When Food Workers Rebel | Tomás Madrigal on the 2013 Berry Workers’ Strike

Moderator’s Note: We are reposting this set of
close-up reflections on the 2013 Burlington Berry Workers’ Strike by a direct
participant, the scholar activist Tomás Madrigal, a doctoral candidate in
Chicana/o Studies at UC-Santa Barbara. Tomás is among a new generation of
Chicana/o social science scholars refocusing attention on the conditions and
struggles of the working class. ‘Labor studies’ in Chicana/o Studies – perhaps
because the field was closely associated with the marxist ‘metanarratives’ –
became a neglected research area. 

Over the
course of much of the 1990s and early 2000s, Chicana/o Studies shifted focus
and ‘old school’ topics like unions and strikes became passé and were largely
eclipsed by the postmodernist obsession with identity and subjectivity. It is refreshing
to see a new generation of C/S scholars like Tomás Madrigal, Raul Garcia, Gabe
Valle, Jessica Lozano, and many others return to community-based social action
research in support of workers’ self-organizing struggles. Working-class
research is resurgent at just the right moment.



Madrigal teaches us some very important lessons: “Solidarity is not just an ideology under these conditions, but a way to survive.” I believe there is an underlying condition that shapes these new moments of solidarity across the long and sometimes violent internal ideological and racialized divisions of the working class. Is it a shared condition of precariousness that brought the Teamsters and United Farm Workers Union together in a struggle to defend workers in eastern Washington state? 

Today’s post
originally appeared on November 26, 2013 at 7:45 pm on Káráni:
Escribir o Volar, which is the homepage of Tomás Madrigal’s excellent blogwork.
Please note the use of photo images of primary documents and event processes as
they unfolded in place – for me, a sure sign of a well-grounded co-ethnography.

Reflections on the Rebellion of Food Chain Workers

WHY THE FOOD SYSTEM MATTERS

Tomás Madrigal | Bellingham, WA | December 10, 2013

Recently, following a line of
examination that was first advanced by professor Devon Peña’s Environmental and Food Justice blog
through a five part series called “When Food Workers Rebel,” that wove together
the struggle of berry picker’s in Burlington, Washington, service workers
organizing against Whole Foods Markets, and strawberry plant farm workers in
Tule Lake, California. Community to
Community Development Formación Civica Director, Edgar Franks
organized a series of community dialogues titled, “When Low Wage Workers Rebel”.

There is a certain
resonance looking towards a new era of migrant farm worker and working class
solidarity and creative organization, as The Militant recently held
similar community forums under the banner of “Unify the Working Class: What has been gained from recent
struggles by farm workers, Machinists, and Teamsters”.

And the Teamsters union in
Washington, in an unprecedented move, recently joined forces with the United
Farm Workers struggle to organize dairy farm workers at Darigold farms in
eastern Washington state and UFCW represented grocery store workers through the
formation of the Farm to Family
Coalition.

The Food Chain Workers Alliance
of Los Angeles of course has been doing this type of organizing since 2008,
with entities such as Data Center and Labor Notes doing this type of work for
much longer. The US Food
Sovereignty Alliance has also led the way in terms of envisioning
what food sovereignty would look like within the borders of the United States.

All of these examples of
food chain solidarity lead us to consider a new era of justice work, of a particular
type of food justice work based upon food sovereignty.

At the C2C panel, Carlos
Hernandez was unable to make it, as his commitment to being physically present
with the Boeing Machinists demonstration at Westlake center that day made him
unable to find a ride that would get him to Bellingham on time. Needless to
say, Franks filled the panel spot with Tara Villalba, the program coordinator
for Community to Community Development who spoke as a seasoned Migrant worker
activist.

Villalba in her response to
Franks, who moderated the dialogue, who asked a question about what was the
significance to systemic change made by these rebellions, argued that in Hong
Kong and the Philippines, as it was here in the United States, that food
sovereignty, which she defined as the ability to grow your own food and live
off of your own means of production is the same problem that you see on both
sides of migration. For those who stay, the struggle is to find a way to get
basic shelter, to eat, and get rid of waste in a sustainable manner; it is the
same struggle for resettled or migrant workers across the food chain in new
geographies, food sovereignty.

The other panelists, Ramon
Torres and Rhonda Ivie, gave evidence to this that was specific to their own
struggles as farm workers and grocery store workers, respectively. Ivie
presented on why it was so important for Wal-Mart workers to have the ability
to be represented collectively. Torres presented the gains they had made
through the creation of their organization Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and
their struggle for a $15/hour wage, health benefits, and better working
conditions via a boycott campaign for a contract. Ivie, discussed the
importance of being able to come into a place of employment as a grocery clerk
and have the ability to be represented by a union.

All of the panelists discussed how they
were united by a common denominator of struggling for justice against
injustice.

On November 16, 2013 Ramon
Torres spoke on a panel with union rank and file members involved in the Davis
Wire struggle with the Teamsters, the IAM local 79 struggle at Belshaw Adamatic
Bakery Group, as well as longshoremen and rank & file machinists currently
involved in the Boeing struggle.

The discussion was
moderated by the editorial staff of The Militant, who also provided an
international scope of the struggle by linking it to working class struggles in
Egypt, Cuba, and the Philippines. They contextualized the solidarity emerging
between the rank and file of the working class and farm workers along the food
chain as a historical precedent that had twice before led to revolutions, one
in Mexico and a second in Russia.

In fact, Juan Vicente
Palerm, recently pointed out in a reform lobby policy brief that,

Over the ages, the
oppression of agricultural workers by the landed has often been met by
resistance and erupted into outright rebellion. Sometimes successfully, as is
the case of the Mexican revolution of 1910 that destroyed the hacienda system
and transformed modern Mexico (Womack, 1969), and other times unsuccessfully as
were the peasant uprisings in Andalusian, Spain, under the banner of
anarco-syndicalism that ended with ruthless repression (Diaz del Moral, 1967).
Indeed, the first half of the 20th century, when capitalism consolidated its
grip over agriculture, witnessed myriad peasant-worker resistance, uprisings
and revolutions (Hobsbawm, 1959; Wolf, 1969; and Scott, 1985).
(Palerm,
Unpublished Policy Brief, pp. 3-4, 2013)

Capitalists are so worried
about this type of collaboration occurring between the food chain’s rank and
file that they have even resorted to extreme and what we consider desperate
measures, as reported by Democracy Now, U.S.
Corporations Enlist Ex-Intelligence Agents to Spy on Nonprofit Groups.
This type of overkill on behalf of multi-national corporations lead us to
consider that the crisis for capital is perhaps coming to a peak.

The risk, of course is
allowing the interests of capital to to determine our line of struggle, as
blogger Mauro Sifuentes suggests,

Our relationship to easily
accessible material lends itself to reactivity, as we are not choosing our own
subjects of inquiry outside of market demands; we know that popular culture
(including most online news sources) cater to profitability. If the dominant
forces are providing us with the majority of our material to critique, they are
essentially formulating our resistance for us. (Pop-Culture
Criticism/Reactive Anti-Racism)

When we allow ourselves to be sucked up
into time and resource wasting reactionary politics, by turning upon ourselves,
we take some of the creativity and strength away from the movement.

Considering that Wal-mart
is one of the above-mentioned corporations, the Farm to Family Coalition must
be on its radar by now. In a press conference at the Teamsters Union Hall in
Tukwila on November 16, 2013, Margarito Martinez, pictured above, a former farm
worker at Ruby Ridge Dairy which as being organized by the United Farm Workers
Union to no avail, shared pretty much the same experiences of wage theft, poor
working conditions, mistreatment, harassment and retaliation that workers
across the food chain have experienced. He was followed by Lisa Hearing, a
Darigold lab technician who described how their workplaces ran 24 hours a day
in order to make sure that the milk being processed was safe for public consumption,
Steve Williamson and Denise Jagieglo of the UFCW both described how dock
workers and grocery store clerks also participated in transporting the product
without breaking the cold storage and providing service to the customers to
help make healthy decisions.

That the majority of the
people on all of these panels were people of color, and that many of the
workers represented are women speaks to a unique truth. The truth of the matter
is, as The Atlantic recently published,

The labor market is stratified,
if not calcified, by race, with whites seeing higher wages and lower
unemployment, while blacks and Hispanics cluster in lower-paying jobs.(Derek
Thompson, The Workforce is
Even More Divided by Race Than You Think, November 6, 2013)

Solidarity is not just an
ideology under these conditions, but a way to survive. When solidarity is
politicized towards the project of Food Sovereignty for people of color and
women, the possibilities for working families are moved from mere survival
towards the possibility to thrive becomes a reality.

Why does the food system
matter? Because governments and corporations no longer see us as people, or
even as populations to manage, but much more in the way that they treat crops
to tend to and warehouse and harvest.

We come from those that are
overrepresented in prison populations, mental health institutions, foster care
systems, and beyond. These are places where we are warehoused, like the labor
camps described by Ramon Torres.

In the same way we are
warehoused, we are displaced, by state sanctioned terrorism, by natural
disasters made more intense by monocultural plantation farming and deforestation.
Where we die in the tens of thousands at a time, so that a military base can be
built where we used to live, or maybe a new plantation.

Once we are in motion, we
exercise our autonomy for but a moment. But more likely than not, we are then
herded like livestock, into refugee camps, into ghettos, into labor camps.

When we settle, we become
crops with organs, plasma and sex to be harvested that as commodities in a
global market can be sold to the highest bidder. We are no longer just
alienated of our labor, but of our own humanity. Dignity lacking, for even the
parts of our bodies have a price, under extreme conditions of alienation, our
lives have become commodities, have become something that you spend as opposed
to live.

This is what has broken the
fabric of our communities, and this is why we have to stick together through
the darkness towards a brighter tomorrow.