THE HUMAN COST OF A STRAWBERRY WAGE
By David Bacon
Civil Eats, 4/24/24
Guillermina Diaz, a Mixtec immigrant from Oaxaca, picks strawberries. She and her sister Eliadora support three other family members, all of whom sleep and live in a single room in a house.
Driving north on California's Highway 101 through the central coast, a traveler approaches the Santa Ynez Valley through miles of grapevines climbing gently rolling hills. Here humans have mastered nature, the landscape seems to say - a bucolic vision of agriculture with hardly a worker in sight. Perhaps a lone irrigator adjusts drip pipes or sprinklers. Only during a few short weeks in the fall can one see the harvest crews filling gondolas behind the tractors. Even then, you'd have to be driving at night, when most grape picking now takes place under floodlights that illuminate the rows behind the machines.
As 101 winds out of the hills, the crop beside the highway suddenly changes. Here endless rows of strawberries fill the valley's flat plane. Dirt access roads bisect enormous fields, and beside them dozens of cars sit parked in the dust. Most are older vans and sedans. Inside this vast expanse dozens of workers move down the rows.
From the highway, many fields are hidden by tall plastic screens. Growers claim they keep animals out, but they are really a legacy of the farmworker strikes of the 1970s. Then growers sought to keep workers inside, away from strikers in the roadway calling out to them, urging them to stop picking and leave. The abusive and dangerous conditions of strawberry workers today, and the eruptions of their protests over them, make the screens more than just a symbol of past conflict.
Picking strawberries is one of the most brutal jobs in agriculture. A worker picking wine grapes in the hills can labor standing up. But the men and women in the strawberry rows have to bend double to reach the berries. As strawberries ripen, they hang over the side of raised beds about a foot high, covered in plastic. In a ditch-like row between them, a worker pushes a wire cart on tiny wheels. Each holds a cardboard flat with 8 plastic clamshell containers - the ones you see on supermarket shelves.
Eduardo Retano plants root stock of strawberry plants.
The pain of this labor is a constant. Many workers will say you just have to work through the first week, when your back hurts so much you can't sleep, until your body adjusts and the pain somehow gets less. At the start of the season in March, rain fills the rows with water and the cart must be dragged through the mud. When summer comes the field turns into an oven by midday.
Through it all, workers have to pick as fast as possible. "At the beginning of the season there aren't many berries yet," Matilde told me. She'd been picking for three weeks, her fifth year in the strawberries. "The mud makes heavy work even heavier. It's hard to pick even 5 boxes an hour, but if I can't make that, or if I pick any green berries, it gets called to my attention. The foreman tells us we're not trying hard enough, that they don't have time to teach us, and if we can't make it we won't keep working. Some don't come back the next day, and some are even fired there in the field."
Mathilde didn't want to use her last name because being identified might bring retaliation from her boss, a fear shared by another worker, Juana. "Not many people can do this job," Juana told me in an interview. She came to Santa Maria from Santiago Tilantongo in Oaxaca and speaks Mixtec (one of the many indigenous languages in southern Mexico), in addition to Spanish, like many strawberry pickers living in the Santa Ynez Valley. She's been a strawberry worker for 15 years. "I have permanent pain in my lower back," she said, "and when it rains it gets very intense. Still, I get up every morning at 4, make lunch for my family, and go to work. It's a sacrifice, but it's the only job I can get."
Eliadora Diaz, a Mixtec immigrant from Oaxaca, picks strawberries with her sister Guillermina.
Low Wages, High Cost of Living
On April 1 the Alianza Campesina de la Costa Central (Farmworker Alliance of the Central Coast) organized an event timed to gain public notice at the beginning of the strawberry season. The objective was to pressure growers to raise the wages. The Alianza issued a powerful 44-page report, Harvesting Dignity, The Case for a Living Wage for Farmworkers, that documents in shocking statistics what Mathilda and Juana know from personal experience.
Those statistics reveal that the mean hourly wage for farmworkers in Santa Barbara County was $17.42 last year, which would produce a yearly income of $36,244 for a strawberry picker working fulltime, all twelve months. But this calculation includes the higher wages of foremen and management employees. Juana, after 15 years, made $16, the state minimum wage, and Mathilde after five years made the same.
In reality, their annual income was much lower because even working the entire season, they would get no more than eight months of work, and often less. At the beginning of the season there are not enough berries for 8 hours each day, so Mathilda only got 6 hours, or 36 hours in a week working on Saturday too. Juana's week in late March was 15-20 hours.
At the height of the season wages go up because growers begin to pay a piece rate, which last year was usually $2.20 for each flat of eight clamshell boxes. To make the equivalent of the minimum wage, a worker would have to pick over 7 flats an hour, and earning more than minimum wage on the piece rate means working like a demon, ignoring the physical cost. At the beginning of the season, "champion pickers can do 8 or 9 an hour," Mathilde explains. "but not everyone can. 6 or 7 is normal."
Fulltime work at minimum wage for eight months would produce $21,760. Out of her strawberry wages Juana and her husband, who works in the field with her, are paying $2000 a month rent, or $24,000 a year. Three of her children are grown, and the other three are still at home. "We have to save to pay the rent during the winter when there's no work. If we don't, we don't have a place to live," she explains. "During those five months there are always bills we can't pay, like water. By March there's no money at all, and we have to get loans to survive." The loans come from "friends" who charge 10% interest. "Plus, I have to send money to my mama and papa in Mexico. There are many people depending on me."
Sabina Cayetano and her son Aron live in an apartment complex in Santa Maria. In the spring and summer she works picking strawberries.
Mathilde and her husband and their two children share a bedroom in a two-bedroom house. Another family of three lives in the other, and together they pay $2,200 in rent. "Fortunately, my husband works construction, and gets $20 an hour," she says, "but the same months when there are no strawberries the rain cuts his hours too. It would be much harder if we didn't have his work, and we try to save and save, and look for work in the winter, but often there's just enough money for food. We don't eat beef or fish, just economical foods like pasta, rice and beans. And even with that sometimes we have to get a loan too."
According to Harvesting Justice, the median rent in Santa Barbara County is $2,999 per month. Using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's living wage calculation formula, the report estimates the annual food cost for a family with two children at $12,880, and the total income required for all basic expenses at $99,278. As a result, a UC Merced/California Department of Public Health survey found that a quarter of all farmworkers sleep in a room with three or more people.
This poverty affects all farmworkers in the state, in all aspects of life. Less than a quarter of undocumented field laborers have health insurance, and the Harvesting Dignity report estimates that people without immigration documents make up 80 percent of those living in Santa Maria. Because reporting bad conditions, and even more so protesting them, is much riskier for undocumented workers, having no papers affects survival at work as well. "In Santa Barbara County in 2023 there were two farmworker deaths," it noted, "both related to poor supervision and training. In one instance, farmworkers reported they were told to continue working in a Cuyama carrot field alongside the body of their fallen coworker."
Workers Calling for Change: The Wish Farms Strike
Santa Maria strawberry workers have mounted many challenges to this low wage system. In 1997 a Mixteco worker group organized a strike that stopped the harvest on all the valley's ranches, which lasted three days. More recently workers at Rancho Laguna Farms protested the owner's failure to follow CDC guidelines during the pandemic, and won a 20¢ per box raise by stopping work. In 2021 forty pickers at Hill Top Produce used the same tactic to raise the per-box piece rate from $1.80 to $2.10, which was followed by similar action by 150 pickers at West Coast Berry Farms. At the beginning of the next season in 2022 work stopped at J&G Berry Farms in another wage protest.
Last year, workers carried out a dramatic and well-organized strike at Wish Farms, a large berry grower with fields in Santa Maria and Lompoc, and headquarters in Florida. At the height of the season, to increase production the company promised a wage of $6/hour plus $2.50 per box, a rate they'd paid the previous year. When workers saw their checks, however, the piece rate bonus was a dollar less. They met with Fernando Martinez, an organizer with the Mixteco Indigenous Community Organizing Project (MICOP), which belongs to the Alianza Campesina. Martinez and MICOP organizers had helped workers during the earlier work stoppages, and urged the Wish Farms strikers to go out to the fields to call other workers to join. "We helped them form a committee," Martinez says, "and in a meeting at the edge of the field they voted to form a permanent organization, Freseros por la Justicia [Strawberry Workers for Justice]."
Strawberry workers on strike against Wish Farms, a large berry grower in Santa Maria and Lompoc Most were indigenous Mixtec migrants from Oaxaca and southern Mexico, but who now live in the U.S.
Workers say they discovered, however, that after they walked out the company brought a crew of workers with H-2A guestworker visas into one of the fields to replace them. The H-2A program allows growers to recruit workers in Mexico and other countries, and bring them to work for less than a year, after which they have to return home. Workers are almost all young men. Those who can't work fast enough, or who protest conditions, can be fired at any time and sent back. Federal regulations establish a wage for them, which last year in California was $18.65 per hour.
Replacing domestic workers with H-2A workers during a labor dispute is a violation of Federal regulations. Wish Farms did not respond to requests for comment about the strike.
Concepcion Chavez, one of the strikers, told me in an interview that "when we would work by the hour, the company was paying them [the H-2A workers] $18.65 [per hour], and us $16.25. Many of the workers who live here felt the company really wanted us to leave. We are always afraid they'll replace us, because they give a preference to the contratados [H-2A workers]. That's what the supervisors say, that they'll replace us and send in the contratados."
After two days strikers reached an agreement with Wish Farms and went back to work. In September, however, as the work slowed for the winter, Chavez asked if she would be hired again the following season. "In the office they told me they had no job because the company was already filled up," she recalled. "But when I went back to my foreman, he said the company had told him not to give me a job. That happened to other workers who were in the strike too."
Another Roadblock to Change: Union Busting
According to Martinez, "There were a lot of strikes until last year, mostly to challenge low wages. But after the strikes, workers usually don't want to continue organizing because the company brings in anti-union consultants. Wish Farms brought in Raul Calvo, who has been in other farms also. We've heard from workers that growers tell them not to participate in meetings with community organizations like us. They're trying to intimidate people, because they're afraid workers will organize."
Strawberry workers on strike call out to other workers to leave the field and join them.
Calvo has along history as an anti-union consultant. At the Apio/Curation Foods processing facility in Guadalupe, a few miles from Santa Maria, Calvo was paid over $2 million over eight years to convince workers not to organize with the United Food and Commercial Workers. After the union was defeated in 2015, Curation Foods was bought by ag giant Taylor Farms for $73 million.
Following huge wildfires in 2017, Calvo appeared in Sonoma County in 2022 to oppose proposals for worker protections. A coalition of labor and community groups, North Bay Jobs with Justice, proposed hazard pay, disaster insurance, community monitoring and safety training in indigenous languages like Mixteco, for farmworkers laboring in smoke and other dangerous conditions. Calvo organized a committee of pro-grower workers, who testified at hearings in opposition. An ordinance including some of the protections was finally passed by the county Board of Supervisors later that year. Most recently, Calvo was hired by the Wonderful Company to organize another anti-union committee to oppose nursery workers in Wasco, CA, who are trying to join the United Farm Workers.
Opposition to unions and worker organizing activity is one reason why strawberry wages remain close to the legal minimum, according to the Harvesting Justice report. One of its authors, Erica Diaz Cervantes, feels strongly that the wage system is unjust. "During the pandemic, these workers provided our food, even though as consumers we can be oblivious of that fact. So when the workers have initiated these strikes, it has put more attention on their situation." Diaz Cervantes is the Senior Policy Advocate for the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), which formed the Alianza with MICOP.
Nevertheless, the strikes haven't resulted in permanent worker organizations. "There are a lot of union busters who discourage workers," she says. "They win small improvements and wins, but always in the piece rate, never the basic hourly wage. And the actions don't go on longer because workers can't afford to."
Jamshid Damooei, professor and director of the economics program at California Lutheran University, and executive director of the Center for Economics of Social Issues, was a principal advisor for the report. "Profit seeking by growers is greatly responsible for the low wages," he told me. "If they can depress wages, the profit is greater. Unionization can help workers because the function of a union is to give them the ability to negotiate."
The Diaz family, Mixtec immigrants from Oaxaca, slept and livet in a single room in a house in Oxnard, where other migrant families also lived. The Diaz family are strawberry workers. From the left, Guiillermina Ortiz Diaz, Graciela, Eliadora, their mother Bernardina Diaz Martinez, and little sister Ana Lilia.
The Impact of H-2A Workers
But workers' bargaining leverage is undermined by their immigration status, he believes. "Eighty percent of farmworkers in Santa Maria are undocumented, and without them there is no agriculture. Yet the median wage, which in 2019 was $26,000 a year for farmworkers born in the U.S, was only $13,000 - half that - for the undocumented."
While undocumented labor is cheap, nevertheless strawberry growers in Santa Maria increasingly use the H-2A program to bring workers under labor contracts from Mexico and Central America. About 2 million workers labor in U.S. fields. Last year, the Department of Labor gave growers permission to bring 371,619 H-2A workers - or about a sixth of the entire U.S. farm labor workforce - a fourfold increase from 98,813 in 2012.
Growers provide food and housing for the workers, although there is a long record of complaints over crowding, substandard conditions, and enforce isolation from the surrounding community. Because employment is limited to less than a year, workers must apply to recruiters to return each year.
Growers say they face a labor shortage making this necessary. According to Western Growers President & CEO Tom Nassif, "Farmers in all sectors of U.S. agriculture, especially in the labor-intensive fruit and vegetable industries, are experiencing chronic labor shortages, which have been exacerbated by recent interior immigration enforcement and tighter border security policies."
This trailer, at 1340 Prell St., was listed as the housing for six H-2A workers by La Fuente Farming, Inc.
That is not the case, at least in Santa Maria, Diaz Cervantes responds. She says the 2022 census reported 12,000 workers in the Santa Ynez Valley. Martinez believes the true number is double that, and that 60% are Mixtecos. "I do not think there's a shortage of farmworkers here," Diaz charges. "We know it's a lot more because many undocumented people are afraid to be counted. There are always people ready to work and put in more hours. It's just a way to justify increasing the H-2A program. Overall there are a lot of local workers in the county."
What makes the H-2A program attractive to growers, Damooei says, is that "workers do not have much ability to negotiate their labor contracts. Their living environment and mobility are restricted, and they face repression if they protest. That has an impact on workers living here."
One recent case highlights the vulnerability of H-2A workers. Last September at Sierra del Tigre Farms in Santa Maria, more than 100 workers were terminated before their work contracts had ended and told to go back to Mexico. The company then refused to pay them the legally required wages they would have earned. The company's alter ego, Savino Farms, had already been fined for the same violation four years earlier,.
One worker, Felipe Ramos, was owed more than $2,600. "It was very hard," he remembers. "I have a wife and baby girl, and they survive because I send money home every week. Everyone else was like that too. The company had problems finding buyers, and too many workers." In March Sierra del Tigre Farms declared bankruptcy, still owing workers their wages. Last year Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, Inc., another labor contractor, was forced by the Department of Labor to pay $1 million in penalties and back wages to H-2A workers it had cheated in a similar case.
Bars on the windows of the complex at 1316/1318 Broadway, was listed as the housing for 160 workers by Big F Company, Inc. and Savino Farms. It was formerly senior housing, and the contractor built a wall around it, with a gate controlling who enters and leaves.
According to Rick Mines, a statistician who designed the original National Agricultural Workers Survey for the U.S. Department of Labor, "There are about 2 million farmworkers in the U.S., mostly immigrant men and women who live as families with U.S- born children. They are being displaced by a cheaper, more docile labor force of single male H-2A workers. The H-2A program should be phased out and replaced with a program of legal entry for immigrants who can bring their families and eventually become equal American citizens. We should not become a democracy that is half slave and half free."
A New Way Forward
As the strawberry season unfolds in Santa Maria, warmer weather will dry out the mud. The berries will ripen faster and become more numerous. It will be the time growers feel the most pressure to get them from the fields to supermarket shelves. It will also be the time Juana and Mathilde depend on each year to pay past bills and hopefully save for future ones. They will need the work. How the Alianza Campesina uses this moment could have a big impact on their wages and lives.
"Perhaps there are different ways to change things," Martinez speculates. "We've thought about a local ordinance like ones we've seen for other kinds of workers. A union could also raise pay and bring benefits and holidays."
MICOP and CAUSA are holding house meetings with workers, and a general meeting every two weeks. "Right now we're trying to popularize the idea of a sueldo digno [dignified wage] and explain the justice of this demand. The idea is to increase workers' knowledge. And since so many of us are Mixtecos, we're getting workers to reach out to their workmates from the same home communities in Oaxaca."
Alondra Mendoza, a community outreach worker for MICOP, talks with a farmworker outside the Panaderia Susy early in the morning before work.
Diaz adds that workers can see the labor activity happening elsewhere in the country. "Our report is adding to what workers are already doing. Whatever they do we're right behind them."
Mathilde has already made up her mind. "It's necessary to pressure the ranchers so they value our work," she says. "Without us they have nothing. We do all the work, so why should we get $2 or $2.20 per box when $3 or $3.50 is what's fair. People have to unite, and we need big demonstrations. I am willing to help organize this, because it will make life a lot better. I hope it will happen soon."
