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As last month’s heat wave peaked on a sweltering Friday afternoon, the scene unfolding in this farm town on the outskirts of Bakersfield, only an hour and a half, but two worlds, removed from Hollywood Boulevard, might have seemed to many like a sun-induced mirage.

Some 350 people, young and old, many holding the red-and-black flags of the United Farm Workers union, others lofting hand-lettered signs in Spanish reading “No more deaths!” and “Stop the Speed-ups!” braved the thermometer and trudged an hourlong path from a local park to rally on the patio of the historic St. Thomas the Apostle Church.

The crowd sweated and sucked on frozen fruit bars in the oven-hot church courtyard, as a handful of union speakers — including the near-legendary UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta — denounced the recent spate of heat-related deaths, called on the state Legislature to finally enact a long-languishing heat-abatement bill, and kicked off an organizing drive to win a livable field-worker wage of $8 to $10. The assembled hundreds punctuated the oratorical jabs with choruses of “Sí se puede!” and “Viva Chavez!”

It was a labor-driven political demonstration of enormous proportions for this sleepy village of only 12,000 people where most of the inhabitants’ days begin with a silent predawn ride into the unforgiving fields and then melt into the midafternoon, lazing in front of the room fan with a cold beer and some música ranchera on the radio. But one, no doubt, fueled by the banner headline in that morning’s Bakersfield Californian: “Farm worker may be the latest heat victim.”

The corpse of 40-year-old fruit picker Augustine Gudino had been found the day before in the triple-digit heat baking the local Giumarra Vineyards. For the previous week, the United Farm Workers had been scrambling to mount the rally to protest the heat-exposure deaths of two other local pickers in the past 10 days. It was by macabre coincidence that the third fatality was reported the day of the protest itself, adding an extra dollop of indignation and stoking the turnout.

“This is the first time in more than 15 years we’ve seen anything like this,” said Fausto Sanchez, a 34-year-old Mixtec community-outreach worker who works at the local office of the California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA). “I’ve been around here since 1988 and can’t remember any march like this.”

For those Californians who live outside the Central Valley, Sanchez’s wonderment over the UFW rally might seem a little odd. There’s a prevailing popular assumption that superexploitation of the state’s farm workers is a closed chapter in some deep, dark past. And that while immigrant fruit pickers and packers might not be getting rich, somehow the struggle of the late Cesar Chavez and his UFW had “solved” the most pressing problems of these workers and forever curbed the worst abuses of the growers.

But exactly 40 years after Chavez’s UFW exploded into the national consciousness by leading the great 1965 Delano grape workers’ strike and forced America to recognize the plight of those who put our food on the table, nothing could be further from the truth. The golden years of California farm workers lasted barely a decade and then sharply began to fade. “Since the late 1970s, it’s all been downhill, it’s all been on the defensive,” says Oxnard-based CRLA attorney Jeff Ponting.

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Marc Cooper, "Sour Grapes: California’s farm workers’ endless struggle 40 years later," LA Weekly, Aug. 12-18, 2005

[ 30 August 2005: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

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You’ve heard a lot recently about Giumarra Vineyards Corp., the world’s largest table grape grower with 4,000 peak season workers in Kern and Tulare counties. Two farm workers who died from extreme heat since last year labored at Giumarra.

But Giumarra workers have many other long-standing grievances. They are now engaged in the largest farm worker organizing drive since the 1970s. Workers vote Thursday in a state-conducted secret ballot election on whether to be represented by the United Farm Workers. Here are just some grievances Giumarra workers have voiced:

* Workers packing grapes into lugs, or boxes, being forced to labor eight hours a day on their knees with no umbrellas to protect them against the sun. Nearly all other table grape growers supply tables and umbrellas so packers can work standing up in the shade.
* Illegally requiring that newly-hired pickers labor without pay for several days, a week or sometimes as long as a month during a "probationary period."
* Workers disciplined by being made to "take a seat" or endure a "time out" for hours or even a day because supervisors are displeased with how they pack or pick grapes.
* Strict enforcement of quotas—picking a minimum number of boxes per hour or day regardless of the crop quality. Workers say carrillas, or speed-ups, constantly make them work faster and harder, even in extreme heat. Many don’t take legally guaranteed work or lunch breaks—or even time to drink water—out of fear they will be given time outs, suspended or fired for not making quotas.
* Low pay. Workers now earn $7 an hour, up 25¢ in July because of UFW pressure. The last wage hike was in 1992 except for increases in the state minimum wage.
* Workers complain about being illegally required to provide their own work tools.
* During winter pruning, piece rates are set so low that workers sometimes don’t make the minimum wage.
* Some workers say they must pay bribes to supervisors to keep jobs or work overtime.

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Click on the link below to send a message in support of the farm workers:

Union Voice - Take Action

[ 30 August 2005: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

What happens in the Fraser Valley is criminal, what happens in the Okanagan is reprehensible.

And I'm not sure the Canadian labour movement is doing very much at all about any of it.

Now they're bringing the workers in from Mexico on special permits. Canadians won't work under such brutal conditions. Rather than improve conditions, they prefer to look further afield for their workers ... who have to pay for their plane tickets out of what they earn...

WHY are we alway so much quicker to be shocked and appalled about the USA foul treatment of workers and so unwilling to look at what is happening here?

It's really important to rabble.ca -- and therefore to you, as babblers -- that our statistics are as good as they can be. Every time someone clicked on this "Sour Grapes" story from our front page, rabble.ca registered another hit. And that's good!

Speaking of which, here's a story from today's LA Times which sheds a little more light on the UFW's organizing efforts here:

Mark Arax "UFW Thinks Climate Is Right to Grow Its Ranks," LA Times 08/31/05

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DELANO, Calif. — The workers were eating pigskin soup under the vines when Lupe Martinez came calling at noon sharp, a bullhorn in one hand and a stack of union cards in the other.

"Come. Come, fellow farmworkers," his voice shot out. "We need to have unity. We need to fight."

The migrants, knees caked in dirt and grape juice, might have laughed at the union man coming to challenge their boss, the self-proclaimed "Grape King."

With his cowboy boots, Martinez stood 5 feet tall and weighed 200 pounds. He didn't walk so much as he rolled straight at them. And what he was here to pitch was a movement whose glory days were far behind it, a United Farm Workers union that hadn't delivered a major victory in these grape fields for 35 years.

Every morning for the last month, union organizers from Los Angeles, Watsonville and small valley towns have headed to the fields of the southern San Joaquin Valley. They have gotten more than 2,000 workers at Giumarra Vineyards to sign union cards.

It's enough to qualify for an election Thursday to decide whether the union, after a three-decade absence, will once again represent workers at Giumarra — one of the giants of California agriculture.

On the far east side of Bakersfield, 30 miles away, John Giumarra Jr. brushed off the UFW as a paper tiger. He said his company didn't need the union to meddle in its business. "Where have they been for 35 years?" he asked derisively. "Farmworkers don't buy into their promises anymore."

But Martinez, a lead organizer for the UFW and onetime tractor driver who likes to recall how he was plucked out of the fields in 1982 by Cesar Chavez, believes this summer is different.

As he made his way past the crew boss — a lady dressed head to toe in purple — he said he could smell the anger in the air. He raised the bullhorn to his lips.

"Are you ready? Are you ready to organize against Giumarra?"

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Sharon - I did not see this story when it was posted in "Netted News."

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I was pretty sure of that robbie_dee. It just gave me a chance to post that reminder -- and although it happened to be you I addressed, I hope other babblers read it also. It happens fairly often that people bypass rabble.ca and link to an outside site.