Huelga!

Cesar Chavez's Birthday was Thursday, March 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. 

Chavez's birthday also brings back memories of the Roederer Winery's 1998 labor thuggery here in the Anderson Valley, with Mendocino County's wine industry cheering Roederer on.

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

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

Roederer’s field crews, just as the grapes were ready on the vines, had refused to pick the company’s grapes from its several hundred acres of Anderson Valley vineyards because Roederer had suddenly announced that their harvest crews would be paid less than in previous years. Roederer clearly thought, with the workers assembled at dawn ready to begin the work day, that they could bully harvest workers into accepting less pay for grueling work. 

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HUELGA!

The strike began on that Monday morning but didn’t become public until Wednesday morning when Roederer’s striking 80-man harvest crew dramatically refused to allow replacement workers into the company’s Boonville vineyards. 

Roederer called for the Sheriff's Department to get the striking workers out of the fields, the scabs in. But by the time the Mendocino County Sheriff’s deputies arrived the two groups of pickers — workers and scabs — had become one. The Roederer crew had convinced their would-be substitutes to join them on an impromptu picket line, the first and only strike among farmworkers in Mendocino County.

The Monday morning that 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, at the time (1998) could earn as much as $3,000 a month for the two months of the annual harvest, and they still 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 pay arrangements of the same work for less money, and the workers had quickly convinced the would-be scabs of the benefits of solidarity, the workers called the UFW’s office in Santa Rosa to help with their fight against the French-owned enterprise, so securely prosperous that much of their higher-end wine is pre-sold.

Three UFW union reps were in Boonville by 9am Wednesday morning, signing up workers for the UFW by the side of Highway 128 as passing motorists waved and honked in solidarity, or stared uncomprehendingly at the unprecedented local scene of red and black UFW banners. A worker's strike in Boonville? Who would have thought?

Roederer found its international self with its Boonville grapes ripening on the vine with no Mexicans to pick them, and an unyielding union on the edge of its vineyard signing up its previously quiescent workers for the militant United Farm Workers.

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

And were still united a week later for a UFW local, the first (and last) union representation for farm workers in Mendocino County.

Representatives of Anderson Valley’s and Mendocino County’s burgeoning wine industry, lamented the arrival of the formidable UFW as they marveled 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 was 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 American land to make a lot of money for a family in France. (Roederer is the oldest family-owned winery in the world.) 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 at the time, expressed her surprise. “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 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 at the time — she warned that “the UFW has never lost a retaliatory firing case.” (Some workers were fired and expelled from Roederer housing and also blacklisted for work at other vineyards in the county.)

Mendocino County wine people were not only surprised that a wealthy company like Roederer would risk alienating crews who have been with the winery since it began operations in Anderson Valley in the early 1980s, for a few dollars, but fear that the UFW’s Anderson Valley foothold meant that the union might soon be in their vineyards.

Roederer, workers complained that they hadn’t had a raise in 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. (Vineyards in Mendocino County, with the exception of a few committed organic growers, collectively use literal tons of chemicals annually. Michel Salgues, the Anderson Valley boss at Roederer at the time, holds a PhD in chemistry.)

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. Roederer initially invested some $14 million in its Philo winery, bringing in French workers to do much of the construction, and spent several more millions developing new vineyards. They are the largest winery in Anderson Valley, and among the largest in Mendocino County.

The strike was unprecedented in Mendocino County agriculture.

The late John Parducci, then 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 for that one heady year, but resumed when Roederer quickly went to work weeding out strikers with the help of the professional strike-breaking law firm out of San Francisco, Littler-Mendelsohn.

That dramatic strike day back in '98, 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 on the Friday after the strike. The locals and the three UFW reps, with the grapes still unpicked, negotiated with Roederer and its suave Mendocino County boss, Michel Salgues and his “union consultants.” Salgues, pleasant but always warily circumspect in his public relations, said years later it was all "a big mistake on our part." 

But at the end of that memorable Friday, Roederer International had backed down. Jubilant workers declared, “We got everything we asked for.”

Saturday morning, Roederer’s crews were back in the vineyards.

Salgues, with a jaunty Gallic shrug, 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 union cards signed, sealed and delivered, were bringing in Roederer's 1998 grapes.

The UFW’s Sonia Mendoza then announced that the union had requested approval from the Agricultural Relations Board for a vote up or down on union representation for Roederer workers. Within days, in a dramatic vote in Roederer's Boonville vineyard, the first Mendocino County farm workers to successfully fight for a say in the work they do cast affirming votes for the United Farm Workers. For exactly one year Mendocino County farm workers the respect and protections French workers have assumed for two hundred years. And then the union was de-certified, and for farmworkers in Mendocino County it was back to the padrone. 

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Postscript: After the strike, in 1999, Roederer hired the famous union-busting law firm of Littler-Mendelson out of San Francisco. They also hired an infiltrator to pose as a field worker to live with the workers in Roederer’s farm worker housing and convince as many of them as possible that unionization was a bad idea. Anyone who held out for unionization was later fired. There hasn’t been any open talk of unionization since.