“Injustice anywhere…” Farmworker strike in Mexico underscores urgent need for real human rights protections on both sides of the border…

[hupso title=”Injustice anywhere… farmworker strike in #Baja #Mexico underscores urgent need for #humanrights” url=”https://ciw-online.org/blog/2015/04/injustice-anywhere/”]

Strike leader’s early years with CIW in Immokalee helped shape role in today’s protests…

Two weeks after erupting in an historic strike, farmworkers in Baja California’s fertile produce fields are settling in for the long haul and assessing their options for how best to protect the rights they say have been trampled for years.

The strike began on Tuesday, March 17, as thousands of workers left the fields and took to the streets to demand an end to longstanding poverty and abuse in Mexico’s produce industry.  According to a report in the LA Times, “Mexican farmworkers strike over low wages, blocking harvest,” the workers’ demands were simple (and more than a little familiar):

Farmworkers are seeking higher salaries, government benefits and overtime pay. They want agribusiness to stop sexual abuse of female pickers at the hands of field bosses.

From the same report:

 

Veronica Zaragoza grew up in these coastal fields, picking berries and tomatoes and watching an industry being transformed.

She saw new greenhouses erected, irrigation lines spread through the fields, packing plants expanded and produce piled onto ever-larger trucks.

Everything in this fertile agricultural region 200 miles south of San Diego has changed, it seemed, except her wages. Zaragoza said she still earns 110 pesos per day, about $8 — a little more than when she started picking as a 13-year-old.

Zaragoza, now 26, joined thousands of pickers this week as they spilled onto the streets to protest low wages in a bold demonstration — the first strike by farmworkers here in decades.

Pickers not only stayed out of the fields, they stood shoulder to shoulder blocking the main highway, stalling traffic for hours and all but stopping the harvest at the height of the season… 

… The strike, which began Tuesday, has shut down schools and stores across the region and focused attention on alleged labor abuses at agribusinesses that export millions of tons of produce to the U.S. every year. Among those targeted are U.S.-based BerryMex, which grows strawberries and raspberries sold under the Driscoll label… 

For its part, BerryMex issued a statement (also quite familiar in tone and content) defending the company’s practices:

In a statement, BerryMex said it has been committed to “fairness, honesty and respect for all employees” since starting operations in the region in 2000.

“Our primary focus continues to be toward the well-being of our employees and we are working with local authorities to ensure the safety of our workers and the local community,” the statement said… read more

Familiar battles, familiar faces… 

Interestingly, as coverage of the strike continued and deepened, it became clear that the workers’ demands and employers’ defenses weren’t the only thing recognizable about the protests in Baja.  One of the key organizers and spokespeople for the Baja strike, Fidel Sanchez, had spent several years picking tomatoes in Immokalee in the late 1990’s, during which time he was one of the central leaders in the CIW community-wide strikes that later gave rise to the Campaign for Fair Food.  

In a story entitled, “Baja labor leaders learned tactics from their time in the US,” the LA Times’ Richard Marosi interviewed Fidel (below, left, in hat) and other Baja leaders about their experiences in the United States and how those experiences inform their efforts today in Mexico’s fields:

 

Before Fidel Sanchez led protest marches this month against growers in Baja California, he fought for higher wages from tomato farmers in Florida…

… “They came back from the U.S. with different ideas,” said Gabriel Neri, a local radio talk show host who thinks the American experience has been a key inspiration for labor leaders, especially the younger ones. “It gave them a different perspective.”

And influenced their tactics.

Fidel Sanchez, 44, a gruff, goateed father of six, has threatened to use a boycott strategy that led to landmark labor reforms in Florida. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a union in which Sanchez took part as a negotiator in the late 1990s, has succeeded in pressuring major retailers such as Walmart to improve wages and conditions at its supplier farms…

Perhaps the most interesting note from the profile was this:

Sanchez at a recent meeting told government officials and an industry representative that if negotiations failed he would start pressuring major American buyers of the berries, tomatoes and cucumbers exported from the area… read more

While the similarities between the Baja strike today and the CIW’s strikes of the 1990’s are abundantly clear — the fierce consciousness driving the action, the unshakable commitment to fight for the fundamental rights of the community as a whole, the willingness to take on giants with little or no resources — it would seem that the lessons of the latest chapter of CIW organizing are not lost on the leadership in Baja, either.  

The road ahead…

So where do the workers in Baja go from here?  Reports from the area indicate that negotiations with the growers appear to have broken down, and that workers have begun to return to the fields.  It seems that this first phase of their organizing campaign may have run its course.  

It is entirely possible, of course, that their protests get a second wind and the workers in Baja are able to force the growers back to the table and win their wage and labor rights demands.  It is also possible, however, that — just as was the case with the CIW’s strikes in the last 1990’s — the very poverty and hunger that they are fighting to end serve as chains to keep workers in the fields and render even their prodigious will to fight finite.  Fear and economic insecurity are the greatest enemy of poor workers’ movements, and the best friend of employers who treat and pay their workers so poorly that they live day-by-day on the edge of desperation. 

But just as was the case 15 years ago in Immokalee, even if the strike comes to an end today, the future for farmworkers in Baja remains bright.  

 

With their courageous action, they have made their case that the exploitation of farmworkers in Mexico’s produce industry is extreme and cannot be allowed to continue.  The status quo ante is all but dead; it is simply being propped up by what workers and human rights observers alike perceive to be Mexico’s ubiquitous web of corruption, a web woven among the growers, the political leaders (many of whom are or were growers), and the police and security forces that shape social and economic reality in poor communities like San Quintin.  But after the events of the past two weeks, the future will not look like the past.  A solution to the human rights crisis in Mexico’s fields is necessary and, if not imminent, not far off, either.  

The workers in Baja have also left no room for doubt that any efforts to forge a solution must include — and not just include but be driven by — the farmworkers themselves.  The time for empty corporate social responsibility schemes is over.  Those schemes have failed and are responsible for the crisis in Mexico’s fields today.  Workers need real rights, real education around their rights, a real process to complain when their rights are violated, and real consequences when growers refuse to protect workers or correct rights violations.  Cases of sexual harassment, violence against workers who complain, wage theft, and child labor must be investigated and resolved by a new system for the protection of human rights backed by the US retail food corporations that buy Mexican produce by the tens of millions of pounds every year.  Workers are the only people with a true stake in the protection of their own rights, and so workers must be not only at the table, but at the head of the table, when a solution is built and put in place to ensure a fairer future for Mexico’s farmworkers.  

The good news is, a model already exists for just such a system — Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) — and many of the same corporations that buy produce from the fields of Baja already support WSR here in Florida’s tomato fields.  Through the Fair Food Program, the WSR model has proven capable of solving what most human rights observers have long considered one of this country’s most intractable human rights crises, bringing an end to what was once called Florida’s “Harvest of Shame.”  With the right mechanisms in place — including a strong, independent workers’ organization of the workers’ choosing and the binding support of the world’s largest buyers of fruits and vegetables — WSR can solve the human rights crisis in Mexico’s fields, too.

A final word…

Back in the late 1990’s, when the CIW was leading community-wide strikes in Immokalee demanding “Dignity, Dialogue, and a Fair Wage,” growers were asked why they couldn’t meet the CIW’s demands.  From the St. Petersburg Times (“Striking for Pay, Pride,” Dec. 1999):

baja7
A worker walks by a mural outside the CIW office in Immokalee in 1999.

… Growers point to Mexico 

Gilmer of the fruit and vegetable association freely admits that picking tomatoes is hard, low-paying work.

“It’s not intended to be a living wage if you understand that by its nature, it’s called seasonal work. The work is only available when the harvest is ongoing.”

Nonetheless, he says, by law the growers must pay at least minimum wage to the workers, regardless of how much they pick.

“The farming community recognizes that it is not a wage that allows people to live year-round on,” Gilmore said.

So why not raise it?

Gilmer can answer in one word: Mexico.

The same country that supplies many farm workers to Immokalee also sends tons of tomatoes to the U.S. market. Since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, more than half the winter tomatoes sold in the United States come from Mexico, he said.

“If you raise the wages to the point of putting the (U.S.) farms out of business, then what’s the benefit to the workers, much less the rest of the community?”

When the CIW was leading strikes to improve farmworkers’ lives in Immokalee, the extreme exploitation of workers in Mexico’s produce industry served as an anchor dragging down wages and working conditions here.

Today, Mexico’s striking workers face no such downward pressure on their wages from a lower-cost competitor.  On the contrary, the reverse is very much the case.  

The hopes of Mexico’s workers for a fairer future are lifted up, rather than dragged down, by conditions in Florida’s agricultural industry today.  The historic progress taking place in Florida’s fields under the Fair Food Program — “one of the great human rights success stories of our day” —  is not only serving as an inspiration to the workers in Mexico who are demanding a better deal, but as a progressive market force drawing demand toward higher human rights standards and away from the exploitation and abuse in Mexico’s fields.  This 21st century market force will, sooner or later, compel Mexico’s growers to face the writing on the wall and take real steps in their own industry toward verifiable human rights protections — or watch the US demand for Mexican produce that built the industry there slowly, but surely, withdraw in search of more humane, and more marketable, produce.

It is a prophetic twist on the old maxim:  Justice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere.  And justice in Immokalee is a mortal threat to the old system of poverty, sexual harassment, and forced labor in Baja.  It’s just a matter of time.