FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For information: Richard Greer, 202-637-5279
Statement of John J. Sweeney
President of the AFL-CIO
On the "union" election at Coastal Berry Co.
July 23, 1998
The decision by the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board to permit a so-called union election at Coastal Berry, the largest employer of strawberry workers, makes a laughingstock of laws designed to ensure that farm workers have the most basic of rights.
By acquiescing to an election on the basis of a petition from an employer-controlled "union," the ALRB has allowed itself to play into the schemes of the $600-million a year strawberry industry and its cohorts in agribusiness.
If any group of workers in this country should be able to look to a union to improve their lives, it‘s California strawberry workers. For back-breaking sunrise-to-sunset days, they earn poverty wages. Benefits like health care or a paid holiday are rare. And respect – for work, for heritage and the immigrant‘s dream of making a better life C is more rare.
In the face of a broad movement by tens of thousands of consumers and union members to support strawberry workers and counter the strawberry growers‘ generations-long grip, the strawberry industry has resorted to reprehensible tactics.
The strawberry industry has spent a small fortune to crush workers‘ expectations and block their efforts to organize a union with the United Farm Workers. As agribusiness has done in the past when farm workers organized unions to improve their lives, the strawberry industry has bankrolled phony opposition groups, spent huge sums on a public relations operation and run their fields like fortresses with tools of violence.
The industry has used the threat of thugs advancing with lead pipes on co-workers, of fields being plowed under in retaliation for joining a union, and of intimidation to create a moment when fear overcomes the most basic of rights.
This isn‘t a union election. It is a modern-day "harvest of shame".
It is also another reason why strawberry workers will continue organizing a real union. Workers, the UFW and the AFL-CIO will continue with the long-term work of transforming an industry from a feudal system in which a handful hold a tight grip to reap all the profits into a system that benefits both strawberry workers and the growers they make successful.
In the strawberry fields, workers say to each other, "Con unión se vive mejor"- with the union, a better life. They mean a real union.
This ALRB decision is wrong and it is being challenged. Phony front groups financed by strawberry companies and agribusiness lobbies will continue to be exposed. And strawberry workers will continue to fight for security, fairness and justice, and for the right to join together in a union to improve their lives.
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