Portside

On September 16, 2004, Mt. Olive Pickles finally came to an agreement with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, ending a lengthy boycott of the company. This groundbreaking farm workers union launched one of the most successful organizing campaigns of the last 25 years in the South and demonstrate the continued vitality of farmworker unions in the present. FLOC was successful with these workers because they became a way for workers to express their own power.

For the state’s first hundred-plus years, certain unspoken rules governed California politics. In a state where agriculture produced more wealth than any industry, the first rule was that growers held enormous power.

For the past three years activists have been fighting hard for unionization efforts for farmworkers supplying berries for Driscoll’s in the United States and in Mexico. In 2014, workers in Washington state went on strike after complaining that the piece-rate wage was set too low. Sakuma Farms allegedly brought in hundreds of guest workers under a H-2A visa program to replace the strikers, The Progressive reported.

Many of 20th-century conservatism’s tricks were honed in 1930s agribusiness’s fight against farmworkers

Mythology has hidden the true history of how and why the great grape strike started, especially its connection to some of the most radical movements in the country's labor history. After 50 years that silence is lifting. Dawn Mabalon, a history professor at San Francisco State University, has documented the radical career of Larry Itliong, who headed the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), one of the two organizations that carried out the 1965 strike.

While the most dramatic protest this year took place in Baja California, the same anger is building among indigenous farm workers all along the Pacific coast, from San Quintin in Mexico to Burlington, an hour south of the U.S. border with Canada. Two years ago Triqui and Mixtec workers struck strawberry fields in Skagit County in Washington State. Two years before that, Triqui workers in the Salinas Valley rebelled against an inhuman work quota, and immigration raids.

On May 18 in Fresno, California, the state's Court of Appeals for the 5th District ruled that a key provision of the state's unique labor law for field workers is unconstitutional. Should it be upheld by the state's supreme court, this decision will profoundly affect the ability of California farm workers to gain union contracts. At issue is the mandatory mediation provision of the state's Agricultural Labor Relations Act.

Reader Comments - Obama and the TPP; Stop-and-Frisk; White Americans and Police Accountability; Vietnam and Anti-War History and the Ongoing Debate; Remembering Jackson State Murders; Greece, Organizing New York; Those Who Work in Customer Call Centers; Announcements - Immigration, Work and Wages - Washington - May 21; Film Showing and Discussion - Blood Fruit - New York - May 22

Hiring migrant farm labor is very profitable for big agribusiness. Last year workers walked out of the fields at Sakuma Brothers Farms in Washington - one of the largest berry growers in the state. Berries are big business, with annual sales of $6.1 million, and big corporate customers like Häagen Dazs ice cream. Here is their story.