Friday, April 4, 1997
UNION:
Workers deserve decent living conditions, respectBy Patrick
Doyle
Watsonville, Calif. is a small town in the center of the
Monterey Bay, just north of the Pajaro River. This town is the
agricultural anti-node between collegiate Santa Cruz and the 20:1
ratio of golf courses to Monterey retirees. Like many agricultural
towns, Watsonville exists because it was once more than a day’s
ride by horse to other towns and the agriculture in the area
required warehouses to store the food being produced.
The town was created by filling in the wetlands of the Pajaro
River. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake hit this town harder than
the Mission district of San Francisco because it was so much closer
to the epicenter. Many retail businesses that had located in
Watsonville in the 1940s and ’50s chose not to rebuild, including
the five-story Ford’s department store, which suffered from both
physical damage and the emergence of suburban shopping malls in
nearby Capitola. The damage to the retail community and downtown
marked the destruction of the old Watsonville and is a ruinous
reminder of the unsound base on which the town had been
constructed.
The Monterey Bay was the capital of Spanish  and later,
Mexican  Alta California, as evidenced by the names of the
towns in the area like Salinas, Capitola, Soquel, Monterey, Carmel,
Pajaro, Corralitos and Santa Cruz. The Anglicized name Watsonville
seems completely out of place, reflecting a second colonization of
California. Why was Watsonville created on the unstable fill of the
flood plains of a large river?
The basis of Watsonville’s economy is agriculture. The way to
create a financial basis for such magnets of conspicuous
consumption as Ford’s department store is for the owners of the
fields around Watsonville to either receive a higher price for the
crop or to lower the labor costs. They can also pursue both at
once. The experience of farm workers chronicled in John Steinbeck’s
"The Grapes of Wrath" provides a glimpse into what the conditions
of the human beings working in the fields were: exploitation by
growers chiefly through the creation of widespread desperation and
willingness to work for very low wages, combined with aggravating
cultural differences to create hostility among the farm workers
themselves.
The Loma Prieta earthquake revealed the instability of the
ground that supported Watsonville while the aftermath revealed the
inhumanity of the situation in Watsonville. Thousands of homes in
Watsonville were unhabitable, and huge tent cities were erected to
house these homeless persons. Many of the warehouses and canneries
were destroyed by the earthquake. The loss of jobs and homes from
the earthquake created a desperate need for employment, making the
outlying fields the only remaining industry in Watsonville. Did the
growers respond in ways that recognized the desperation of the
situation in Watsonville?
The United Farm Workers had long sought a union contract with
the strawberry growers in Watsonville. The growers were opposed
and, based on the intense need of the persons in Watsonville, they
felt justified in using every means that they had to keep the union
out. They would plow under the strawberry fields whenever a union
contract was sought or mandated. They continually took advantage of
the desperation and needs of this community in order to maximize
their profits. The growers did what they always did.
What place do I have to judge this situation? I was born in a
house just outside of Watsonville, a house bordered by flower
fields where the smell of rotting brussels sprouts and lettuce
added a unique pungency to the cold fall air of harvest time. I
moved when I was 12 to Northern California. I went to school in
Watsonville at a bilingual magnet school called Alianza (meaning
alliance), riding the bus with children who lived in the migrant
camps of the nearby fields. I remember the cover of the Register
Pajaronian during the long strike at the Green Giant cannery, where
a woman sneered into the camera with her middle finger raised. The
union battle has long been a part of the town.
Going through the formative years of my life with the children
of migrant workers, learning to speak Spanish while they learned
English, and seeing how people lived and worked in the fields has
made it impossible for me to turn my back. The benefits to these
peoples’ lives brought about by recognizing the United Farm Workers
are the benefits of recognizing basic human rights and providing
livable wages, mitigating the terrible physical consequences of
such back-breaking work.
The recognition of collective interest is at the core of the
union ideal. What is good for me is good for you and vice versa. An
economist might argue that this is a zero-sum game and that people
will be unwilling to bear the costs of UFW recognition. My response
is that to deny a human being adequate living conditions is to deny
them basic human rights. On April 13, in Watsonville, a
demonstration is being planned by the United Farm Workers on the
scale of the civil rights protest of Selma, Ala. Their demands are
the same: basic human rights. I haven’t been back since just before
the earthquake. It’s been way too long.