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July 7, 2017 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
Farmworkers ratify historic first union contract
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Paula
After a four-year campaign, 200
Washington farmworkers get $15
an hour and job protections.
By Don McIntosh
An independent union of North-
west Washington farmworkers
pulled off a remarkable achieve-
ment June 15: They ratified their
first-ever union contract, which
will raise wages for about 200
farmworkers at the giant Sakuma
Brothers berry farm.
The contract is the culmina-
tion of a four-year struggle that
began with strikes at the farm,
and escalated into a multi-state
boycott campaign targeting
Driscoll Berries, which buys
most of what Sakuma Brothers
produces. Sakuma Brothers
grows strawberries, blueberries,
blackberries, and raspberries in
the Skagit Valley, about an hour
north of Seattle. The union —
Familias Unidas por la Justicia
(Families United for Justice) —
suspended the boycott last Sep-
tember when Sakuma Brothers
agreed to a process for holding a
union election and negotiating a
collective bargaining agreement.
Familias Unidas spokesperson
Maru Mora Villalpando says the
new contract delivers what
workers set out to achieve: $15
an hour, and protection against
unfair discipline. The contract
sets a floor of $12 an hour, one
dollar above Washington’s cur-
rent minimum wage. Piece rates
are then set for each kind of berry
— for example, $4.25 per tray of
blackberries — so that workers
will earn on average $15 an hour.
Workers will also have seniority
rights in hiring and layoff. And
they’ll have standard union “just
cause” protection, meaning that
the employer has to have a fair
reason, and document it, for dis-
ciplining a worker, and workers
have the right to have a union
representative defend them. The
contract will run two years,
through June 2019.
Villalpando said Sakuma
Brothers workers ratified the
contract by an 85 percent mar-
gin. The agreement came just in
time — days before the begin-
ning of berry-picking season.
Had the two sides not reached a
deal, the contract would have
been settled by binding arbitra-
tion under the agreement they
reached last September.
The overwhelming majority
of the union’s members speak
neither English or Spanish, Vil-
lalpando said; they are indige-
nous speakers of Mixtec and
Triqui from the Mexican states
of Oaxaca and Guerrero. Famil-
ias Unidas is an independent la-
bor organization that claims
about 500 farmworker members
in the Skagit Valley. It’s not part
of United Farm Workers, but has
been affiliated with the Washing-
ton State Labor Council, AFL-
CIO, since 2015.
It’s exceedingly rare for farm
workers to be covered by a union
contract, and there are only one
or two other farmworker union
contracts in Washington. Farm-
workers were specifically ex-
cluded from coverage under the
1935 National Labor Relations
Act, which regulates private sec-
tor unionization, so farm em-
ployers have no legal obligation
to recognize or bargain with
unions — except in California,
which has had a state farm-
worker union law since 1975.