GUADALUPE, CA – Strawberry workers went on strike against Wish Farms, a large berry grower in Santa Maria and Lompoc, for two days. They demanded that the company stop cutting piece rates and live up to promises of better pay.
Piece rates compensate farmworkers for a specified task completed or piece produced, as opposed to hourly pay. The system is legal in California though it is subject to certain regulations.
The workers rallied in front of the company office in Guadalupe, a small farmworker town near Santa Maria along California’s Central Coast. After trying unsuccessfully to negotiate with the company manager on the phone, they went to a nearby strawberry field and called on the workers there to leave and join the strike. Some did, before the company called the sheriff.
Workers then went back to the company office where they continued meeting. The company eventually agreed to raise the wages, and workers went back to work the following day. They decided to keep organizing a union, which they called Freseros por la Justicia, or Strawberry Workers for Justice.
The Central Coast is a major strawberry producing region for California in an industry worth nearly $2 billion statewide. California farmworkers produce one-third of the nation’s food supplies and 75% of its fruits and nuts.
Farmworkers across the state have been advocating for higher wages and better protection in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic and the growing impact of climate change on the agricultural sector as a whole, including the recent rains that hit large swaths of California last winter, leaving farmlands fallow and farmworkers without employment.
Beginning next year, California plans to expand access to MediCal to all undocumented residents in the state, including undocumented farmworkers, though there are concerns the income threshold will exclude large numbers. Data show nearly half of farmworkers lack basic health insurance.
Most of the striking strawberry pickers are indigenous Mixtec migrants from Oaxaca and southern Mexico, but who now live in the U.S. The company also brings in H-2A contract workers from Mexico. The H-2A system allows agricultural employers to bring in non-immigrant foreign workers to the US in cases where there is an expected shortage of available workers.
The strike was supported by the Mixteco Indigenous Community Organizing Project. People who want to support the workers can contact Fernando Martinez, (805) 940-5528, fernando.martinez@mixteco.org
Photo © David Bacon, used by permission.
