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Huelga! Anderson Valley’s First Strike

CESAR CHAVEZ'S BIRTHDAY was Thursday the 31st. As we remember the crucial movement Chavez launched, we remind persons interested in Chavez and the UFW that the best book on Chavez is Frank Bardacke's Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers. A former farmworker himself (and fluently bilingual), Bardacke's fine history is the best-written and the most comprehensive picture of the man and the movement. 


Roederer’s Big Miscalculation a Big Break for Vineyard Workers (late summer 1998)

France, the country that brought the world the inspirational ideas of liberty and equality for all people has just presented Mendocino County farm workers with the long overdue gift of the United Farm Workers Union.

Unintentionally, that is, and out of what appears to be a serious miscalculation at harvest time by Roederer International, the famous champagne makers.

Roederer’s field crews refused last week to pick the company’s grapes from its several hundred acres of Anderson Valley vineyards when Roederer told workers they’d be paid less than in previous years.

The strike began a week ago Monday morning but didn’t become public until Wednesday morning when Roederer’s 80-man harvest crew refused to allow replacement workers into the company’s Boonville vineyards. The company called for the police to get their workers out of the fields, the scabs in. But by the time the Mendocino County Sheriff’s deputies arrived the two groups of pickers had become one. The Roederer crew had convinced their would-be substitutes to join them on an impromptu picket line.

The Monday morning Roederer’s annual harvest was to begin, picking crews were told they would not only be paid less per ton but would be expected to share their earnings with two additional persons, the tractor drivers and the sugar testers. They said no, and kept saying no until Friday night when Roederer agreed to return to expected harvest practices and pay.

Harvest crews work in self-selected teams and split their per-ton earnings equally. They sprint up and down the hilly rows of pinot noir and chardonnay grapes in a sun-up to sunset (or longer if lights are brought in) piece-work race to fill ton-sized bins with the raw ingredients of Roederer’s world famous champagne. Workers can earn as much as $3,000 a month for the two months of the annual harvest, and they jealously guard their traditional ways of bringing in the grapes.

After negotiations in the fields all day Monday and Tuesday failed to shake Roederer’s demand that their vineyard workers accept the retro new arrangements of the same work volume for less money, and the workers had quickly convinced the would-be scabs of the benefits of solidarity, not to say national origin, they called the UFW’s office in Santa Rosa to help with their fight against the French-owned enterprise.

Three union reps were in Boonville by 9am Wednesday morning, signing up workers by the side of Highway 128 as passing motorists waved and honked in solidarity, or stared uncomprehending from their vehicles at the unprecedented local scene.

Roederer found its international self with its American grapes ripening on the vine with no Mexicans to pick them, and an unyielding union on the edge of its vineyard signing up its work force.

“We didn’t have a leader,” a quietly determined Boonville worker said Thursday, “but we were united.”

And are still united a week later for a UFW local, the first union representation for farm workers in Mendocino County’s history.

Representatives of Anderson Valley’s and Mendocino County’s burgeoning wine industry, none of whom would agree to speak for attribution, are lamenting the arrival of the formidable union as they marvel at what one Philo winery owner described as “Roederer’s stupidity.”

One of Anderson Valley’s many mom and pop vineyard owners shook his head, seemingly stunned at Roederer’s obtuse labor stand. “Lots of us pay an hourly rate during the pick and during pruning because we can’t afford to pay workers year round. Roederer could easily afford to pay a little more to get their own grapes in because they don’t have to buy grapes to make their wine. When the harvest is off, like it is this year, most wineries try to pay a little more because a smaller crop is harder to pick. I don’t understand what Roederer thought they were doing by hardnosing their crews like that.”

There is much local speculation that Roederer’s vineyard managers, Bob Gibson of Ukiah and Pat Rogers of Hopland, caused the strike by telling the workers this year it would be the same work for less money. Others say nothing happens at Roederer without it first being cleared by Michel Salgues, a French national and company vice-president, and the man in charge of Roederer’s huge Mendocino County operation.

One local skeptic summed it up this way: “The French wouldn’t even consider letting an American make a key decision. The French have thought Americans were a bunch of dummies clear back to Thomas Jefferson. You think they’re about to let a couple of non-French vineyard guys call basic shots on labor relations? They’ve got a classic imperial deal going here using Mexican labor on our land to make a lot of money for people in France. They don’t need people looking at them like this. But they somehow screwed up big time. They thought they could screw the Mexicans and get away with it, but it all blew up in their face.”

Sonia Mendoza, a UFW rep with an office in Ukiah, said Friday, “I was very much in shock that it (the strike) happened at that particular winery; I thought it was one of the better employers in the county.” She also said that the UFW was “here to stay,” adding that that although some workers fear they might be fired and expelled from Roederer’s worker housing — the only company housing for single workers in Anderson Valley — she warned that “the UFW has never lost a retaliatory firing case.”

Mendocino County wine people are not only surprised that Roederer would risk alienating crews who have been with the winery since it began operations in Anderson Valley a decade ago over what amounts to a proportionately few dollars, but fear that the UFW’s Anderson Valley foothold could mean the union will soon be in their vineyards.

Roederer’s high end champagne and sparkling wines sell for $17 a bottle and up. The business is considered among the most prosperous wineries in the world, much of its annual production pre-sold as much as five years in advance.

Roederer, workers complain, hasn’t raised worker pay for five years. A few year-round employees enjoy the company’s health plan but pay mightily for it if they sign their families up for benefits. Workers also express apprehension about the company’s heavy use of ag chemicals.

But Roederer was the first, and is still the only, winery in Anderson Valley to erect housing for single workers. The French also include all their employees in annual parties and have promoted a significant number of Spanish-speaking workers to important jobs with the thriving, Philo-based concern. Roederer invested some $14 million in its Philo winery and several more millions in new vineyards, one of which is being planted this summer near Navarro. They are the largest winery in Anderson Valley, and among the largest in Mendocino County.

The strike is unprecedented in Mendocino County agriculture.

John Parducci, the reigning patriarch of Mendocino County wine, bluntly summed up the county’s traditional approach to worker demands for fair pay and decent job conditions. “Agitators were fired.”

The days when the padrone could simply banish workers who asked for decent pay and work conditions ended in Boonville a week ago.

A committee consisting of four local farm workers, all of whom are year-round residents of Anderson Valley, as are almost all the workers who struck, and three UFW representatives, Molly Lopez, Greg Kestel and Luis Mendoza, negotiated all day Friday with Roederer and its suave Mendocino County boss, Michel Salgues, his vineyard managers and the company’s “union consultants.” Salgues, pleasant but always warily circumspect in his public relations, holds a PhD in chemistry. It has always been assumed in the local wine industry that Salgues survived an excruciating selection process before being appointed to head up Roederer’s large American investment. “That guy didn’t just fall off a Philo turnip truck,” is how another Philo vineyard owner assesses the Frenchman.

But at the end of the day Friday, Roederer International’s American branch had definitely tumbled from the turnip truck. The company backed down. Jubilant workers declared, “We got everything we asked for.”

It seems likely workers are also going to get union representation. Saturday morning, Roederer’s crews were back in the vineyards.

Salgues, a jaunty Gallic shrug in his voice, said simply, “As a company we have taken the decision not to make any statement, but everything is back to normal.”

Not exactly.

All was back to normal in that Roederer’s disaffected workers, UFW cards signed, sealed and delivered, were bringing in the 1998 grapes.

The UFW’s Sonia Mendoza said Monday that the union has requested approval from the Agricultural Relations Board for a vote up or down on union representation for Roederer workers. Within days, the first Mendocino County farm workers to successfully fight for a say in the work they do will cast affirming votes for the United Farm Workers, and the long-delayed task to bring Mendocino County farm workers the respect and protections French workers have assumed for two hundred years will be underway.

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