Protestors gathered outside the gates to call for a boycott of the Santa Maria Strawberry Festival over the weekend of April 25. Colorful signs painted with strawberries and “HULEGA!!”—meaning ‘strike’ in English—waved as sharply-dressed families walked by.
They picketed in solidarity with massive strikes in Baja California, Mexico. Tens of thousands of berry pickers walked away from the harvest in the farming hub of San Quintín, some 200 miles south of San Diego. They are protesting low wages, limited benefits, poor working conditions, and human rights violations.
Many of those farms are operated by Oxnard-based berry distributor Driscoll’s and their Mexican affiliate Berrymex. They reap a sizeable share of the $7.6 billion in farm exports from Mexico to the U.S. every year. Driscoll’s has a major presence at the Strawberry Festival and large farms in the Santa Maria Valley.
Berrymex workers in San Quintín, many of them indigenous migrants from Mexico’s destitute southern states, are paid about $8 a day. In 2014, the LA Times reported that workers were trapped by barbed wire, armed guards, and debt peonage in labor camps without beds, running water, or functioning toilets. Workers claim that supervisors turn a blind eye to child labor and perpetuate rampant sexual abuse.
“There are literally thousands of children working in those fields, and these are American companies based on the Central Coast,” said local organizer Pedro Reyes. “Locally, there are a lot of people who have come together to say, ‘Look, we’re in support of those workers out there, and we also question the ethics of those major corporations.’”
On March 17, the first day of the strike, about half of San Quintín’s 75,000 workers walked away from the harvest. They blocked the Transpeninsular Highway, by which fruit is transported to the United States, and clashed with state police, who responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and hundreds of arrests.
Local chapters of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union have dispatched truckloads of food and thousands of dollars to support the protesting jornaleros. Antonio Rivera, a representative from the UFCW Salinas office, was present at the protest.
“Driscoll’s, the company here, they exploit our people there in San Quintín. They are growing their crop for a cheap price, and they are coming here to sell their produce and make a lot of money,” he said.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 7, 2015.