The 1800 workers at two Watsonville, California canneries went on strike in 1985. They were almost all Hispanic women. About half were single mothers. Even in 1985, $6 an hour was a crappy wage. But the canneries had just cut their wages from $6.66 to about $5 an hour. National unemployment was around 10%, and even higher in the Watsonville area.
Yet every single one of those poorly paid workers walked out, and during that eighteen-month strike, not a single worker crossed the picket lines and went back into the canneries.
They moved in with each other and cooked for each other. They looked after each other’s children. They shared food and clothes and money. But they did not break their strike, not a single one, for almost two years.
For over a century, California agriculture produced massive amounts of fruits and vegetables. Thousands of field hands picked those crops, and thousands of workers in packinghouses and canneries cleaned, trimmed, and packed everything from lettuce to broccoli to artichokes into the pretty arrangements and colorful cans that tempt the grocery store shoppers.
Many people know that farm workers’ lives are physically hard, with low wages. The workers in the canneries fared little better. In the 1930s, communist-led mass uprisings among food processing workers triggered mass strikes of thousands of workers, marked by police assaults and murders, use of anti-labor spies, and oppressive court injunctions against striking.
To thwart those activist labor organizations, some growers sought out a docile union and signed their low-wage, unenforced contracts, often with the Teamsters. Those agreements, called “sweetheart contracts,” remained in place for decades, and kept more militant unions away.
But in Watsonville in 1985, those 1800 cannery workers rose up as one, battled for control of their local union, and waged an unexpected strike.
I first met the Watsonville workers a year before their strike, at a Teamster for a Democratic Union (TDU) convention in Los Angeles. TDU is a rank-and-file group of teamsters who were dedicated to restoring democracy into what was then a union tainted with hoodlums and do-nothing officers.
TDU had installed a couple dozen headphone sets in one seating section, that translated the convention proceedings into Spanish. That was neat, looking at the group of Hispanic folks listening through their earphones, just like the United Nations.
A couple of older white teamsters I knew from the anti-war days, who were also from Watsonville, explained to me later that the teamsters union officers had signed very poor contracts for the cannery workers.
But attending the TDU convention inspired the cannery workers, they went back to Watsonville, and got a reform candidate elected to one of the seven union positions.
Just a few months later, most of the union membership was out on strike.
Frank Bardacke, a Watsonville union activist, provides a valuable history of the strike in his account titled The Workers United, published in the October 1995 issue of El Andar Magazine, and on line at http://www.elandar.com/....
I’ve paraphrased part of Bardacke’s article below.
“Strike defections are not questions of morale. When a company can win back a significant minority of its experienced workers, those workers can restore production and defeat a strike. During the Watsonville Canning strike, however, the whole packaging operation was a shambles.
We forget that people are necessary to produce things. The machines inside factories do not run themselves. Skilled people set them up and fix them when they break down. They learn the machines’ quirks, ignore the official adjusting screw on top and bang the machine in the right spot to keep it going. This knowledge is hardly ever 'shared' with supervisory personnel. The workers guard it jealously.
A new recruit can become an average broccoli trimmer in a couple of weeks, among an experienced crew ready both to teach and to cover for a beginner's mistakes. Just moving your hands skillfully is only part of the job. What's tough is standing on the hard wet concrete for twelve-hour shifts, with the deafening noise, the endless movement of the product on the belt, the pressure from the floorladies and the chicken-shit company rules.
All that is bad for $6.66 an hour plus medical benefits and a week's paid vacation. But when you have to be bused in with police escorts, or return to the parking lot and find your car with four punctured tires, and when you make only $5.05 an hour with no benefits and no job security, the job becomes a poor deal indeed.
Scabs would work for a few weeks and quit. Wells Fargo had been financing this attempt to bust the union, but not even a big bank could save the canneries from the truth that it needed its regular workforce to make the plant run.
The refusal to scab was made at great sacrifice by most workers. Not only did people lose their weekly checks (for most workers around $250 in mid-season) but unemployment benefits ended, women had their AFDC checks taken away, and only a few people got food stamps or other welfare.
Times were especially hard for the single mothers-an incredible 40 per cent of the strikers-and for the many families where both parents were on strike. Hundreds lost whatever savings they had; scores lost their homes or whatever else they were buying on time, like furniture and cars. Families were forced to double up or even treble up.
The frozen food workers all lived and worked in the same community, went to the same churches, had children in the same schools, played and watched soccer games in the same parks. Large numbers of strikers were actually related to each other, members of the same extended families. Families were used to a level of cooperation practically forgotten in metropolitan Anglo culture.”
After six months on strike, the Richard Shaw cannery gave in and renewed the union contract, cutting wages from $6.66 to $5.46, rather than the original demand of $5.05/hour. That was bad enough. However, low prices from Central American canneries and food processors had severely undercut domestic operations, and six of the eight area canneries had already closed.
The bravest 1000 workers fought against the hold-out, Watsonville Cannery for another year, Then Well Fargo called in the company’s credit line, and Watsonville Cannery was bankrupt. The new cannery owner quickly signed a Teamsters contract, although it still had wage cuts. But there were no health benefits. Even after eighteen months on strike, the workers voted the contract down and began their own unauthorized “wildcat” strike, against the union officers’ urgings.
This lead to one of the most remarkable demonstrations in US labor history. These Hispanic women set out on a “peregrinacion.” Many people know about Farmworkers Union founder Cesar Chavez, whose own peregrinacion (pilgrimage) included walking 300 miles from the farm fields to Sacramento, the State Capitol.
The cannery workers’ peregrinacion was only for a mile or two. But they walked the whole distance on their knees.
The next day, several of the women began walking, on their knees, the mile or more between the cannery and the nearest Catholic Church. They would inch forward on their knees, on a cloth spread in front of them, to protect their knees from the paved road. They would reach the end of the cloth. Their sisters would move the cloth. The women would inch forward a few feet to the end of the cloth. The cloth would be moved. They would struggle another few feet, surrounded by their neighbors, many of whom carried pictures of Mother Mary, Jesus, and the Saints.
The women meant to humble themselves before their neighbors, before the cannery bosses and the cannery attorneys (who were also Catholics) and before their God, in an effort to demonstrate their worthiness to have their health care benefits restored. Few could watch this solemn, painfully slow, dignified procession without breaking into tears. I cried my eyes out.
The company owners and their attorneys were panicking at the thought of what would happen when the women eventually reached the Catholic Church where the bosses and their attorneys actually worshipped. How could you turn them away? And if you let them in, how could you deny them health benefits, after they’d come a mile on their knees?
After a day-long procession, the women arrived at the church, which welcomed them in.
Later, the company agreed to restore the health benefits.
It was a great victory when it happened. In retrospect, it was a stalemate that allowed some workers to keep their jobs and some of their benefits for a few more years. The structural changes in the international economy, that allowed production and importation of cheap produce from Central America, eventually wiped out a total of 5000 cannery jobs, just in Watsonville.
One lasting impact was the Teamster local in Watsonville became a real union. The local now has a far more engaged membership, although their numbers are greatly reduced with the losses of the cannery jobs.
At the time, I, along with countless other, harshly criticized the Teamster leadership for its tepid strike support. Years later, the karmic wheel spun, and I am currently advising workers in an industry where most of the companies have closed and fled to China and vicinity. What do you say to folks who insist on striking for a big raise, when 75% of their industry has already shuttered its facilities and fled offshore, and foreign competition charges half of what their employer charges, for the same products?
And what should the teamster union leaders have said to the Watsonville workers, when six of the eight canneries had already closed? Let’s strike the last two canneries and kill those 1800 jobs, too? Or take another wage cut, and hope against hope that the industry stabilizes and those jobs remain? In retrospect, both choices were doomed.
The Teamsters did pay the cannery strikers $50,000 to $90,000 in strike benefits every week for 70 weeks, or roughly $4 million in strike benefits, even at $55/week per worker. The Teamsters also reportedly pressured Wells Fargo to pull the line of credit from Watsonville Cannery, which bankrupted the company, and resulted in new owners who signed the union contract.