threw their leaflets back at them and others threw them in the trash can.”

Ventura County would be no small prize for the UFW, trailing only the Watsonville-Salinas area in strawberry production with about 4,500 acres and a sales value of $149 million in 1995, the most recent figures available.

But Roy said the UFW has made almost no inroads into the strawberry industry statewide, winning only three elections to represent pickers since 1975.

Two of those cases were in Ventura County--one in 1977 and another in 1995--and the third was in the Salinas Valley. In each case, the company either went out of business or stopped growing strawberries, he said.

In the 1995 union victory, most of about 600 workers at Ocean View Produce in Oxnard voted to join. But the company, a subsidiary of Dole Food Co., plowed under its strawberries and laid off 450 workers, saying it hadn’t made money on the crop for years.

For the state to call an election, the union must submit signatures of support from more than half of a company’s workers.

The UFW represents only a tiny fraction of Ventura County’s agricultural work force, holding just two contracts and representing about 125 workers.

But Rodriguez said he believes there are plenty of issues that will resonate with local pickers, such as fresh water and toilets in the fields, health insurance and pay.

Many laborers do not earn an hourly wage, working instead for so much money per crate of strawberries picked, Rodriguez said. And that has far-reaching health consequences.

“They work very, very hard,” he said. “Your body is tired but you have to support your family.”

Under union representation, the workers would get higher hourly wages so they would not have to opt to be paid by the crate, he said.

Roy said Ventura County strawberry growers have excellent records in training workers, providing sanitary conditions in the field and paying good wages. Pickers generally prefer to harvest strawberries on a piece rate because some can fill more than 100 crates at $1.35 each in a typical day, he said. “One of my clients just told me he has guys making $150 a day.”

But many strawberry pickers earn far less than $100 a day. The most recent state figures show the average strawberry worker making $6.44 an hour, the second-lowest of 19 categories of agricultural workers.