Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ) was born when migrant indigenous Mexican blueberry pickers refused to go into the fields of Sakuma Brothers Farms after one of them had been fired for asking for a wage increase. Workers then organized work stoppages for the next four years to raise their piece-rate wages. At the same time, they organized boycott committees in cities on the Pacific Coast to pressure Sakuma’s main customer, the giant berry distributor Driscoll’s Inc. In 2017, the farm’s owners agreed to an election, and the union won. Familias Unidas then negotiated a two-year contract with Sakuma Brothers Farms.

“We know this contract is going to change our lives,” says Ramon Torres, Familias Unidas president. “We have always been invisible people, but now our children will have the opportunity to keep studying. It is not that we want to get them out of the fields, but we want them to have an opportunity to decide what they want. Our members understand that we are not just farmworkers. We are part of a community.”

Since signing the contract, work stoppages have occurred on many nearby ranches. Most of those workers are also Mixtec and Triqui migrants from Oaxaca and Guerrero in southern Mexico, who now live permanently in rural Washington. Familias Unidas has been able to help workers in these spontaneous strikes. The piece rate for picking berries at Sakuma Brothers Farms has increased dramatically, with some workers earning as much as $30 per hour. Now farmworkers at other farms have taken action to raise their own wages.

“The wages on the other farms are much lower,” Torres explains. “So, our vision is to help form independent unions and negotiate contracts there also. Everything is led by the workers. The purpose is to grow the union, so that all of us have fair wages.”

Organizing Migrant Farmworkers for a Better Life

After winning its contract, Familias Unidas members organized the Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad. Rosalinda Guillen, director of Community2Community Development in Bellingham, helped workers form both the union and the cooperative. “Today, the production of food is based on how much profit a farmer or a corporation can make,” she charges. “Farmworkers are a cost. Growers do not invest in us because they do not believe we are worth it.”

But she believes the culture of indigenous farmworkers is a resource for developing sustainable agriculture. “Many migrants coming to the U.S. were farmers in Mexico and Central America. Because of trade agreements like NAFTA, they were displaced and moved north. Many are in the caravans and now in the detention centers in the U.S. But they know how to grow food with no chemicals, how to conserve water, how to take care of the land. We have to organize these farmers and see them as a resource because the corporate food system is poisoning the earth and the water. Farmworkers suffer illness from pesticides and broken bodies because of the pressure to work fast under bad conditions. The average lifespan of a farmworker is forty-nine years. Fourteen years ago, it was forty-seven years.”

A Cooperative Vision for Farming

In the eyes of Torres and the workers, the cooperative is an alternative for workers to the wage exploitation they have suffered since coming to the U.S. This cooperative uses the tradition of mutual help that is part of the indigenous culture of the workers themselves. “In the cooperative, we are educating workers,” he says. “We want to be an example. We do not need supervisors or managers. We do not need owners. We can be the owners – we just need land.”

Tierra y Libertad has just signed an agreement to purchase sixty-five acres in Everson, in addition to the two acres it is already farming near Sumas. Twenty acres are planted in red raspberries, seven in blueberries and four in strawberries. In addition to the handful of founding members, five more families are being trained in the cooperative’s operations. Last year, it sold berries in community food cooperatives, stores on Kamano Island, local fruterias, and even in front of churches after services. When the harvest begins in the spring, they hope to expand to other areas as well.

“We want a system in which we can live and buy locally,” Torres says. “Where our gains stay here in the county. At the same time, we will compete with the corporations that have been making money from us.”

Farm Work is Skilled Work

Basic to the vision of both Familias Unidas and the cooperative is the idea that farm work is skilled, and it should provide a decent life and respect for those who do it. One of the biggest obstacles, however, is the growth of the H-2A visa program that treats immigrant farmworkers as temporary labor, contracted for the harvest and then sent back to Mexico once it is over.

Companies using the H-2A program must apply to the U.S. Department of Labor, listing the work, living conditions and wages workers will receive. The company must provide transportation and housing. Workers are given contracts for less than one year and must leave the country when their work is done. They can only work for the company that contracts them, and, if they lose that job, they must leave the country immediately.

In 2017, Washington growers were given H-2A visas for 18,796 workers, about 12,000 of whom were recruited by the Washington Farm Labor Association (WAFLA). In 2017, about 200,000 H-2A workers were brought to the U.S., and in 2018, the number exceeded 242,000. “In the capitalist system, we are disposable and easily replaceable,” Guillen says. “The guest worker program is a good example. You bring people in and ship them out and make money off of them. It is time to end that. We are human beings, and we are part of the community.”

In the summer of 2017, seventy H-2A workers refused to work at Sarbanand Farms in Sumas, after one of their fellow workers collapsed in the field and later died. The strikers were then deported because workers with these visas have no right to strike. “The impact of this system on the ability of farmworkers to organize is disastrous,” Guillen charges. Workers faced replacement at Sakuma Brothers Farms as well before the union contract was negotiated.

Meeting Transnational Corporations with Cross-Border Solidarity

The flow of workers is not the only cross-border issue facing Washington farmworkers. Recently, two leaders of the new independent union for agricultural laborers in Baja, California’s San Quintín Valley visited Familias Unidas and the new cooperative. “Workers in Mexico and the U.S. work for the same companies, like Driscoll’s,” says Lorenzo Rodriguez, the General Secretary of the National Independent Democratic Union of Farmworkers (SINDJA). “It is important to form alliances with the workers of different countries. That is the only way we can face the companies. They are all coordinated. We must cooperate also.”

Adds Abelina Ramirez, SINDJA’s Secretary for Gender Equality, “Regardless of what country we live in, we have basic rights to education, to health care, and to the welfare of our children. If we unite and organize, we can win these rights.”

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History was made on September 12, 2016 with the election of Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ) to represent hand harvesters at Sakuma Brothers Farms in Washington state. FUJ is an independent union, one of only a handful of farmworker unions outside of California, the only state with a legal framework to oversee union elections and collective bargaining, and the first union to be led by indigenous Mixteco and Trique farmworkers from Mexico.

Hundreds of voters came to cast ballots at Sakuma Brothers Farms on that day. The paper ballots were hand counted before a small crowd including representatives of the farm and union as well as independent observers. The election itself and the formal recognition of the union, who won the vote 195–58, were historic.

But a quieter history was made even before that day. Just a week before the election, the farm and the union signed a legally binding Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) outlining the election process, agreements regarding public communication and conduct by both sides, and the contract negotiation process that would follow should FUJ win the election. Note that farmworkers are not covered by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the law covering union recognition and collective bargaining.

Creating a process took the better part of the summer and helped address concerns in a neutral and fair manner. For example, one of the non-union farmworkers raised concerns that he had seen a list of workers the union had. He was afraid they were counting workers who had never agreed to be union members. The mutually agreed on process covered such concerns, spelling out that the election would be by secret ballot and that eligibility criteria included the number of hours worked in the current season. Any lists, public statements for or against the union, or any previous commitments were irrelevant. Only the vote cast at the election mattered.

Though FUJ won the election by a wide margin, it was not unanimous. Fifty-eight workers voted against the union, either because they preferred no representation or would have preferred different representation. In addition, some workers did not cast a vote at all, many because, as migrant workers, they had already left the farm for the season. However, even those who voted against the union now have a democratic voice within the union.

The process agreed on by both sides ensures that the election was fair and that both the union and the farm will remain committed and accountable to each worker, no matter their original vote. The agreement does not guarantee that there will be no problems or disagreements going forward, but it does ensure a process for resolving any conflicts and grievances fairly. Without boycotts, strikes and protests, news coming from the farm may be quieter now, but what is happening there continues to be historic and newsworthy.

We asked Ramon Torres, President of FUJ, and Danny Weeden, CEO of Sakuma Brothers Farms, to share their perspectives on the process, as well as their visions for the future. Both speak of struggles — Ramon of immigrant farmworkers and Danny of the economic precariousness of running a family farm — but both also speak to hope for a brighter future for the farm and the people it supports.

A Story of Farmworker Justice
by Ramon Torres

Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ) came together to negotiate a contract with Sakuma Brothers Farms because we were facing many problems. Many of us are migrant workers, and our biggest needs are medical plans and good living conditions. Companies give us housing, but it is usually in bad condition.

We are not just pickers, we also have families. When people get older, they should not have to keep working in the fields. We want to give workers a pension plan and the chance to rest. When they get to be sixty-four years old, workers should receive a pension so that they can sustain themselves and not depend on hard farm labor.

Also, young people often start working at twelve years old to help their families pay rent and bills. We found out that the youth were only being paid 85% of adult wages. We think it is time to get the youth out of the fields and give them the option to study, at least until they are eighteen years old and can consciously decide what they want to do.

That is why we came together to form our own union. It is important to organize ourselves because we are farmworkers and specialists in what we do. And we clearly understand that the only ones that can lead us or govern us are farmworkers. Getting a union contract will improve our quality of life. It will give us the opportunity to get more involved in the community — and give us a voice.

One of the big milestones in our campaign came in 2014 when we organized and filed a class action wage theft lawsuit. Over 1,000 workers received back pay for the past three years. And thanks to this, there was evidence to go to the state supreme court and implement a state law granting that all workers in Washington state who are paid piece rate will now have a ten-minute paid rest break for every four hours worked. Si Se Puede!

Winning the election for FUJ to represent farmworkers on Sakuma Brothers Farms last September was an important step and an opportunity to work with people who have been invisible for a long time. It signifies that we will have independence. We won with 77% of the vote out of 253 workers there that day. We have nearly 700 members from different companies. As immigrants, we did not think this would be possible, but the most significant thing is that we are led by farmworkers.

Going forward, we want to help more workers from different farms to form their own independent unions and negotiate their own contracts. We do not want to represent all the workers, we just want to support them in forming their own unions. We are now working with some farms and organizing with other workers to decide the future role of FUJ in Washington state.

Beyond our region, the benefits of FUJ’s victory can be seen, as other companies are now offering medical plans, vacation time and wages that are higher than the legal minimum. We have arrived at the conclusion that many farms can provide for their workers.

We also think that we need to work with small family farmers as well. We have much in common, since we all live in the same communities, and the current food system hurts all of us.

Sakuma Brothers Farms: A Way Forward
by Danny Weeden

Sakuma Brothers Farms is a fourth-generation family farm with a 100-year history. When I was hired to be Sakuma’s CEO in early 2015, I was empowered to find a way to make the farm sustainable.

Farming has never been easy. It takes a lot of patience and persistence. Even in the best of times, it is impossible to farm without the right amount of sun, water and labor — and a fair amount of faith.

My first two summers with Sakuma have been the earliest and warmest on record in western Washington. As one of the few growers of late-season blueberries, Sakuma has benefitted from higher prices paid for our berries that ripen after the California and Oregon berry seasons. The longer and hotter summers have meant that our berries ripened while the lower-cost berries still flooded the market, with unprofitable results.

Like many farms across our nation, we have struggled with a shortage of workers to harvest our crops. Instead of relying on the H-2A Federal Guest Worker program, Sakuma has recruited from within the community by attracting qualified workers through good pay and a caring culture. In addition to good wages, we offer free housing for workers and their families who travel long distances to work in our harvest. Our employees have cited our housing as a major, positive factor in coming to work with us.

Prior to my arrival, Sakuma had become the focus of a movement to unionize by Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ). Unlike most private workers in America who can unionize under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), farmworkers are specifically excluded. And although secondary boycotts are prohibited by the NLRA, FUJ targeted our customer Driscoll’s in an effort to force Sakuma to negotiate a union contract.

It was not easy to respond to FUJ’s demands for a union contract. A statutory framework to implement such a process does not exist for farmworkers under federal or Washington state law. In search for a solution, and with the support of Driscoll’s, we developed our own process that allowed our harvest workers to choose whether or not they wanted to be represented by a union.
Through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with FUJ, we were able to present our harvest workers with a transparent process to allow a secret ballot election. A vote was held last September, and the employees chose FUJ as their representative.

We are currently in the process of negotiating our first labor agreement with FUJ. While this is unchartered territory, I am hopeful that these negotiations will be productive and successful.

Despite our optimism and a new relationship with FUJ, we continue to face seemingly insurmountable challenges for survival as a family farm. God has presented us with a strategic opportunity, an opportunity to come together in caring and cooperation to find a solution. From this, I believe Sakuma has an opportunity to be one of the best farms in America. I intend to do everything possible to make that happen, and I pray it will.

A BRIGHTER FUTURE

Hand harvesters at Sakuma Brothers Farms will start the 2017 season with a contract negotiated between farm management and elected union leaders. This is historic. But the process laid out to get there is just as historic, providing a model for other farms that wish to end labor disputes and determine what, if any, representation farmworkers want. The fact that the farmworker union and farm management came to an agreement on what makes a fair process is the true historic moment — and one that we hope will have ripple effects throughout the industry.

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Photo copyright: © David Bacon

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“We come to the U.S. to work because we can’t get a price for our product at home. There’s no alternative.”
– Rufino Dominguez, Director of the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants

When NAFTA was passed two decades ago, its boosters promised it would bring “first world” status for the Mexican people. Instead, it prompted a great migration north. In Oaxaca, for example, some towns have become depopulated, or now consist of communities with only the very old and very young, where most working-age people have left to work in the Global North.

Indeed U.S. trade and immigration policies are linked. They are part of a single system — not separate and independent. Trade negotiations and immigration policy were formally joined together by the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986.

IRCA set up a Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development to study the causes of immigration to the U.S. It found that the main motivation for coming to the U.S. was poverty. To slow or halt the flow of immigrants, it recommended that “U.S. economic policy should promote a system of open trade … [such as] the development of a U.S.-Mexico free trade area and its incorporation with Canada.”

The negotiations that then led to NAFTA started within months. NAFTA, however, did not produce rising incomes and employment in Mexico, and it did not decrease the flow of migrants. Instead, it became a source of pressure on Mexicans to migrate. The treaty forced corn grown by Mexican farmers without subsidies to compete in Mexico’s own market with corn grown by huge U.S. producers who had been subsidized by the U.S. government. In fact, agricultural exports to Mexico more than doubled during the first year of NAFTA.

According to Alejandro Ramírez, general director of the Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, “We lost 4,000 pig farms. Each 100 animals produces five jobs, so we lost 20,000 farm jobs directly from imports. Counting the five indirect jobs dependent upon each direct job, we lost over 120,000 jobs in total.”  Once Mexican meat and corn producers were driven from the market by imports, the Mexican economy was left vulnerable to price changes dictated by U.S. agribusiness and U.S. policy. “When the U.S. modified its corn policy to encourage ethanol production,” he adds, “corn prices jumped 100% in one year.”

NAFTA also prohibited price supports, without which hundreds of thousands of small farmers found it impossible to sell corn or other farm products for more than it cost to produce them. Once free-market structures were in place, prohibiting government intervention to help them, those farmers paid the price. Campesinos from Veracruz, as well as those from Oaxaca and other major corn-producing states, joined the stream of workers headed north.  There, they became an important part of the workforce in U.S. slaughterhouses and other industries.

According to Garrett Brown, head of the Maquiladora Health and Safety Network, the average manufacturing wage in Mexico was 23% of that in the U.S. in 1975. By 2002, however, it was less than 12.5%. Brown says that, after NAFTA, real Mexican wages dropped by 22%, while worker productivity increased by 45%.

The rosy predictions of NAFTA’s boosters — that it would raise incomes and slow migration — proved false. The World Bank, in a 2005 study for the Mexican government, found that the extreme rural poverty rate of around 37% in 1992-1994, prior to NAFTA, jumped to about 52% in 1996-1998, after NAFTA took effect.

In the U.S. political debate, Veracruz’s uprooted coffee pickers and unemployed workers from Mexico City are called “immigrants,” because that debate does not recognize their existence before they had left Mexico. It is more accurate to call them “migrants,” and the process “migration,” since that takes into account both their communities of origin and those where they travel to find work.

Since NAFTA’s passage in 1993, the U.S. Congress has debated and passed several new trade agreements — with Peru, Jordan, Chile and Central America. At the same time, Congress has debated immigration policy as though those trade agreements bore no relationship to the waves of displaced people migrating to the U.S. looking for work. Meanwhile, heightened anti-immigrant hysteria has increasingly demonized those migrants, leading to measures that deny them jobs, rights, and any equality with the people living in the communities around them.

To resolve any of these dilemmas, from adopting rational and humane immigration policies to reducing fear and hostility toward migrants, the starting point must be an examination of the way U.S. policies have produced migration — and criminalized migrants. But “displacement” is unfortunately an unmentionable word in the Washington discourse.

Not one immigration proposal by Congress in the quarter century since IRCA was passed has tried to come to grips with the policies that uprooted miners, teachers, tree planters, farmers and other workers. In fact, while debating bills to criminalize undocumented migrants and set up huge guest worker programs, four new trade agreements were introduced, each of which has caused even more displacement and migration.

Note: The ideas herein were developed from David Bacon’s book, The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013).

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