September 22, 2017
CapitalPress.com
15
CapitalPress.com 15
Washington orchard
strike gets resolved
By DAN WHEAT
Capital Press
QUINCY, Wash. — Sev-
eral H-2A-visa foreign guest-
workers who went on strike
at a Quincy orchard are back
at work with assurances they
won’t be retaliated against
but with no guarantee of work
next year.
Seventeen of approximate-
ly 27 H-2A workers at W&L
Orchards nine miles south-
west of Quincy quit picking
Gala apples for five days in
protest of alleged bullying by
a supervisor for allegedly not
working fast enough. There
were other complaints about
working conditions.
“They took advantage
of our open door policy and
brought their complaints to
us and we listened and were
happy to be able to address
their concerns and get every-
one moving forward again,”
said Keith Larson, president
of Larson Fruit Co., Selah,
which owns W&L.
In response to their com-
plaints there were multiple
state Department of Labor &
Industries inspections and “no
serious violations brought to
our attention,” Larson said.
Three workers who were
fired have been reinstated and
a different person has been put
in supervision of the crew, said
Larson, who declined comment
on the validity of the com-
plaints.
An agreement was worked
out between the workers and
the company. Familias Unidas
por la Justicia (FUJ) and Co-
lumbia Legal Services helped
the workers, Larson said.
FUJ is a Burlington farm-
workers union that started in
2013 to represent workers at
Sakuma Bros. berry farm in
Burlington.
Larson Fruit agreed to not
retaliate against or blacklist the
workers, may hire them back
next year if they do good work
but there are no guarantees,
Larson said.
Larson Fruit hired the work-
ers from Mexico with the help
of the Olympia-based farm la-
bor association WAFLA.
The association hires firms
to recruit H-2A workers in
Mexico, arranges their visas
and transports them to the em-
ployer who hires them. WA-
FLA has arranged hirings of
probably about 10,000 H-2A
workers this year.
Dan Fazio, WAFLA direc-
tor, said the workers who struck
at W&L came from the same
state in Mexico and apparent-
ly were friends or relatives of
H-2A workers who struck at
Sarbanand Farms, a blueberry
farm in Sumas, after a 28-year-
old H-2A worker died there in
early August apparently from
pre-existing conditions.
Sumas is on the Canadian
border about 45 miles north of
Burlington. WAFLA is not in-
volved with the blueberry farm,
Fazio said.
Joe Morrison, Columbia
Legal Services attorney in
Wenatchee, said there is no ev-
idence the Quincy strike was
in sympathy or connected with
the strike in Sumas.
Morrison said he and FUJ
were both involved in Sumas
and Quincy but that workers
in Quincy approached Larson
with grievances before he and
FUJ were involved.
Complaints in Quincy and
Sumas were similar about abu-
sive foremen and work condi-
tions.
“Sumas should have been
a wake up call to the industry,
that a company should listen
instead of doing what they did
in Sumas which is to fire peo-
ple. A month later in Quincy,
Larson and WAFLA didn’t
learn from that. They followed
the same play book and to me
that’s incredibly disturbing,”
Morrison said.
The workers in Quincy pre-
sented grievances to Larson
Fruit on Sept. 6. On Sept. 7 a
Larson employee and a WA-
FLA employee visited the or-
chard and said a list would be
prepared of those who could
work and those who could go
back to Mexico, Morrison said.
Fearful for their jobs the
whole group went back to
work, Morrison said.
On Sept. 8 state L&I inspec-
tors arrived at the workers’ re-
quest. On Sept. 9 Larson fired
three workers and then all the
workers went on strike again,
he said. FUJ helped workers
in negotiations with Larson
and the company reversed
course, reinstated fired work-
ers, changed the foreman and
signed an agreement, Morrison
said.
“We were just motivated to
get everyone back to work. We
have a crop to pick,” Larson
said.
He declined comment on
whether worker grievances
were valid or contrived by
union agitation.
“Does Larson or WAFLA
have any proof FUJ was there
to trump up stuff? Why, if this
was trumped up, would Lar-
son rehire them?” Morrison
asked.
A Larson Fruit Co. attorney
told WAFLA that FUJ want-
ed WAFLA to sign Larson’s
agreement with its workers,
Fazio said.
“Normally, you don’t sign
an agreement where you’re not
a party to the dispute and are
not at the negotiating table,”
he said, explaining WAFLA
did not sign.
“I think the workers wanted
a guarantee to be hired through
WAFLA next year if Larson
did not hire them,” Fazio said.
“The H-2A program is a great
deal for workers and Washing-
ton employers have a well-de-
served reputation as tops in the
nation. I understand the work-
ers’ concern.”
Morrison said either Fazio
doesn’t trust his lawyer or
his client or doesn’t want to
pledge that WAFLA won’t re-
taliate.
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Photos courtesy Kyle Dunning
Holly Dunning, left, operates a canning machine with her sons, Brayden, center, and Parker, right, to
can the family’s estate-grown Pinot gris. Canned wine has surged in popularity in recent years.
Canned wine aimed at active drinkers
Sales of canned
wine have surged
in recent years
By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI
Capital Press
The Dunning family will
break from tradition upon in-
troducing their estate-grown
Pinot gris later this year — the
wine will debut in cans rather
than bottles.
The idea is to target the
“active wine drinker” who
prefer not to lug around a
heavy 750-milliliter glass bot-
tle on hikes and other outdoor
adventures, said Kyle Dun-
ning, the family’s patriarch.
“There are places you
can’t take a bottle where you
can take a can,” Dunning said.
Kyle and his wife, Holly,
planted the first grape vines
on their property near Corval-
lis, Ore., in 1990, back when
their two sons, Parker and
Brayden, were still young-
sters.
Since then, the family has
mostly harvested and sold
grapes to winemakers, but
they’ve recently taken steps
to become more vertically in-
tegrated.
Last year, their two grown
sons launched a mobile bot-
tling and canning service
under the “Knotty Brothers”
brand, under which the fami-
A can of Knotty Brothers wine,
which is produced by the Dun-
ning family from grapes grown
on their property near Corvallis,
Ore. Canned wine has surged
in popularity in recent years.
ly’s wine will also be sold.
About 350 cases of the
wine cans were fermented by
winemaker Joe Dobbes from
grapes that were harvested
from the family’s vineyard
last year.
The Dunnings have a
ready-made clientele for the
product among the wineries,
breweries and cideries across
Eastern Oregon and Idaho
that contract with Knotty
Brothers for bottling and can-
ning services.
Cans offer convenient por-
tion control, as each holds the
equivalent of two wine glass-
es, said Holly. With a 750-mil-
liliter bottle, consumers must
either commit to drinking the
whole thing or risk degrading
the quality of leftover wine by
exposing it to oxygen.
For breweries, the cans
provide an opportune serving
container, so they don’t have
to invest in glasses, said Park-
er. “They don’t need to do
anything to sell our wine.”
Many sports arenas and
parks don’t allow glass bot-
tles but can be entered with
cans, which are also simple
to recycle, said Robert Zarate,
a canning consulant hired by
the Dunnings.
“It’s growing for sure. It’s
getting big,” he said.
Between 2012 and 2016,
sales of canned wine surged
from less than $2 million to
more than $14 million in the
U.S., according to the Nielsen
research company.
That’s still only about 1
percent of the total wine mar-
ket, but “portability” is seen
as a big plus, with 73 percent
of consumers saying easy-to-
carry containers are important
to them, according to Nielsen.
Canning wine involves a
somewhat different process
than canning beer, since the
federal government requires a
slightly larger can size — the
equivalent of half a bottle, or
roughly 12.5 fluid ounces.
The cans are also lined
with a polymer coating to pre-
vent wine from eating away at
the aluminum container, since
it’s more acidic than beer.
Also, each can must be
dosed with nitrogen gas to
replace oxygen, which spoils
wine over time.
(See answers in Class 570)