I have worked for Giumarra Vineyards for 8 eight years. I have seen most in this company is a lot of favoritism and much pressure on us workers. An example of this is when we do the job of tipping and removing the leaves from the vine. The second, Alejandro ( I do not know his last name) who is the assistant to the boss, helps his wife to finish her row, this way we are forced to catch up to them and this puts pressure because it is not the same one to have one person work on a row while they have two people work on a row.The same thing happens with our boss Eliseo Salazar. He helps his daughter in law so this puts more pressure on us. I get so upset because they help them and they want us to keep up with them but it is not the same having two hands working as having four hands working and this pressures us to keep up with them.
I have witnessed how three of my coworkers almost fainted from so much pressure in 2008, with the high temperatures and the pressure to keep up being so high, they have had to be taken to the car to recover and then to keep on working. And not only that, when someone wants to drink water, the boss gets mad. This was the case with my nephew, Artemio Gonzalez. When he would go out to drink water, the boss would say to him angrily, “ All of this leaving! It is a lot of time lost each time you leave to get water; get to work unless you want me to tell the Supervisor.”
This is the reason they put fear into the workers and we force ourselves no to leave for water, because when the boss tells the Supervisor they stop us from working from one to two hours. But if they stop us working after twelve noon, they stop us the rest of the day. When they stop us working, we feel fear and upset at the same time, because we will not receive a full paycheck and sometimes we will not have enough for our bills or rent. This causes us to be preoccupied that we might find ourselves on the streets for not being able to earn to pay our rent.
One time in the year 2008, during picking season, they sent us to pick in a ranch where the grape was very stained and yellow. For our bosses, this grape was useless. We did all that we could with our hands to clean this grape, me and my co workers. But when Salvador Giumarra , the owner of the company arrived, he did not like the job I was doing and he told us to clean it more. We did it, but we did it with fear and we felt intimidated. He was behind us watching as we worked and suddenly he grabbed the bunches of grapes with disgust and threw them into the tray. He started to yell at us that we were stopped for that day. In that moment we felt very embarrassed and humiliated. The whole crew knew who they stopped because the boss yells to everyone else in the crew that they have stopped a person, in this case me.
Everyone makes fun or begins to talk about one and it is very different when they stop one of their own family members because if we ask who they stopped, he responds for us to keep working and nothing happened.
In my crew, many things happen during picking season. First there is a lot of favoritism with the family members of the supervisor. When we are picking they do two checks so we don’t fall below productions. One check is at 9:00 am and the second at 12:00 pm. At the 9:00am check is where they pressure us to hurry. They threaten us that if we don’t do many boxes by 12:00pm they will stop us the rest of the day.
But they don’t check on the family members of the bosses or supervisors because the wife of the supervisor is one of the persons that does not do many boxes and when they check the list, she is one of the ones that is below production and the supervisor immediately gets in to help her so that she may be higher in production. But if that were us, that would not happen. To us, they would take away that days work.
I would like things to be different or for them to help us but no, what they do is take away two hours of work or the rest of the day. Preventing us from earning a little more money