International Trade, Labor Relations, and Bargaining Power: International Strawberry Commodity Networks [1 ed.] 1032360232, 9781032360232

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Routledge Studies in Employment and Work Relations in Context

INTERNATIONAL TRADE, LABOR RELATIONS, AND BARGAINING POWER INTERNATIONAL STRAWBERRY COMMODITY NETWORKS Matthew M. Fischer-Daly

International Trade, Labor Relations, and Bargaining Power

International Trade, Labor Relations, and Bargaining Power: International Strawberry Commodity Networks examines power in the commercial food system through the history of always available strawberries. Applying an interdisciplinary approach to case studies on strawberry production and sales in Mexico, Spain, and the United States, the author untangles the symbiotic relationships between the economic boom and labor strife in the sector. By comparing workers’ struggles in the sector, he develops a novel model of workplace bargaining power in which the process of dignity catalyzes change. Since international trade in strawberries began three decades ago, the sector’s growth has paralleled the rise of retailer dominance of food sales. Highlighting inequitable gains from the sales boom, workers have organized mass strikes, boycotts, and pressure campaigns. The divergent results ranged from ephemeral acknowledgments of workers’ concerns to the establishment of union collective bargaining and steadily improving working conditions. Grounded in extensive research, the book provides fresh analytical approaches to understanding the social dimensions of international trade and workplace bargaining power. The book unpacks the relationship between poor working conditions and economic growth by applying a new method, international commodity network analysis, which builds on prior global supply chain approaches. It explains differences in workers’ initiatives to improve employment conditions by identifying the process of dignity in the creation of solidarity. Matthew M. Fischer-Daly is an Assistant Research Professor, Center for Global Workers’ Rights, School of Labor and Employment Relations, The Pennsylvania State University.

Routledge Studies in Employment and Work Relations in Context Edited by Peter Fairbrother and Tony Elger

The aim of the Employment and Work Relations in Context Series is to address questions relating to the evolving patterns and politics of work, employment, management, and industrial relations. There is a concern to trace out the ways in which wider policymaking, especially by national governments and transnational corporations, impinges upon specific workplaces, occupations, labour markets, localities, and regions. This invites attention to developments at an international level, marking out patterns of globalisation, state policy, and practices in the context of globalisation and the impact of these processes on labour. A particular feature of the series is the consideration of forms of worker and citizen organisation and mobilisation. The studies address major analytical and policy issues through case study and comparative research. The Origins of Worker Mobilisation Australia 1788–1850 Michael Quinlan Temporary Work, Agencies and Unfree Labour Insecurity in the New World of Work Edited by Judy Fudge and Kendra Strauss Unions and Globalization Governments, Management, and the State at Work Peter Fairbrother, John O’Brien, Anne Junor, Michael O’Donnell and Glynne Williams Vocational Training International Perspectives Edited by Gerhard Bosch and Jean Charest Sexualities, Work and Organizations Stories by Gay Men and Women in the Workplace at the Beginning of the 21st Century James Ward For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Employment-and-Work-Relations-in-Context/book-series/ SE0840

International Trade, Labor Relations, and Bargaining Power International Strawberry Commodity Networks Matthew M. Fischer-Daly

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Matthew M. Fischer-Daly The right of Matthew M. Fischer-Daly to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-36023-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-36024-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-32991-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003329916 Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun

Contents

List of Figures and Charts List of Tables Acknowledgments 1

2

3

4

5

6

vi vii viii

On International Commodity Networks and Dignity: New Approaches to the Social Dimensions of International Trade and Bargaining Power

1

Dignity as Catalyst: Reorganizing Work in Strawberry Production in Washington, United States

34

Divided, Demobilized: Containment of an Uprising in Strawberry Production in San Quintín, Mexico

65

A Fragmented Labor Movement and Persistent Abuses in Strawberry Production in Huelva, Spain

97

The Construction of Walmart’s Power to Set Terms of Exchange in the Strawberry Sector

125

Why Poor Working Conditions Persist and Some Workers Transformed Labor Relations in the Strawberry Sector

172

Index

196

Figures and Charts

Figures 1.1 1.2 2.1 3.1 4.1 5.1 6.1 6.2

A simplified strawberry international commodity network A model of power building by workers confronting precarious employment Process of FUJ changing employment relations at Sakuma Brothers, 2013–2020 Process of workers’ collective action in San Quintín in the 2010s Disconnected labor and delayed process of building power Spain’s strawberry sector Building bargaining power impeded by low associational power at Walmart A simplified strawberry international commodity network Dignity-based model of workers building bargaining power in the strawberry sector

12 18 54 86 118 151 177 185

Charts 1.1 1.2 4.1 5.1 5.2

Strawberry growth and labor strikes in the sector, 1988–2019 Growth of world strawberry production and US food retail shares of top 4, 8, and 20 firms, 1990–2018 Spain’s strawberry production and exports and sectorexpanding events World strawberry exports and US food retail shares of top 4, 8, and 20 companies, 1990–2019 US food retail, decline in real average wages and increase in shares of top 4, 8, and 20 companies, 1990–2019

2 19 98 126 126

Tables

1.1 2.1 3.1 5.1

Summary of case studies of labor relations in strawberry production and retail sales FUJ member comments on union representation Employer obligations and compliance status, strawberry sector, San Quintín Indicators of Walmart’s influence

21 49 68 127

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book came directly out of my dissertation at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) at Cornell University, although many of the ideas in it percolated during a longer period. Discussions of globalization, global supply chains (GSC), global production networks (GPN), and increasingly global value chains (GVC) were continuous over years advocating for workers’ rights, first while working at the Development Group for Alternative Policies, then Social Accountability International, and thereafter at the International Labor Rights Forum. The organization of the production, trade, and consumption of things in recent decades has affected society in many ways, not least of which is a general increase in the power of capital over humanity. Studying at the ILR School provided the opportunity to dig deeper into scholarship theorizing our contemporary social system. Two literatures grabbed my attention. One is world systems analysis, which explains phenomenon by applying a wide lens to capture interrelated economic, political, and social dynamics and their historical structuring. Yet the most popular adaptations, into GSC and GVC studies, have tended to narrow the focus onto firm-to-firm exchanges. My interest in applying the wider lens motivated the development of the international commodity network framework presented in this book. The other is bargaining power, which explains employment terms and conditions by analyzing the sources of employer and labor power in a particular conjuncture. Again, I found that many studies left stones unturned. First, analyses tend to shorten time to the moment of an evident crisis or change in employment relations, yet the historical creation of forms of power used by employers and workers is often informative. Second, many studies highlight solidarity as the fulcrum of labor’s bargaining power, yet how solidarity and bargaining power are created is generally described with examples. The dignity-based model of bargaining power presented in this book is an attempt to understand the creative process. It centers dignity as a process, building on Axel Honneth’s work, and is informed by the workers’ struggles in the strawberry sector that are profiled herein.

Acknowledgments ix

For many years, agriculture has presented itself like a prism, illuminating multiple forms of power. In the 2000s, in Nicaragua, driving to health and safety workshops with sugarcane workers, I passed an encampment of former banana workers demanding accountability for the poisoning of their bodies by toxic chemicals knowingly used by banana multinational corporations. During the workshops, the sugarcane workers highlighted widespread kidney failure, which medical researchers associated with their working conditions. Further north in Choluteca, Honduras, a father shared his struggle to feed his family after losing his productive land to export melon farms that simply refused entry to government officials, according to the local labor inspector. In the 2010s in Jizzakh, Uzbekistan, a group of farmers explained the state system of forcing them to produce annual cotton quotas and those least able to refuse to harvest the cotton. As I listened, we watched schoolchildren and their teachers working in the fields. When workers began striking in strawberry fields supplying multinational food retailers, I knew that they would have a lot to teach me about our world system and struggles for humanity in it. I am grateful to so many people who have provided me opportunities to learn about our society. While indebted to each and every one, here I’ll limit acknowledgments to those who specifically helped me with this book and hope that I have communicated my gratitude to the others. Several brilliant scholars helped me to begin to make sense of the phenomenon I was observing in our present system. Harry Katz, Sarosh Kuruvilla, and Philip McMichael guided my doctoral studies and, along with Mark Anner, Marissa Brookes, Virginia Doellgast, Eli Friedman, Shannon Gleeson, Ian Greer, Johnnie Kallas, Andi Kao, and Alessandra Mezzadri, challenged and supported my work with constructive criticism on drafts and opportunities to sharpen my thinking. While conducting research for this book, many participants in the strawberry sector also shared incisive observations. I am deeply grateful to each of them for their generosity. In addition to keen insights, several also offered logistical support to meet others and to experience work in the berry fields and efforts to improve it. Thank you for your extraordinary support Edgar Franks, Rosalinda Guillen, Librado López, Juan Malagamba, Lorenzo Rodríguez, Ramón Torres, Abelina Vásquez, José Antonio Brazo Regalado. Thank you also to Brianna Ascher, Yong Ling Lam, and Jessica Rech at Taylor and Francis Group for supporting this project. Finally, I owe tremendous gratitude to Sabine for her love as my partner in life. Throughout this study, she provided essential encouragement and gracefully listened to hours of my talking through pretty much every issue considered.

1

On International Commodity Networks and Dignity: New Approaches to the Social Dimensions of International Trade and Bargaining Power

In July 2013, workers stopped working and demanded reinstatement of a dismissed coworker and changes to their working conditions from Sakuma Brothers, a century-old strawberry production company in the US state of Washington. Two years later, tens of thousands of workers shut down production and transportation from San Quintín, the Mexican municipality and supplier of winter berries to US markets. During the 2010s, workers filed hundreds of complaints of abuses during each strawberry harvest in the Spanish province of Huelva, and many have filed criminal complaints against production company managers alleging sexual assaults. In each of these countries, the largest exporters of strawberries, workers expressed similar goals of safe workplaces for all, wages that meet living costs, and participation in their work rules. For their labor harvesting strawberries, workers have endured low wage rates, nonpayment of legally owed compensation, widespread gender-based discrimination and violence, dangerous conditions, lack of employment security and healthcare, and active resistance to collective bargaining. Ramón Torres, later elected president of the union that emerged from the strike, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, described the sentiment in Washington at the time, saying, “people are tired of low pay, but that’s not all of it … People feel humiliated, and denied basic respect” (quoted in Bacon 2016). Why would workers harvesting strawberries, one of the fastest growing commodities for decades and highest revenue category in retailers’ produce aisles, face such poor working conditions? Between 1987 and 2019, international trade of strawberries grew from zero to more than two billion pounds annually (Chart 1.1). Throughout the period, Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry brand, expanded to a $3 billion valuation, selling patented plant varietals and purchasing berries from production companies in 21 countries, and marketing berries in 48 countries (Goodyear 2017; Shanker 2016; Shelman 2017; USPTO). Simultaneously, retail corporations became the dominant strawberry and food sellers, with four capturing 40 percent of grocery sales in the largest berry consumer market, the United States (USDA ERS 2021). Among them, Walmart played an outsize role in shaping the strawberry sector, having entered food retail at the beginning of the berry DOI: 10.4324/9781003329916-1

2

On ICNs and Dignity World Exports (lbs)

Strikes (-)

2,500,000,000

2,000,000,000

1,500,000,000

1,000,000,000

500,000,000

0

Chart 1.1 Strawberry growth and labor strikes in the sector, 1988–2019. Source: Author’s compilation with data from FAOSTAT 2020, UN Comtrade 2021.

boom with one-third the labor costs of competitors and in 2020 reporting three times the revenue of its nearest competitor.1 In other words, there is substantial capital accumulating from strawberry production and sales, and workers have not gained decent work from their linkage to this international sector. If inclusion in internationally traded product sectors, most widely described as global value chains, determines “growth opportunities” and “facilitates upgrading opportunities,” as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Trade Organization, and World Bank Group (2014) report, clearly in the strawberry sector, the gains have accrued inequitably, with workers left struggling for their livelihoods. The contrasting experience of corporate profit and workers struggle in the international political economy is a question of inequity, one of the most profound of modern phenomena. Approaches to the question in the mid-20th century focused on national differences, either observing historically contested differences or prescribing stages for each country to follow.2 Observing that capitalism operates on a world scale, subsequent approaches studied the processes of production, circulation, and consumption of things to shed light on inequitable distribution of the value generated.3 From the observation, the commodity chain research method emerged, referring to analysis of “a network of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished product.”4 Subsequently, adaptations focused on firm-to-firm exchanges in global commodity chain (GCC) studies, governance of exchange between lead and supplier firms in global value networks (GVC), and the relations between multiple actors

On ICNs and Dignity 3

embedded in particular conjunctures by global production networks (GPN).5 To date, inquiries into why employment remains precarious as profits accumulate continue to seek to account for the complex of economic, political, and social forces at play. From muddy plant rows to interviews with chief executive officers (CEOs), observations of the strawberry sector during the last four years suggested the need for a new approach to production, circulation, and consumption systems. Therefore, in this book, I develop the “international commodity network (ICN)” framework to describe and illuminate what’s happening. “International” reminds us that the sector depends on national states for labor markets, cross-border trade, subsidies, infrastructure, and selective regulation of various laws, including on anti-trust and labor. “Commodity” recalls that uses of strawberries are entangled with its commerce, conditioning production, transportation, sales and the relations between retail sellers, the production companies supplying them, and the workers at each stage of the process. “Network” emphasizes that, far from a linear chain, the strawberry sector’s actual operations reflect decisions by managers at separate companies, government officials at multiple levels, and workers—all interacting in particular contexts that affect their choices. In other words, it is a network of people (and plants, insects, other life) determining the sector’s outcomes under the constraints of history. Striving toward a more comprehensive approach to the question of labor exploitation supporting profit growth, the ICN analysis presented in this book implies the scale and range of changes required for the strawberry sector to make good on its claim of providing good jobs. Toward good jobs in the sector, workers engaged in collective actions, which resulted in divergent outcomes. Workers used strikes, boycotts, lawsuits, formed the union Familias Unidas por la Justicia (Families United for Justice, FUJ), and negotiated collective contracts with the berry production company Sakuma Brothers in the US state of Washington. The largest strike in agribusiness in Mexico shut down strawberry production and transport from the export hub San Quintín in Baja California, yet workers’ demands for freedom of association, collective bargaining, living wages, and payment of legal benefits remained unfulfilled five years later. Despite Spain’s institutionalization of sectoral bargaining, payrates below national minimum wage rates and sexual assaults and harassment persist in Europe’s largest strawberry production region, Huelva. On the sales side, workers campaigned for unionization unsuccessfully for decades at Walmart in the United States, while retailers opted out of Germany’s collective bargaining and co-determination institutions. Primarily listening to workers involved in these struggles, it became evident that widely held understandings of how working conditions can be improved did not fit their experiences. In the first three decades of the international strawberry sector, the workers who achieved more improvements to working conditions are considered “illegal” by the national state and

4

On ICNs and Dignity

excluded from national labor laws in the country where they live and work. In other cases, clear laws on labor rights and mass collective action did not lead to good working conditions. Neither labor standard institutions nor disruptive strikes were sufficient to establish decent working conditions, a foundational observation of bargaining power theories.6 Bargaining power refers to management and labor’s capacities to advance their material and psychological interests despite resistance.7 In their efforts, both parties use economic, political, and social forms of power, frequently described by employment relations scholars as their “power resources.”8 Given the structural differences and social implications, inquiries into workers’ sources of power are most intriguing, and they typically point to solidarity as determinant.9 Yet less clear is how workers might create solidarity. The study of labor struggles in the strawberry sector presented in this book suggests that dignity created solidarity and thus made possible improvements in working conditions. The activities by workers in the cases in the United States, Mexico, and Spain are modeled to explain how they gained influence, or built power, to differing degrees. Their trajectories suggest that workers gained the capacity to influence their employment by acting as a collective and in coalition with allies, disrupting capital flows, and negotiating and enforcing agreements with employers and governments. The catalyst that advanced progress through this sequence was dignity. While often used and infrequently defined, here dignity specifically refers to the psycho-social process of individuals mutually recognizing each other’s capacity to participate in the rules to which they are subjected (Honneth 1995). This introductory chapter proceeds to situate the study. The two principal arguments, ICN analysis to explain inequity in the international strawberry sector and the dignity-based model of building bargaining power, are elaborated. Subsequently, the comparative method used in the study is explained. Finally, the chapter previews the rest of the book.

International commodity network analysis The activities that result in always available strawberries for consumption in North America and Europe are together best understood as ICNs. The ICN approach developed herein emphasizes the active role of national states, the socioeconomic character of strawberries as an object of production, commerce, and consumption, and the diversity of actors and forms in which they relate to each other in and adjacent to the product sector. ICN analysis builds on the lessons learned from extant approaches to understanding modern socio-economic and political processes and their implications for society. At an earlier time of commercial expansion, Karl Marx noted that each exchange of commodities, combinations of use and exchange values, yields additional value (Marx 1867: 156). Mid-20th-century

On ICNs and Dignity 5

concern with inequitable exchange led Hopkins and Wallerstein (1977, 1986) to propose studying the social relations of power in the world system by using the commodity chain as the unit of analysis. Taking up the task, Gary Gereffi and collaborators led numerous “global commodity chain” (GCC) studies (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994). Gereffi (1994: 95–122) distinguished between chains in which a retailer or brand acts as the lead firm by setting the terms of exchange, “buyer-driven” chains, and those in which a production company is the lead firm wielding such power over others in the chain, “producer-driven” chains. With Timothy Sturgeon and John Humphrey, Gereffi then led a turn to “global value chains” (GVC) that, with its developmentalist focus on the possibility of economic and social upgrading, has become the dominant approach among policymaking institutions.10 Whereas GCC studies had increasingly focused on firm-to-firm exchanges, GVC studies further narrowed analysis to exchanges between lead firms and their direct or “first tier” suppliers. The research illuminated the influence of lead firms on distribution of value throughout processes of production, circulation, and consumption. However, most GVC studies focused so much on the largest companies as to convey a world without labor and states. As presented to introduce the 2019 Handbook of Global Value Chains, the processes of production, distribution, and consumption observed contemporarily result from business strategies and informationcommunication and transportation technologies.11 Critiques of the predominant studies of international production and distribution have highlighted the absence of analysis of labor, national states, and social norms in the studies themselves. The GCC and GVC approaches have focused on micro- and meso-levels to the detriment of understanding how the world system reproduces an international division of labor based on unequal power (Bair 2005). As a result, predominant studies have primarily detailed firm-to-firm exchanges while obfuscating labor’s creation of value, which firms, workers, and countries benefit from increased value circulating in the chains, and determinative actions outside of firm exchanges. Fallacies of composition and comparison in these predominant approaches imply absurdities that if one company, worker, state, or community benefited from a GVC linkage, then others could through the same internal strategy without regard for external competition (Selwyn 2015). Following on these critiques, scholars have issued calls for improving on the predominant GVC approach to understand the social dimensions of contemporary organizations of economic activities. Building on the observation that dispossession of people from their means of producing material needs is an ongoing phenomenon, Bair and Werner (2011) call for studying such processes of exclusion, because they combine with processes of including workers and production inputs to co-constitute commodity chains. Benjamin Selwyn emphasizes the labor process as the source of profit and lead firms’ dual use of outsourcing production and monopsonistic power to push down supply prices and insulate themselves from the

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On ICNs and Dignity

implications of “heightened labour exploitation” that is a response to the price squeeze.12 Frederick Mayer and Nicola Phillips (2017) note that predominant GVC scholarship has theorized and analyzed “politics, and by extension states … only in perfunctory terms,” and call for approaches recognizing that “states are to a great extent the intentional architects of the GVC.” Scholars, many affiliated with the University of Manchester, proposed “global production networks” to advance research on “the nexus of interconnected functions and operations through which goods and services are produced, distributed and consumed.”13 The approach has sought to highlight the social conditions that result in finished things and services, which necessarily include consideration of the relations between and use of power by companies, national states, workers and their organizations in distinct spaces and times (Dicken et al. 2001; Henderson et al. 2002). To date, however, as Mayer and Phillips (2017) note, our understanding of contemporary production, circulation, and consumption remains limited by firm centricity to “questions of how to connect to GVCs and to facilitate economic ‘upgrading’ within them.” Building on 20 years of such calls, ICN analysis is introduced in this book to break from limiting assumptions of predominant GVC approaches. The ICN analysis used herein to study the strawberry sector attempts to take up the challenge of incorporating and comparing the relations between the primary actors in the sector and how they are shaped by economic, political, and social forces partially under their control.14 The first point of ICN analysis is directional, focusing attention onto the subjects of study. Use of “international” recalls the role of national states, in particular the antinomy of national political processes and international economic processes (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1977), which manifests in discordant national and multi-national policies, regulations, and activities. While “global” has been used for 30 years to highlight the dialectical relations between actors located in different socio-political contexts (Henderson et al. 2002), the investigative practice following this emphasis has merely replicated the neoliberal imaginary of weakened national states.15 Yet, as critics of the GVC approach have emphasized, the relations between actors involved in products and services are mediated through national states, including by the regulation of trade, subsidization of select economic activities, and organization of labor markets. “Commodity” is used to emphasize products’ use and exchange components, which are shaped by power relations clustered around them in consequential moments and locations. In other words, using commodity as conceptualized by Marx encourages investigation of the social relations of production, circulation, and consumption instead of circumscribing analysis to revenue or other partial indicators.16 This breaks with the use of “value,” as in GVC, which risks contributing to an immaterial imaginary devoid of soil, seed, and sweat, and with the use of “production,” as in GPN, which asks readers to read the word ‘production’ and think production, circulation, and

On ICNs and Dignity 7

consumption. Use of “network” follows the GPN approach, departing from “chain” and its connotation of linearity to the actually observed configurations that dynamically move between hierarchies and markets.17 As GPN scholars underscored (Dicken et al. 2001; Henderson et al. 2002), ‘network’ additionally refers to the embeddedness of economic activities in the world as experienced, thus directing attention to the complex of forces that constitute and affect them. Secondly, ICN analysis aims to re-foreground the inequity question to better explain how power is produced and reproduced with material implications for participants in a sector. The approach expands our view beyond dyadic relationships that dominate most studies and discussions of international commodity production and trade to consider both production and sales nodes of a commodity network. This builds on the major insight of GCC studies, that lead firms have and use market power to set terms of exchange with their suppliers. Where GVC studies have focused on buyersupplier relationships, critical scholars have extended the observation to explain super exploitative employment at many production companies. Extant studies have documented corporate arbitrage of unit labor costs across geopolitical boundaries and use of market power to “squeeze” value of dispersed, subordinate supplying companies and workers at them (Anner 2019; Suwandi 2019). Across diverse contexts, others have documented the use of patriarchy to under-value feminized labor and race to enhance economic control over labor (Hopkins 1966; Deere 1979; Federici 2012; Holmes 2013). ICN analysis of the strawberry sector extends such approaches to why lead firms have such monopsonistic power, and why employers have such unilateral discretion over terms and conditions of employment. Instead of taking the power of these actors as a given, the ICN approach explores the sources of their power, shedding light on the historical decisions by state, business, and labor actors that contributed to such control over labor.

Learning by ICN analysis: application to the strawberry sector ICN analysis helps to explain persistently poor terms and conditions of employment in the strawberry sector during its boom of the last three decades. They made it possible. Far from spontaneous entrepreneurial innovation, state policies spurred the boom. Strategies to profit from strawberries derive from both the fruit’s use and trade and depend on organization of resources in the sector. Such organization reflects market power of lead firms to insulate themselves from risks and the construction of surplus labor supplies facilitated by the mobilization of social forces of division. Certain working conditions have characterized the sector’s boom. Employment in strawberry production is generally seasonal, for two to four months, and in many cases by the day. Wage rates fall short of living costs,

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On ICNs and Dignity

and workers endure health risks, including straining in stooped positions for hours in heat and exposure to chemicals in the fields. While immigrant workers—some with, others without state recognition of their residency—are employed to suppress wages, many workers considered immigrants have lived where production occurs for generations, requiring additional means of sustaining super-exploitative pay that supports profitability. Weak and under-enforced laws have enabled non-payment of legally required remuneration, contributed to abuses, especially toward racialized female workers, and limited access to health care. Mobilization of racial and patriarchal discrimination has further underpinned abuses and limited alternative income opportunities for workers. ICN analysis addresses the complex of economic, political, and social forces behind these conditions. National states made possible the strawberry sector as we know it: the profit-oriented processes making the fruit available for consumer purchase nearly anywhere, anytime. States provided infrastructure. The Mexican government paved the trans-peninsular highway connecting San Quintín to San Diego and making the Baja California municipality an agribusiness export hub for US markets. The Spanish government built the irrigation systems necessary for water-intensive agriculture in arid Andalusia. They established and have protected the rights of companies to move strawberries and capital across national borders while denying rights of workers recruited to migrate and work in the harvests. The US and Mexican governments established capital mobility rights in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, subsequently re-negotiated as the US-MexicoCanada Agreement [USMCA]), and the Spanish government through its European Union (EU) membership. Meanwhile, immigration policies have denied workers protections from abuses, while legal exceptions and underenforcement heightened risks of abuses. In addition to physical and legal infrastructure, states have created and supported the re-production of surplus, differentiated labor markets. Governments produced new supplies of wage labor by displacing indigenous communities from their lands and foreclosing their prior, non-wage dependent means of social reproduction, a process observed generally in the creation of commodity networks (Wood 2002; Bair and Werner 2011). While colonial projects had encroached on the indigenous communities of present-day Mexico and Morocco now employed in North American and Spanish strawberry production, since the 1980s, privatizations and concessions of property rights over land and water by the Mexican, Moroccan, Spanish, and US governments completed the enclosures, establishing surpluses of labor on which the strawberry sector relies (Swyngedouw 2007; Minoia 2012; Velasco et al. 2014; Zlolniski 2019). US and Spanish immigration regimes facilitate employer access to workers whose livelihoods depend on subordination to managerial prerogatives. Immigrant workers provide 75 percent of all labor employed in US agribusiness and 25 percent in Spain, particularly striking in the Andalusia region where unemployment has

On ICNs and Dignity 9

remained above 20 percent for decades. Such surplus labor markets empower employers by facilitating the externalization of workers’ costs of living, thereby increasing margins from the labor process (Burawoy 1976). Indicating the importance of the relationship between places of work and residence, two of the cases of worker uprisings studied herein occurred after workers ceased migrating and became residents where they harvested strawberries. Selective law enforcement represents another state contribution to employer discretion over terms and conditions of work in the strawberry sector. The US government excludes agribusiness workers from federal protections of collective bargaining rights, underpinning the discretion of employers in the industry, indicated by government estimates that onethird of agribusiness workers have incomes below the poverty line, and more than half rely on public assistance programs (USDOL 2018). In Mexico, state supported collusion between employers and corrupt union entities has blocked freedom of association and collective bargaining for decades, while under-enforcement of regulations sustained non- and under-payment of legally required compensation to strawberry harvest workers. In Spain, state orientation toward workers’ rights is indicated by the prevalence of sexual assaults toward the overwhelmingly female workers hired from Morocco for the strawberry harvest, and wage rates set below the national legal minimum. State support for such unilateral employer power is entangled with the organization of capital and character of the product in the strawberry sector. Starting with the product, the first observation is the interconnectedness of its use and exchange values as a commodity. Profiting from production of strawberries, like most of agriculture, faces natural impediments.18 Nature is in control,19 scheduling production cycles seasonally and thus extending the time for returns on investment in time-saving technologies. Between planting and harvesting, invested capital lies stagnant, awaiting plant maturation. Labor power cannot be used constantly without destroying the crop, limiting employers’ ability to increase work time. Predicting agricultural yields is limited by natural elements such as weather and pests, increasing the risks of investing capital. Geographically, crop production is limited by conditions conducive to plant growth. Strawberry plants, for example, thrive in sandy soils in temperate climates modulated by proximity to the sea (Wells 1996; Roethler 2016). In further contrast with the manufacture of non-living products, agribusinesses must arrange for delivery of products to market quickly before they spoil. The strawberry boom has thus followed development of industrial agriculture, “agribusiness,” in pushing nature’s limits. Risks to investment in production tend to direct capital to the input, marketing, and retail processes (Guthman 2004; Kloppenburg 2004; Dicken 2011). The strawberry sector evinces the tendency, with hundreds of production companies exchanging with oligopolies in plant varietals, chemicals and other inputs,

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marketing, and retail.20 This market power on the input and output sides of production acts like a vice, constraining the capacity of production managers to accept higher labor costs. To gain business from buyers that source from multiple production locations with overlapping harvests, production companies specialize, intensifying their seasonal demand for labor. The structure provides workers the ability to disrupt production with strikes during harvests, which agribusiness has historically suppressed with political support. National states are inclined to support agribusiness due to their interests in legitimacy, shored up when agribusiness provides surplus capital and cheap food facilitating profits from lower labor costs in other industries (McMichael 2013). In this agribusiness logic, “agricultural and rural workers tend to be either tacitly or explicitly excluded from pertinent laws,” and, “where agricultural workers are covered by labour legislation or other sectoral laws, applicable labour standards are not often well implemented in practice,” as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO 2018: 2) reported.21 While nature sets limits to certain strategies, people with particular interests determine terms of exchange, raising the question why lead firms have the power to set prices below production costs that would cover higher labor standards. Lead firm market power is substantially attributable to state supports. US government policies supporting monopoly behavior and employer avoidance of collective bargaining with unionized workers facilitated Walmart’s takeover of food sales, by enabling its extraction of extraordinary value from its internal operations to claim a position of dominance in the market. The retailer began selling food with one-third the labor costs of then leading food retailers, and alone accounted for one-third of US food sales in 2020, making it the dominant final seller of strawberries and difficult for production companies to avoid. As the largest company worldwide for decades, Walmart’s practices set the standards for food retail.22 Economic power in the strawberry sector is not, however, cleanly organized in a vertical hierarchy. Reflecting the network organization of companies, brands act as intermediaries between many berry production and retail companies. The brands’ dominance of intellectual property provides them the capacity to control most flows of strawberries and in turn guarantee the volumes, prices, and characteristics demanded by retailers, all while insulated from the risks of managing production. Driscoll’s alone has owned 28 percent of strawberry varietals patented since 1976, subcontracts production in 21 countries, and accounts for one-third of all berry sales and 60 percent of organic strawberry sales in the United States, one of 48 countries where it markets berries.23 The brand’s general counsel described its business model: “Growers are sort of like our manufacturing plants. We make the inventions, they assemble it, and then we market it, so it’s not that dissimilar from Apple using someone else to do the manufacturing but they’ve made the invention and marketed the end product” (quoted in Goodyear 2017). The relationships between production companies and

On ICNs and Dignity 11

brands may be described as “captive,” meaning the buyer substantially determines production decisions for suppliers lacking capital to market independently, and that between retailers and production companies selling directly to them as “modular,” meaning the supplier assumes full responsibility for producing according to the buyer’s standards.24 However, such a description under the GVC framework stops short of explaining why the companies wield such power over each other, a question that involves aforementioned political power and social forms of power. ICN analysis of the strawberry sector thus necessarily addresses the contexts in which workers, firms, and government officials interact in the sector. As detailed in each particular juncture in subsequent chapters, their interactions draw on, recreate and deploy patriarchal and racial constructs, affecting their dialectic capacities to pursue their respective interests. Generalized subordination of women in societies in which strawberries are produced and sold has been mobilized with material effects for women working in the sector. Production companies in Spain’s Huelva Province explicitly recruit mothers, exploiting their familiar commitments as assurance that they will return home after the harvest and not settle (Martin 2016: 21; Interviews by the author). In Mexico’s San Quintín Valley, women of the first generation of indigenous migrant workers recalled that “a lot of assault, many vulgar, gross language, and yes, physical assault as well” characterized treatment by foremen for years. Workers in the US state of Washington cited their union president’s resistance to foremen who harassed women as a main reason they elected him. In sales, Walmart infamously adapted “the management/ labor dyad to a ‘natural male/female hierarchy” to dampen workers’ solidarity (Moreton 2007: 76), contributing to rampant discrimination against women, acknowledged but not penalized by the US Supreme Court.25 Furthermore, in each context, women’s unpaid care work subsidizes agribusiness while multiplying female workers’ workloads. Racism in the strawberry sector manifests primarily as the ascription of status in society based on perceived proximity of an individual’s characteristics to others placed in an essentialized category.26 At the core of racism is the reification of social hierarchies that permeates ideological and material society, implying that it co-constitutes economic, political, and cultural institutions.27 Racism intersects with patriarchy and other hierarchies to compound power over marginalized people, especially racialized women (Crenshaw 1989). These social forces shape relations between actors in the strawberry sector. In Spain, for example, the employment of immigrant women workers from Morocco for the strawberry harvest and widely reported labor and gender abuses involved persist in a culture of impunity that rests on the legacy of Spanish colonialization of northern Africa, neo-institutionalized into a form of managerial control through immigration policies of recent decades. Similarly, the employment of indigenous peoples for strawberry fieldwork in Mexico and the United States is based on a reductionist identity of ‘the indigenous’ that denies the legitimacy and complexity of diverse indigenous communities.

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National states (dispossession, privatization, infrastructure, trade promotion, immigration restriction, capital protection, monopoly support, weak labor law, collective action suppression)

Water companies Plant patent owners Agrichemical companies

Production companies (manage labor for planting, cultivation, harvesting)

Marketing companies (direct production; manage transport, marketing, processing)

Food retailers (direct ICN exchanges; manage labor for sales)

Consumption

Landowners

Equipment & services companies

Social hierarchies (limit labor mobility, enable externalities, differentiate & divide workers)

Figure 1.1 A simplified strawberry international commodity network.

As displayed in Figure 1.1, ICN analysis expands the scope of inquiry. Where GVC studies focus on firm relations, especially between lead firms and suppliers, the ICN approach opens the view to consider multiple firm relationships, firm-labor relations, national states, and social forces.28 While the relationships between workers, companies, and governments occur in an economic system, they are shaped by individual and collective decisions influenced by political and social dynamics. From the perspective that the labor process is the primary site of value creation, ICN analysis centers labor relations. In the strawberry sector, labor is concentrated in production and retail, demanding the deepest inquiry in these nodes of the network.

Bargaining power in employment relations Following ICN analysis, which emphasizes the historical construction of power, the second question considered in this book is how certain workers in the strawberry sector built the capacity to improve the terms and conditions of their employment. The historical record suggests that dignity was the catalyst of their efforts for social uplift. The often used and infrequently defined term “dignity” here refers to the psycho-social process of people mutually recognizing each other’s capacities to participate in the rules to which they are subjected.29 Not an outcome, it is the action through which workers create

On ICNs and Dignity 13

solidarity, the bonds that make collective action possible and effective. As indicated by the cases examined herein, of worker struggles in the strawberry sector, the further dignity processes extend, the more dimensions of bargaining power, or power resources, workers are able to build. Dignity processes among coworkers built the capacity to act collectively; between workers and allies, the capacity to act as a coalition; and, after sufficient pressure from disruptive actions, recognition between workers and employers built the capacity to negotiate work rules. A novel dignity-based model of bargaining power is presented in the next section after identifying its referents. Bargaining power in employment relations may be understood as management and labor’s capacities to advance their interests despite resistance, and interests understood to include material and psychological components.30 This definition recalls that managers invest in labor to the extent that such investment is expected to increase profits, while workers sell their labor to survive and enhance their wellbeing. Reflecting their interests and to sustain their position, management may ‘super-exploit’ or pay workers less than their living costs, pay immiserating wages, increase work time without commensurate pay, and raise the rate of profit extracted from the labor process by increasing productivity or decreasing living costs (Marx, 1847: 429–438; Selwyn 2017: 38–39). For their part, workers may strike, making dearer their labor power by making it scarcer but risking their means of living; boycott, disrupting the transformation of a product into profit but requiring organization of consumer purchasing power; and organize cooperative control over means of production, which changes their social position but attracts pressure from capitalists and allied states interested in capital expansion. Management and workers’ abilities to achieve their goals by implementing any of these strategies depend on their bargaining power. Reflecting the world in which their employment relationship is embedded, workers and management are influenced by and assert power primarily in economic, political, and social forms. The concept of elasticity illustrates the influence of primarily economic forces. In junctures where workers are easily replaced, labor costs account for a large portion of operating costs, input costs cannot be reduced without reducing their volume, and final product prices cannot be increased without reducing sales volume, employers are unlikely to increase investments in labor.31 In other words, under such conditions, the number of workers employed is expected to fall if wages increase. The dynamics of each condition, however, are complex, not cleanly economic calculations. The last two conditions describe a company’s bargaining power vis-à-vis other companies in its commodity network, which depends on each company’s market power. For example, monopolistic or oligopolistic supply and sales markets tend to reduce employer investment in labor in production. The replaceability of workers depends on the tightness/ looseness of the labor market, which significantly reflects national state activities, including dispossession, affecting the volume of people seeking

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wages, and laws and their enforcement, affecting the costs of employing labor. The characteristics of the product and thus the labor process significantly determines the second condition; for example, agribusiness and retail tend to have high ratios of labor to overall operating costs. While these conditions indicate whether raising wages will reduce employees (or their hours), they can be difficult to observe with precision and can move in conflicting directions, underscoring the importance of strategic action. The power resources approach aims to explain what workers and managers can bring to bear on their employment relationship. Recognizing that we are talking about workers and managers as cohesive groups despite intra-class diversity in any real-world context, a first order resource is associational power, meaning the ability to act as a collective. In Erik Olin Wright’s framework, workers’ associational power depends on organization and solidarity. Inasmuch as lists and databases, schedules and calendars, surveys and meetings matter, solidarity breathes life into an organization. Following Wright (2000: 962), the strength of associational power may be thought of as the ability “to sanction defectors from cooperation both among their own members and among capitalists.” As Chris Rhomberg and Lopez (2021) succinctly put it, associational power is “the ability of workers to act collectively.” Given the scope of associational power typically refers to workers at a particular employer or industry, workers might expand the scope with coalitional power, meaning the involvement of non-coworkers “willing and able to influence an employer’s behavior” (Brookes 2013: 2019). With associational power, and in many cases also depending on coalitional power, workers can strike, boycott, and otherwise disrupt the process of profiting from their labor. Disruptions are clearly dynamic processes. To gain clarity on their potency, the concept strike leverage describes the dialectical capacities of workers and management to extract concessions from the other by withdrawing from their employment relationship. In terms of withdrawal, management may lock out, or refuse to employ workers; workers may strike, or refuse to apply their labor power to management’s productive process. Given these potential actions, strike leverage is determined relationally by management’s ability to continue production, sales, and profit and workers’ ability to disrupt these processes (Katz et al. 2017: 93–94). The more management can continue production with replacement workers or machinery, sales with product from alternative sites or inventory, and profit with alternative revenue streams or a monopolistic market position, the more they are able to withstand a disruption and extract more concessions from labor. The more workers can continue to satisfy their needs during a disruption, the more they are able to sustain it, an ability dependent on their associational power and influenced by their access to alternative employment (determined by the tightness/looseness of the labor market), savings, and contributions from others (such as family members, a union(s), and allies in a coalition). Scale of capital disruption also affects leverage.32 When a minority of workers can halt the

On ICNs and Dignity 15

process of transforming investment into profit, especially capital-intensive processes, they have more leverage. Their leverage also increases along with the degree to which a strike interrupts other companies’ process of accumulating profit, which, at a certain threshold, shakes the legitimacy of a capitalist national state (in its entangled roles as protector of and dependent on economic growth). In their maneuvering, workers and management often seek to sustain a position relative to the other through institutional means, in other words, to create “institutional power” (Brinkmann and Nachtwey 2013). State-based institutional power may be thought of as the degree to which the state regulates management’s flexibility and mobility on the one hand, and labor’s collective action on the other (Gumbrell et al. 2013). It thus depends on the capacity to influence state actors, that is, political power (Katz et al. 2017). Employer-based institutional power refers to agreements between labor and management, reflecting a degree of shared interests (Wright 2000; Gumbrell et al. 2013). Both forms, however, depend on state action, either through establishing and enforcing laws or by legitimizing employment agreements. Notably, institutional power fixes rights and restricts actions, implying tradeoffs (Ramsay 1977; Webster 1988). Each of these resources affects bargaining power of workers and employers. However, this discussion of bargaining power in employment relationships began by noting the centrality of associational power—all other actions by workers depend on it. Creating associational power, it is widely understood, requires solidarity. How solidarity is created is thus key to understanding power relations in an employment relationship and broader ICN.

A dignity-based model of power building Associational power as the cornerstone of labor’s bargaining power is well developed. As Rhomberg and Lopez (2021) argue, any other resources workers might mobilize, i.e. a strike or coalition, depend on associational power. Even given the acknowledgment that associational power requires organization and solidarity, most attention focuses on organizational practice, with solidarity either unexplained or assumed. If the two dimensions together form the foundation of labor’s bargaining power, understanding how solidarity is created is essential, a point underscored by the cases studied herein in the strawberry sector. Clearly, solidarity is not automatic. Capitalists do much to organize workers into “a class in itself as against capital” by physically assembling workers and presenting wages as their “common interest” (Marx 1847). Yet the conditions in which workers are assembled—such as their positions in international, racialized and gendered hierarchies—require deliberate social construction of solidarity (Gramsci 1996). Such construction likely entails progressive perception of common interests with coworkers, of management as common adversary, of labor-capital struggle as central to society,

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and of alternative social arrangements (Mann 1973). Collective action evidently accelerates consciousness progression (Blackburn 1967; Fantasia 1988). When people develop consciousness of common interests through their interactions, behavior and neural activity tends to shift from exhibiting ties of friendship toward trust-based, functional solidarity motivated by collective pursuit of a goal (Reich and Bearman 2018). What, however, is the human interaction that creates solidarity? To understand workers’ bargaining power, we need to understand such a key interaction. In other words, if labor’s bargaining power turns on associational power, clarifying the process of its development is a fundamental question for employment relations. Toward clearer understanding of associational power and overall power building by labor, the cases presented in this book point to human dignity. While widely used to describe an outcome of social relations, the meaning of dignity is typically assumed. Since the 19th century, the general conception of dignity is a status belonging to all humans, the basis for human rights (Debes 2017). When workers strive to gain respect for rights, clearly they do not already enjoy this aspirational-oriented notion of dignity. In employment relations, dignity is considered less universal, instead, as an outcome of certain changes. Thus, scholars have identified workers’ desires to bring dignity into their employment relationships and described employment with dignity as where workers are “expressing their own identity and competence” (Lamont 2000: 4; Reich and Bearman 2018). Understanding dignity as an action clarifies why workers improve terms and conditions of employment more in certain cases than in others. Dignity, it is argued here, is best understood as a process in which people recognize each other’s capacity to participate in the rules to which they are subjected. Axel Honneth developed this definition of dignity by observing parental relationships. As a mother permits her child autonomy, the two negotiate rules of their interactions, and both gain confidence in their individual identity, relationship, and capacity to assert claims, or they deny to each other such capacity and endure conflict rooted in self-doubt (Honneth 1995). Throughout their lives, humans continue to form identity intersubjectively, through dignified relationships that reinforce one’s participatory capacity and undignified relations that destroy trust in oneself by denying participation in rules governing relations with other people. Thus, dignity may be best understood and here is referring to the interpersonal act of creating solidarity by recognizing each other’s capacity to participate in the rules to which each is subjected. These rules include those governing the relationship between workers, as well as those governing relationships between workers and potential allies, employers, and state actors. By embracing each other’s participation in creating, implementing, and adapting the rules of their own collective, workers build individual and collective confidence and capacity to assert claims.

On ICNs and Dignity 17

As a process through which solidarity is created, dignity is essential to building associational power. The capacity to act as a collective is necessary for workers to strike, workers’ primary tactic for influencing employment relations, given their control over labor power. Furthermore, the strike presents workers a moment of high-stakes decisions and thus an opportunity to recognize or deny each other’s capacity to participate in the collective action and related decisions. Workers may embrace each other’s participation or deny certain co-workers capacity to participate, contributing or detracting from their solidarity. The extent to which workers engage in the process of dignity with each other determines the strength of their solidarity, thus their associational power. When workers deny each other’s dignity, such denial weakens associational power by reducing or even eliminating its solidarity component. In such a context, the risk emerges that some workers will engage in organizational fetishism, believing that power lies in the existence of their collective organization rather than solidarity between its members. The risk increases when leaders distance themselves from rank-and-file members and come to believe that the organization’s power is self-generating (Bourdieu 1991; 2000). Like an incomplete wheel, the collective lacking solidarity struggles to function, to act collectively and improve workers’ livelihoods. While necessary, associational power is often insufficient to improve employment terms and conditions. Shifting the balance of bargaining power often requires combining associational power with other power resources. Workers’ dependency on employment for their livelihood means striking (and strike-like actions) risks immediate harm, loss of income. Therefore, workers can benefit from the support of a coalition. Coalitional power can help mitigate the risks for workers. Like associational power, however, coalitional power includes a solidarity component. Solidarity between workers and allies makes their coalition capable of acting as a collective, a capacity created through the process of dignity—allies and workers recognize each other’s capacity to participate in rules, including those governing their interactions. In contrast, when allies do not recognize workers’ dignity, coalitional power is weakened by a lack of solidarity. By combining associational and coalitional power, workers in the strawberry sector have been more likely to pressure employers and state actors into agreeing to enforceable contracts and laws regulating employment. The negotiation and enforcement of such agreements are processes of mutual recognition of workers, employers, and state actors’ capacities to participate in workplace rules. Sequentially, workers built bargaining power through processes of dignity between themselves, with allies, and with employers and state actors. The more robust the processes, the more workers advanced toward decent work. Figure 1.2 illustrates the dignitybased model of power building.33

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Precarious Employment

Capacity to Act as Collective

Coalition

Capacity to Disrupt

Enforceable Laws & Contracts

Decent Work

Human dignity

Figure 1.2 A model of power building by workers confronting precarious employment.

Applying this conceptualization of dignity as a process to employment relations clarifies the importance of worker participation in the rules governing work. Observers have long pointed to such participation as a process through which workers develop class consciousness and improve working conditions (Marx 1847; Fantasia 1988; Leary 2003; Barrientos et al. 2011). Dignity applies to the process of mutual recognition between workers and employers of each other’s capacity to negotiate the terms and conditions of their relationship. It is the process through which the limits on workers’ duty to obey and employers’ right to command shift from being mandated to negotiated.34 As a dialectical process, dignity in the workplace also mirrors alienation. If denying dignity is to deny human identity, denying participation in work rules is a critical implication of alienation, or treating labor power as separate from the human worker (Marx 1847; Braverman 1998). Such a reading of dignity underpinning human development recalls the moral underpinnings of demands for participation in the rules of production, of class struggle.35

Approach of the study A comparative approach is used to study the questions addressed in this book, on why poor working conditions persist in a growing economic sector, and why certain workers achieve demands in the face of substantial barriers. In particular, an “incorporated comparison” approach is applied, meaning, in Philip McMichael’s (1990) explanation, “the goal is not to develop invariant hypotheses via comparison of more or less uniform ‘cases,’ but to give substance to a historical process (a whole) through comparison of its parts.” In other words, a particular pattern of labor relations in the strawberry sector is not assumed; instead, decisions and actions by companies, workers, and national states are assessed to elaborate the historically specific, dynamic processes establishing observed terms and conditions of employment. Contemporary agribusiness provides the juncture for the study due to its expansive scope and record of poor working conditions. Approximately

On ICNs and Dignity 19

one-third of workers in the world work in agriculture. Most live in poverty and endure conditions dangerous to their well-being.36 While the extent of nature’s control over the production process distinguishes agribusiness from other industries and challenges profitmaking, it is not wholly determinant. As Jane Collins (quoted in McMichael 1995: 120) observed, The production relations through which global agriculture is organized can neither be deduced from theories of agrarian transition nor from the characteristics of crops and technologies. Production relations are generated out of historically specific social processes in which agribusiness firms seek to acquire and discipline labor in accordance with their needs. Following Collins, the study engages with the historical behaviors of the social actors in the sector. The strawberry sector in particular exhibits many of the characteristics of contemporary agribusiness.37 Since it began in earnest in 1988, international trade of strawberries grew to billions of pounds annually (UN Comtrade), and berries became the highest-revenue category in the produce departments of food retailers (Cook 2011). During this period, retailers also captured market share, enabling their position as the lead firms setting the terms of exchanges in strawberries. While in 1992, the largest four food retailers in the United States accounted for less than 20 percent of food sales, the largest 20 less than 40 percent, by 2016, the largest four sold more than 40 percent of food in the country. Similarly, food retailers consolidated in Europe. Four companies grew to account for around 75 percent of food sales in the United Kingdom and five for 80 percent of sales in France, 62 percent in Germany, and 58 percent in Spain.38 Chart 1.2 displays the US trends.

2E+10 1.8E+10 1.6E+10 1.4E+10 1.2E+10 1E+10 8E+09 6E+09 4E+09 2E+09 0

0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1

World production (lbs)

top 20

top 8

2018

2016

2014

2012

2010

2008

2006

2004

2002

2000

1998

1996

1994

1992

1990

0

top 4

Chart 1.2 Growth of world strawberry production and US food retail shares of top 4, 8, and 20 firms, 1990–2018. Source: Author calculations with data from FAOSTAT 2020 and USDA ERS 2021.

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Consolidating retail has shaped the flows of capital in the strawberry sector. Retailers’ preferences for fewer larger suppliers to reduce transaction costs drove the largest brands to increase their volume by expanding, including with locations that overlap harvest seasons to provide strawberries year-round (Mohapatra et al. 2010). With forward contracts, retailers further reduced costs with fewer suppliers, in this case primarily brands, to manage and year-round stock instead of regularly changing shelves. Distribution consolidated among few brands, indicated by four marketing and distribution companies accounting for more than half of all strawberries sold in the United States (Cook 2011: 2). The brand Driscoll’s leads, with its dominance in strawberry varietal patents and marketing and sales, primarily to retailers (Dune 2015; Goodyear 2017; USPTO 2020). The brands, in turn, purchase from production companies concentrated near the primary sales markets of North America and Europe. Spain, Mexico, and the United States have accounted for 65 percent of world exports, on average, between 1988 and 2019.39 The strawberry sector, then, epitomizes the tendency observed in agribusiness more broadly, that a few lead companies direct production, sales, distribution, and investment while risks are disproportionately carried by production companies and workers (Russi 2013). In the words of a production manager, Everything has to do with volume—with the buying power that they have … they punish you some with the price. And as Walmart has grown, so has the competition, so more people have produced; 15 years ago strawberry was an extraordinary business, but not now—it’s normal. Among the implications are pressures on labor costs, particularly in production. To get at the question of labor power, this study of the strawberry sector focuses on instances of workers demanding improved terms and conditions of employment. In production, cases address labor relations in the leading strawberry exporters Mexico, Spain, and the United States. Labor relations in sales are addressed primarily in one case, the industry norm-setting retailer Walmart, to consider the linkages in the network of actors involved in production, distribution, and sales. As a shadow case study,40 labor relations at leading retailers in Germany, the largest destination for strawberries produced in Spain, are surveyed. Table 1.1 summarizes the cases, on which information was gathered between 2018 and 2021 through 154 interviews and review of extant datasets.41 Variation in outcomes provides the opportunity to consider why certain groups of workers have had more success in achieving their demands. At the berry production company Sakuma Brothers in Skagit county of the US state of Washington, workers conducted multiple strikes, a boycott, and

On ICNs and Dignity 21 Table 1.1 Summary of case studies of labor relations in strawberry production and retail sales Stage

Location

Labor Actions

Outcomes

Production

Skagit, Washington State, USA

Strikes, boycott, & lawsuits

Production

San Quintín, Baja California, México

Strike & transportation shutdown

Production

Huelva, Andalusia, Spain

Sectoral bargaining, protests, legal complaints

Sales

Walmart, USA

Sales

Lidl & Aldi, Germany

Minority strikes, class-action lawsuits, protests Strikes against Walmart

New union (FUJ), collective bargaining, increased remuneration, work rules improvements, workers’ cooperative established New union (SINDJA), limited increases of wages & social security registration, increased adoption of certifications Sectoral wages set below national minimum rate; under-employment, persistent gender-based violence Limited wage increases, improved parental policies, consistently precarious jobs Walmart left; minimum wage law enacted; use of “minijobs” expanded

filed multiple lawsuits between 2013 and 2016, resulting in the organization of the union Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), collective bargaining that raised wages and benefits, established rules governing wage rates, breaks, and leaves, and the organization of the workers’ owned cooperative farm Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom). In the municipality of San Quintín in the Mexican state of Baja California, workers went on strike and shut down the highway used to export strawberries to US markets in 2015, resulting in limited increases of wages and social-security registration and the state registration of the union Sindicato Independiente Nacional Democrático de Jornaleros Agrícolas (Independent National Democratic Union of Agricultural Day Laborers, SINDJA). In the Spanish province of Huelva, workers have filed numerous sexual-assault charges against managers; the Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores (Andalusian Workers Union, SAT) union has led protests; and the Comisiones Obreras (Workers Commissions, CC.OO.) union has negotiated wages below national minimum rates in a sectoral agreement with the strawberry industry association Asociación Agraria Jóvenes Agricultores (Agrarian Association of Youth Agriculturalists, ASAJA). In sales, Walmart denied workers’ initiatives to unionize for 40 years, and since 2010 the non-union entity Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) has advocated through minority strikes and public relations, contributing to wage increases and improved parental accommodations.42

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Since union pressure led Walmart to leave Germany in the early 2000s, German retailers have bypassed sectoral agreements and works councils, and used part-time, short-hour contracts known as “mini-jobs” to hire most workers at payrates less than full-time workers (Jaehrling and Méhaut 2013). The following chapters present these cases, which are then compared. The comparison follows the historical-sociological approach to mid-range theory, meaning that the insights drawn are limited to labor relations in the contemporary strawberry sector. That is, the presentation is organized to move toward clearer understanding of the persistence of poor working conditions in the profitable strawberry sector and workers’ achievement of employment improvements in it. The following three chapters focus on labor relations in the three locations of strawberry production, focusing on their historical organization and workers’ efforts for improvements. In each, ICN analysis is applied to map the economic, political, and social forces at work, and workers efforts are analyzed in comparison with the dignitybased model of power building. Chapter 5 turns to sales, focusing on Walmart as the standard setter to consider the question why the firm, and lead firms generally, have the market power that they display. Chapter 6 incorporates the studies of particular production and sales nodes into an explanation of labor relations in the strawberry sector. It concludes with the implications, including the strategic importance of democratic principles and practice to workers and society at large. The study suggests that while always-available strawberries have depended on the organization of poor working conditions, workers can advance decent terms and conditions of employment by building inclusive solidarity.

Notes 1 Lichtenstein 2008. The revenue comparison is based on Deloitte “Global Powers of Retailing 2021” report: for FY2019, Walmart revenue was $523,964,000,000 compared to Amazon’s $158,439,000,000, Costco’s $152,703,000,000, Schwarz Group’s $126,124,000,000, and The Kroger Co.’s $121,539,000,000. 2 National governments were considered the prime movers in mid-20th century, as demonstrated in critiques and plaudits. In Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade, Emmanuel Arghiri (1972) explained profitable trade accompanied by poor working conditions as unequal exchange between national states characterized by different wage levels, similar rates of profit and productivity, high levels of capital mobility and low levels of labor mobility. In contrast, Walt Rostow’s (1960) Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto and Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, Frederick Harbison, and Charles Myer’s Industrialism and Industrial Man (1960) argued for convergence toward institutions modeled on those of the United States of America. 3 To guide research of the development of the modern system, Hopkins and Wallerstein (1977) proposed “commodity chain” as a unit of analysis to unveil how power functions given the worldwide scale of capitalism and national scale of politics, individual determinations of supply and social determinations of demand via income distribution, and capital accumulation through the extraction of surplus

On ICNs and Dignity 23

4

5

6

7

8

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produced by labor. They defined commodity chain as a “network of labor and produce processes whose end result is a finished commodity” (1986: 159). Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986: 159. In Hopkins and Wallerstein 1977: 128, the authors elaborated the definition: “commodity chains. What we mean by such chains is the following: take an ultimate consumable item and trace back the set of inputs that culminated in this item—the prior transformations, the raw materials, the transportation mechanisms, the labor input into each of the material processes, the food inputs into the labor.” Gary Gereffi and collaborators led GCC studies, starting with Gereffi and Korceniewicz’s 1994 Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism. Gereffi et al. (2005) launched GVC studies with the focus on lead firm and supplier firm governance structures. Henderson et al. (2002) led GPN studies the to highlight spatial configurations, institutional contexts, and the processes through which industry standards are created. John Dunlop articulated the institutional approach to labor standards in Industrial relations Systems (1958), arguing that overlapping interests provide the basis for labor, management, and the state to recognize each other’s legitimacy, thereby establishing the basis for the three actors to create and implement rules governing their relationships. While Marxist scholars have long critiqued the institutional approach as reifying institutions, arguing instead that labor standards reflect struggle between labor and management over setting the limits on workers’ duties to obey and employers’ rights to command ( Hyman 1975), industrial relations scholars also departed from rigid institutionalism, observing that employers strategically choose whether and the degree to which they accept the legitimacy of unionized workers ( Kochan et al. 1986). This definition of bargaining power adapts Max Weber’s conception of power, “the ability of an individual or group to carry out their will despite resistance” ( Weber 1968: 56), recognizing that, while some approaches to bargaining power limit it to a dyad, “resistance” recognizes that workers and managers interact with social, political, and economic systems in setting the work rules that govern their relationship. Walter Korpi defined power resources as “capabilities of actors to reward or to punish other actors” ( 2006: Footnote 12) and advanced the power resources approach on the assumption that employment relations “… involve a distributive concept between employees and employers” (2006: 172). Erik Olin Wright (2000) elaborated a theory of associational power, and Beverly Silver (2003) developed the concept of structural power. Rebecca Gumbrell McCormick and Richard Hyman’s development of institutional power, Marissa Brookes’ (2013, 2019) of coalitional power, and Jennifer Jihye Chun’s (2009) of symbolic power have advanced the approach. Considering Karl Marx’s (1847) observations that capitalists organize workers into “a class in itself as against capital” by physically assembling workers and presenting wages as their “common interest,” Antonio Gramsci (1996) pointed out that the conditions in which workers are assembled militate against automatic solidarity, requiring its deliberate construction. Michael Mann (1973) theorized that such construction involves progressive perception of common interests with coworkers, of management as a common adversary, of labor-capital struggle as central to society, and of alternative social arrangements. Multiple scholars have posited that militancy at the workplace accelerates progression through these stages toward conscious worker solidarity ( Blackburn 1967; Fantasia 1988). Adam Reich and Peter Bearman ( 2018) theorized that the development of solidarity involves neurological changes in the individuals. Virginia Doellgast et al. (2018) identify inclusive solidarity as key to cycles of decent work, its absence as the cause of cycles of exploitative employment. See Werner et al. (2014), analyzing the neoliberalism reproduction effects of the uptake of the GVC approach, including by the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development, World Trade Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-

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On ICNs and Dignity operation and Development, and largely the International Labour Organization, which uses “global supply chains” as the term while retaining much of the GVC conceptual focus. Economic upgrading refers to company changes that increase the value that accrues to them, and social upgrading refers to “improvements in the rights and entitlements of workers as social actors” ( Rossi 2019; Barrientos et al. 2011). In the most comprehensive compilation of GVC studies to date, the 2019 Handbook on Global Value Chains, the book’s editors Stefano Ponte, Gary Gereffi, and Gale Raj-Reichert introduce it writing, “Technological and organizational changes have been crucial in transforming the way in which production is organized … by the late 1970s a more flexible and spatially dispersed mode of production had taken hold based on slicing production into specific tasks and moving some of these out of the boundary of the firm through external contracting … information and communication technology (ICT) … facilitated the global outsourcing and offshoring … This has led to the organization of economic activity in global value chains.” ( Ponte et al. 2019). The absence of reference to historical interactions between capital, labor, and national states in which international production and commerce is embedded is underscored a few paragraphs later when such reference is made by citing critiques of predominant GVC studies for narrow focus on business-to-business relations. Beyond analytical clarity, the implication of automaticity of economic activities observed risks paralyzing efforts to improve them. Selwyn 2017: 54–55, citing a 2008 study by William Milberg documenting US import price declines from 1986 through 2006 for apparel electronics, footwear, furniture, chemicals, toys, etc. See Anner 2019 on the “price squeeze,” which “refers to how much lead firms pay suppliers for the products they produce.” The quote is from Henderson et al. 2002: 445. Dicken et al. 2001 is also a foundational presentation of the GPN approach. In parallel to studies explicitly applying versions of the GSC or GVC frameworks, many studies have applied multilevel, dialectical analysis of single commodities to examine the dynamics of production, circulation, and consumption systems, including for example on bananas ( Bourgois 1989; Brown 2013; Striffler 2002), sugar ( Mintz 1985; Tomich 2016), tomatoes ( Barndt 2008), also on strawberries ( Wells 1996), sometimes also with comparative methods ( Striffler and Moberg 2003). On the significance of strong national state activity under neoliberalism, see Block 2003; Dardot and Laval 2013; and Panitch and Gindin 2012 (especially Parts V and VI). Marx 1867/1990: Chapter 1, noting that “the usefulness of a thing makes it a usevalue” and that the “use-values of commodities … are also the material bearers of … exchange value … the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind. This relations changes constantly with time and place.” As Walter Powell (1990) notably observed, many relations operate not as pure hierarchies or market-based transactions but in networks, hybrid relationships that involves power and reciprocity. The characterization is apt for the numerous and complex relations between corporate, national state, and labor actors involved in the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities. Mann and Dickinson (1978) most prominently elaborated on the impediments to profit from investments in agriculture. In Ted Benton’s (1989) words, agriculture is “eco-regulatory.” On natural limits to profitability in agriculture, see Mann and Dickinson 1978. Driscoll’s, the Regents of the University of California, Plant Sciences, Inc., and Plantas de Navarra S.A. (Planasa, aka Societe Civil Darbonne and Darbonne Pepiniere, SAS) together received 56 percent of strawberry plant patents from the US government ( USPTO 2020). Corteva (previously the agricultural unit of DuPont, sold to complete the DuPont-Dow merger in 2019, owns the trademark

On ICNs and Dignity 25

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for Telone, the compound of chloropicrin and 1,3-dichloropropene used as a fumigant in commercial strawberry production. Widely used fungicide Carbendazim and pesticide Bifenthrin are manufactured by massive multinational corporations: BASF, DuPont, Bayer CropScience, Jiangsu Lanfeng Bio-Chem, Lianyungang Jindun Agrochemical, NingXia Sanxi Chemical, Anhui Guangxin Agrochemical Group, AnHui JinTai Pesticides Chemical, Bailing Agrochemical, Trustchem, Jiangsu Sinamyang Crop Science, Yangzhou Pioneer Chemical, and Hunan Haili Chemical Industry ( Absolute Reports 2020). Yaffa and CQM control as much as 80 percent of the fertilizer market, according to another production company manager interviewed. Driscoll’s dominates marketing, accounting for onethird of all US berry sales and 60 percent of organic strawberry sales ( Goodyear 2017). Four companies control more than 40 percent of US food retail sales—Walmart, Kroger, Ahold Delhaize, and Publix ( USDA ERS 2021), and five companies controlled 62 percent of food retail sales in Germany by the mid-2000s ( Lawrence and Burch 2007). While US and German retail are the main destinations of strawberries produced in the locations studied herein, notable, food retail concentration is more widespread. For example, two companies (Mercadona and Carrefour) control nearly one-third of Spanish food retail sales—Mercadona 22 percent and Carrefour 10 percent ( USDA FAS 2019). For more on concentration in food systems, see IPES-Food 2017. The International Labour Organization (2008) reported similarly, “in a number of cases, they [agricultural workers] are explicitly excluded, either fully or partially, from the relevant laws, or, when they are covered under the law, they are excluded from protection in practice.” Since the 1990s, food distribution has been increasingly dominated by retailers, characterized by consolidation in inputs and monoculture specialization in production, intensified use of technologies such as greenhouses, chemicals, and genetic modification, and increased allocation of capital toward finance. See McMichael 1995; Kloppenburg 2004; Lawrence and Burch 2007; Dicken 2011; Corrado et al. 2016; Clapp and Isakson 2018. Together, Driscoll’s, the Regents of the University of California, Plantas de Navarra S.A. (PLANASA) and Plant Sciences, Inc. have accounted for 56 percent of strawberry varietal patents issued by the United States government, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office records, https://assignment.uspto.gov/ patent/index.html#/patent/search (accessed 9 August 2020). On Driscoll’s subcontracting of production and sales, see Goodyear 2017; Shanker 2016; and Shelman 2017. Gary Gereffi et al. (2005) proposed four categories of coordination between company dyads: hierarchical, captive, relational, and modular. Relevant to the current study, modular relations involve suppliers making products in compliance with standards specified by the client while the suppliers “take full responsibility for competencies surrounding process technology, use generic machinery that limits transaction-specific investments, and make capital outlays for components and materials on behalf of customers.” They defined captive relations as those in which the suppliers “are transactionally dependent on much larger buyers,” “face significant switching costs and are, therefore, ‘captive,’” and submit to “a high degree of monitoring and control by lead firms.” The US Supreme Court ruled against the class standing of the 1.5 million women represented in the lawsuit, Dukes vs. Walmart, but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg pointed out in her dissent that the facts of the case stood (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, No. 10277 U.S. (2011)). A lawyer interviewed with decades of experience with class action lawsuits observed that the rejection of class standing reflected the conservative

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On ICNs and Dignity orientation of the Supreme Court, which in iterations prior to the 1980s would have likely certified the class and proceeded to examine the merits of the case. This definition draws on Cedric Robinson’s (2000: 2) concept of racialism, the “legitimation and corroboration of social organization by reference to the ‘racial’ components of its elements,” Stuart Hall’s (1997) analysis that race functions as a signifier of status in society, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2007: 28) definition of racism: “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” As Minkah Makalani (2021) points out, Robinson’s concept racialism pushes us to see beyond the historically contingent manifestations of racism and to see the naturalization of hierarchies that permeate all social structures, including modes of property relations. Cheryl Harris (1993: 1714) observes that racism operates in relation to economic and political orders, sharing “a common premise … of a right to exclude” ( Harris 1993: 1714), The difference is evident in contrasting Figure 1.1 herein with Figure 1 in Fernandez-Stark et al. 2011, which further differentiates firms but does not identify political and social influences on firm-to-firm and firm-labor relations. This definition is adapted from Axel Honneth (1995). This definition of bargaining power adapts Max Weber’s conception of power, “the ability of an individual or group to carry out their will despite resistance” ( Weber 1968: 56), recognizing that, while some approaches to bargaining power limit it to a dyad, “resistance” recognizes that workers and managers interact with social, political, and economic systems in setting the work rules that govern their relationship. This presentation paraphrases Alfred Marshall’s (1920/1961: 383–386) conditions of price elastic demand for labor. Beverly Silver most prominently observed the relevance of the labor process and its relationship to other companies ( Arrighi and Silver 1984; Silver 2003). Figure 1.2 adapts the models used by process tracing theorists Beach and Pederson (2013). In my model, dignity approximates their concept of a causal mechanism, that which makes a particular outcome more likely, with the difference that it is unrealistic to conceptualize dignity as a static input given its character as a relational dynamic. Richard Hyman (1975: 2) summarized employment relations as “about the nature of the limits to workers’ duty to obey and employers’ right to command & how such limits determined.” Both E.P. Thompson (1963) and Axel Honneth (1995) emphasized the moral dimension of struggles for participation in the rules to which we are subjected. The Food and Agriculture Organization ( FAO 2016, 2018) estimates that one-third of workers worldwide work in agriculture and that most live with less than $1.25 per day, a conservative definition of poverty. The FAO (2016, 2018) and World Bank (2019) report that most agricultural workers endure dangerous conditions. On contemporary agribusiness, see McMichael 1995; Lawrence and Burch 2007; Russi 2013; and Corrado et al. 2016. Considering consolidation and other indicators, Lawrence and Burch (2007: 9) posit, “The most important factor in understanding the extent of supermarket power is that the retail sector has moved beyond its traditional responsibility for food distribution, and is now strongly influencing patterns of production and consumption.” The three countries exporting the most strawberries Spain, Mexico, and the United States accounted for more than 55 percent in all but two years between 1988 and 2019. The leading ten strawberry exporting countries accounted for 75 percent of world exports, on averaged, and more than 85 percent in all but four years, during the period (UN Comtrade).

On ICNs and Dignity 27 40 In Hillel Soifer’s (2020) definition, a shadow case study “entails the examination of an ancillary or peripheral case, drawing inference from the within-case analysis of that case to shed light on the generality of claims most centrally evaluated in the core case.” 41 I conducted field visits to Washington, for a week in 2018 and two months in 2020, and San Quintín, for two months in 2020. Fieldwork in Spain was planned for 2020, replanned for 2021, and suspended due to travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, remote interviews were conducted in 2020 and 2021 with key informants in production in Spain and food retail. Guided by protocols and questionnaires reviewed and exempted for human participant studies by the Institutional Review Board, a total of 154 interviews of workers, unionists, managers, government officials, scholars, and activists were conducted and coded manually. Quotes and other information presented in the book are from the interviews unless otherwise cited. 42 United for Respect was called Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) from 2010 until changing to United for Respect to reflect an expanded focus of its activities to multiple companies (see https://united4respect.org/).

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Selwyn, Benjamin. (2017). The Struggle for Development. Cambridge: Polity. Shanker, Deena (November 21, 2016). “The Berry of the Future is Fed a Specialized Diet and Picked by a Robot”. Bloomberg. (21 November 2019). Shelman, M. (2017). “Driscoll’s: Harnessing Digital Technology to Deliver Delight.” California Agribusiness Executive Seminar. Davis: University of California Davis, 2–28. Silver, Beverley. (2003). Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soifer, Hillel. (2020). “Shadow Cases in Comparative Research.” Qualitative and MultiMethod Research, 18(2): 9–18. Striffler, Steve. (2002). In the Shadows of the State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1990–1995. Durham: Duke University Press. Striffler, Steve and Mark Moberg. (2003). Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press. Suwandi, Intan. (2019). Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Swyngedouw, Erik. (2007). “Technonatural Revolutions: The Scalar Politics of Franco’s Hydro-Social Dream for Spain, 1939–1975.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(1): 9–28. Thompson, Edward P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage. Tomich, Dale W. (2016). Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830–1848 (2nd ed.). Albany: State University of New York Press. UN Comtrade. (2021). United Nations Comtrade Database. [database] https://comtrade. un.org/ United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA ERS). (2014). “U.S. strawberry consumption continues to grow.” https://www.ers.usda.gov/dataproducts/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=77884 (accessed 20 March 2021). United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA ERS). (2020). “Farm Labor.” [webpage] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/ farm-labor/ (accessed 20 March 2021). United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA ERS). (2021). “Top 4, 8, and 20 firms’ share of U.S. grocery store sales, 1992–2016.” USDA ERS, using data from U.S. Census Bureau, Monthly Retail Trade Survey, company annual reports, and industry sources. Sales based on North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=54628 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS). (2019). Spain: Retail Foods. https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/report/ downloadreportbyfilename?filename=Retail%20Foods_Madrid_Spain_6‐13‐2019. pdf. (accessed 31 December 2022). United States Department of Labor (USDOL). (2018). Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2015–2016: A Demographic and Employment Profile of United States Farmworkers. Research Report No. 13. January 2018. https://www.dol. gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/naws/pdfs/NAWS_Research_Report_13.pdf United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) (2020). “Patent Assignment Search.” https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/patent/search (accessed 9 August 2020).

On ICNs and Dignity 33 Velasco, Laura, Christian Zlolniski and Marie-Laure Coubes. (2014). De jornaleros a colonos: residencia, trabajo e identidad en el valle de San Quintín. Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Weber, Max. (1968). Economy and Society; an Outline of Interpretive Sociology. New York: Bedminster Press. Webster, Edward. (1988). “The Rise of Social-movement Unionism: The Two Faces of the Black Trade Union Movement in South Africa,” in State, Resistance, and Change in South Africa, edited by Philip H. Frankel, Noam Pines and Mark Swilling. London/New York: Croom Helm, 174–196. Wells, Miriam J. (1996). Strawberry Fields. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Werner, Marion, Jennifer Bair and Victor Ramiro Fernández. (2014). “Linking Up to Development? Global Value Chains and the Making of a Post-Washington Consensus.” Development and Change, 45(6): 1219–1247. Wood, Ellen Meiksins. (2002). The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso. Wright, Erik O. (2000). “Working-Class Power, Capitalist-Class Interests, and Class Compromise.” American Journal of Sociology, 105(4): 957–1002. Zlolniski, Christian. (2019). Made in Baja: The Lives of Farmworkers and Growers behind Mexico’s Transnational Agricultural Boom. Oakland: University of California Press.

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Dignity as Catalyst: Reorganizing Work in Strawberry Production in Washington, United States

On July 11, 2013, Federico López asked management of Sakuma Brothers to increase the wage rate by three cents per pound of strawberries for him and fellow berry pickers. Management fired López, instructing him to vacate company housing along with his family. Instead, hundreds of coworkers stopped working and, with their families, marched to management, demanded López’s reinstatement, the increase of their piece rate, an overtime premium payrate, punch cards instead of digital scanners to record the boxes they pick, the discharge of a foreman, unpaid sick leave, childcare, and an end to intimidatory treatment by certain managers (C2C 2013). The berry company coowner and manager Ryan Sakuma suggested that the workers form a committee. After initial negotiations reached impasse, workers deepened their organization. Over the next four years, they conducted intermittent strikes, won lawsuits, implemented a boycott of their employer and its highest profile buyers, gained recognition of their union Familias Unidas por la Justicia (Families United for Justice, FUJ), negotiated and renegotiated collective bargaining agreements, and formed the worker-owned farming cooperative Tierra y Libertad. The workers’ collective actions improved the terms and conditions of their employment. They won backpay in wage-and-hour lawsuits. Since their first union contract, which covered the 2017 harvest, they have had more job security, higher wages, and access to healthcare; management has complied with labor laws; and workers and managers have resolved disputes through a grievance process that has binding arbitration as its final step. As seasonal workers hand-picking strawberries, blackberries and blueberries, they work 8½ hour days, seven days a week, June until October. During the 2020 season, the company paid $15–$18 per hour, depending on the piece-rate that FUJ and management negotiated daily based on test picks. Workers have breaks, accessible toilets, and water while working in the summer heat. Their union manages an account funded by their employer to cover costs of medical care otherwise inaccessible to most of the workers as undocumented residents. Employment relations have also changed to include worker participation in work rules through their union. During workers’ strike and boycott, DOI: 10.4324/9781003329916-2

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management sought to replace strikers, hired security guards, barred union activists from company property. First contract negotiations dragged on for eight months. During the first year under the CBA, biweekly grievances all went to arbitration for resolution. Over the subsequent three years, the union and management developed a problem-solving relationship, resolving most issues directly through daily communications. Management began sharing financial data with the union and permitting union access to workers on their property. The union communicated with members when market prices limited wage rates, refraining from strikes while maintaining the contractually established minimums, and its members have supported unionization efforts across their state of Washington. FUJ and Sakuma developed a mutually beneficial collective bargaining relationship despite the antagonistic institutions in which they are embedded. The US federal government refuses to provide protection of collective bargaining rights to agricultural workers, sustaining a policy enacted to preserve patriarchal, white political economic power in the country.1 Washington State law offers protection of workers’ concerted activity under its little Norris LaGuardia Act (LNLA),2 but at the time of FUJ’s formation exempted agribusinesses from overtime regulations and to-date only investigates legal violations of any sort when a worker complains, an action carrying risks discharge and deportation for complainants. While more than half of US agribusiness work is performed by undocumented immigrants, the US government classifies these workers as illegal, denying them work authorization; access to health care, nutrition, housing, and education services; and certain protections under the law.3 Sakuma Brothers is one of many strawberry suppliers whose managers’ decision-making is limited by oligopolistic suppliers and oligopsonistic buyers. Indicating their orientation toward collective bargaining, market-leading Driscoll’s said “the underlying issue at Sakuma farms is really the inability of workers to organize themselves into a labor union in the state of Washington,” and that their union was not “proper representation” after they formed FUJ (Chef’s Collaboration 2016). Sakuma Brothers is also a Japanese-American owned business in 77 percent white county,4 where agribusiness associations evidently seek to limit any one company’s wage offer. These political, economic, and cultural forces shape employment relations at Sakuma Brothers and, while mitigated by the collective bargaining process established between the company and FUJ, constrain workers’ gains. Employment under the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) is four months per year, and wage levels are constrained by ICN pressures on the company. In fact, the creation of the cooperative farm Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom) by FUJ members reflects their vision for more thorough control over their livelihoods. This chapter analyzes how workers, organized as FUJ, transformed employment at the berry production company Sakuma Brothers. After explaining the sources of data and analytical approach, ICN analysis is

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applied to map the bargaining power dynamics at the company. Then, the history of labor struggle beginning with the 2013 strike and resulting in collective bargaining at the company is outlined. The final section assesses the workers’ efforts in relation to the dignity-based model of power building, concluding with implications of the case.

Learning sources Toward understanding how workers built bargaining power, the union Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), and a collective bargaining relationship with Sakuma Brothers, I asked the workers, management of the company, and their respective allies and partners, in communications between December 2018 and December 2020. During a first observational visit to Skagit County in Northwestern Washington State, where the company and workers are located, I interviewed several workers and participants in their coalition during a week in the offseason. Over two-month second visit during the harvest season of 2020, I interviewed 55 workers, a representative of the Washington Department for Labor and Industry (LNI), and seven coalition participants. The president and CEO of Sakuma Brothers, Danny Weeden, provided written responses to interview questions. The CEO of Driscoll’s, J. Miles Reiter, participated in a telephone interview. Information in this chapter is from the interviews, except where noted by reference to secondary sources. In addition to the insights shared by interviewees, the Labor Archives of Washington at the University of Washington provided a trove of documents and photographs concerning the workers’ campaign for union recognition and collective bargaining. The demographic profile of workers involved is notable, given the mobilization of identities in employment experiences to indicate their position in socioeconomic and political hierarchies and their reclamation of their own, complex identities in transforming their employment. Of the 552 workers covered by the FUJ-Sakuma Brothers contract for harvesting berries in 2020, 10 percent participated in interviews. Ranging in age from 16 to 63, just over half identified as women, the rest men. The vast majority are bilingual—speaking an indigenous language and Spanish, and some additionally speak English. For half, Mixteco is their first language; for another quarter, Triqui; and others, Spanish. Most of the workers were married and have children, typically two. Eighty-four percent were born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and another 7 percent in the state of Guerrero. Most emigrated due to the lack of livelihood opportunities in their home communities, on average at age seventeen, without national-state permission. A third had no formal education, and those with some were able to attend school for six years on average. The workers had lived in the United States for 13 years on average, and 80 percent of them were living yearround in Skagit county, where Sakuma Brothers is located. As one worker explained, “No one travels to Mexico due to border issues. Coming back is

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too much. Sometimes it’s not even worth it. Back in 1980 my dad used to cross the border every year, work here in the US, then just go back. Now it’s no longer the case. You can’t do that.”5 On average, the 2020 harvesters had worked at Sakuma Brothers for 8 seasons, some as many as 19 seasons.

Mapping bargaining power at Sakuma Brothers through ICN analysis ICN analysis of Sakuma Brothers Farms, Inc. reflects much of the development of the strawberry ICN in the United States and thus bargaining power at a production node. Sakuma Brothers is a production company purchasing from oligopolistic suppliers and selling to oligopsonistic buyers. While this structural position limits profitability, the company has relied on a supply of immigrant labor to extract sufficient value from the production process to remain competitive since its beginnings in the 1930s. As changes in US immigration policy effectively ended the ability of its workforce to migrate annually across the US-Mexico border, particularly in the 2010s, workers’ residency in same community as the company created opportunities for workers to shift the balance of power in their favor. After a threeyear union resistance campaign, the company adapted to a collective bargaining relationship with the workers’ union FUJ. Before tracing the workers’ collective action, this section maps bargaining power based on the company’s economic, political, and social position. Understanding bargaining power at Sakuma Brothers begins with the land. Sakuma Brothers owns 1,000 acres of land in Skagit County, Washington, between Highway 5 and the Puget Sound’s San Juan islands, nearly equidistant between Seattle and Vancouver, Canada. The land was brought under the capitalist property regime by the US government, which displaced the indigenous communities living there—the Clallam, Lummi, Samish, Semiahmo, Skagit, Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Swinomish, and Upper Skagit—and granted settlers access to it under the Homestead Act of 1862 (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014). Furthering the construction of the racialized order in which the company is embedded, the US Naturalization Act of 1870 prohibited Japanese immigrants from owning land, and the state of Washington reinforced the prohibition with Alien Land Laws in its constitution of 1889 and again in 1921. Thus, when Takeo Sakuma began farming around 1915, as a Japanese immigrant, he rented land (Sakuma Brothers 2021). Not until 1935 did the second generation of the Sakuma family purchase the land that the company has since owned and expanded. In the local community, class has primarily influenced relations with the Sakuma’s as business owners. During World War II, multiple Sakuma family members fought for the US military while the US government incarcerated the rest of the family in “internment camps.” A neighboring landowner held the land during the tragedy and returned it to the Sakuma’s after the war. The local business class continued to embrace Sakuma

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Brothers. During the midst of a strike in 2015, the local newspaper the Bellingham Herald effused, “Sakuma Bros. has been a valued member of the Skagit Valley community since 1935, and has been run by four generations of the Sakuma Family.” When workers led a boycott, some local businesses, especially in agribusiness, rallied support for the company. Beyond potential support of other landowners, land ownership carries equivocal financial implications for the strawberry production company. As Julie Guthman (2004; 2019) has observed, many strawberry production companies lease land to rotate off soils deteriorated by monoculture and chemical-intensive practices common in industrial strawberry production, and the increased purchase of lands as financial investments has driven up land values. Sakuma Brothers produced strawberries on 120 acres, 12 percent of its land in 2020, according to management. Financially, land ownership provides a reprieve from rent and source of financial capital accumulation, given increasing prices of lands for strawberry production, but also limits the company’s mobility. While selling its land presents the company with a means to reinvest its capital elsewhere to avoid a union and attendant lower profits, its established presence has provided business allies. In terms of its exchange relations with suppliers and buyers, Sakuma Brothers is similar to other strawberry production companies, squeezed between concentrated markets. The company’s suppliers of inputs for strawberry production are multinational companies with dominant market shares in their respective sectors. The chemicals used to fumigate, fertilize, and control “pests” in the strawberry fields are manufactured and marketed by a few large, multinational corporations.6 Strategically, Sakuma Brothers maintained control over the costs of plants used in its fields for decades. In 1948, two of the brothers took over management of Norcal Nursery in California. In addition to providing control over pricing of strawberry plants, with the nursery, Sakuma Brothers secured another source of revenue by patenting two strawberry plant varietals, SS484 and Burlington, from the late 1980s through mid-2000s (USPTO 2020). However, varietal production has become increasingly competitive among fewer multinational companies, and Sakuma Brothers sold Norcal to Plantas de Navarra S.A. (PLANASA) in 2017. Only Driscoll’s and the Regents of the University of California own more strawberry plant patents than PLANASA; together with Plant Sciences, Inc., the four companies own 56 percent of strawberry patents. As Sakuma Brothers’ CEO reported, “Consolidation has reduced the ability to comparison shop with respect to pricing and services. The large, consolidated suppliers have additional resources that make it more convenient and efficient for operations, but comes at increasingly higher costs.” Sakuma Brothers is also a price taker from its buyers. Like most strawberry production companies, Sakuma Brothers sells the bulk of its strawberries to other companies. It has adapted its sales strategy as competition has increased. In 1990, Sakuma Brothers opened a fruit packhouse, later equipped with Individual Quality Frozen technology, with which it

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processes its own berries and those sold by nearby production companies for sales. As the company’s CEO remarked in written correspondence, it is “a major investment that is a competitive advantage to our company that must be efficiently managed and continually improved to achieve sustainable growth for our future.” The numbers corroborate the CEO’s point. In 2019, processed fruit sales represented 65 percent of $17 million total sales.7 Competition from “low-cost imports,” by which the company’s CEO referred to strawberries produced in Mexico, led Sakuma Brothers to sell all of its strawberries “to process markets and not the fresh market” as of 2020. The workers at the company understand that in the 2010s, the company was selling its berries to Driscoll’s, Häagen-Dazs, and Yoplait. Indicating a constraint on revenue, over which workers might negotiate distribution, the company’s CEO reported, “Consolidation of [the] customer base reduces opportunities to pass along cost increases.” Concentrated capital in inputs and food retail reflect what early observers of capitalist agriculture predicted and contemporary observers are documenting—capital avoids risk-intensive crop production (Kautsky, 1899; Russi 2013). It also indicates price elasticity of the company’s demand for labor, so long as it has access to replaceable workers. In other words, with little control over price of inputs or sales, Sakuma Brothers is, in this respect, in the same position of strawberry production companies observed by Miriam Wells (1996: 44–52) decades ago; “most critical and problematic for their continued capital accumulation is their need to control the price and performance of harvest labor.” Sakuma Brothers has filled its demand for harvest labor at a price supporting profitability with immigrant labor. In total, the company employs 58 people permanently, and hires approximately 500 workers for harvesting between June and October. The company’s CEO reiterated Well’s point on the importance of harvest labor, writing, “labor is a major concern for the Company because all of it crops are labor intensive and there is no mechanized harvesting ability, except for some ability in blueberries.” As the comment referenced, human labor power has to-date been cheaper and faster than available machines to harvest strawberries.8 Prices are of course not transcendentally determined but reflections of the power dynamics in the ICN, including political power to sustain low production costs via low labor costs. US and Mexican governments’ policies and the racialized subordination of indigenous peoples have ensured a supply of cheap labor. Like other agribusiness production companies in the United States, Sakuma Brothers has long relied on immigrant labor. Employing immigrant workers implies the externalization of the renewal of their labor power to their home communities and thus a basis for paying below the costs of living in the employer’s community (Burawoy 1976). The vast majority of workers who harvest the company’s strawberries are undocumented immigrants, meaning that US immigration laws eliminate their ability to make rights claims without the risk of deportation and loss of their source of income.

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The status also reduces options for obtaining income to those companies that expect no enforcement of regulations against employment of undocumented workers based on their political power, and thus may use workers’ immigration status to suppress worker grievances. However, the supply of such disempowered labor needs to be sufficient and renewed, conditions partially fulfilled by US immigration policy, the Mexican state’s development policy, and the construction of a reductionist identity of certain indigenous peoples as field labor. The majority of strawberry harvest workers at Sakuma Brothers have familial roots in the southern Mexican states of Oaxaca and Guerrero. In interviews, two-thirds of workers interviewed said that they migrated to the United States due to the lack of livelihood opportunities in their homelands of southern Mexico. They are among the millions of peasants displaced through the privatization of land and water, shift of subsidies from small producers to export agribusinesses, and preparations for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by the Mexican government in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Weisbrot et al. 2014; Zlolniski 2019). The Mexican government’s debt crisis, attendant need for foreign exchange, and implementation of structural adjustment policies under International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan conditions set the stage for these neoliberal policies on a macroeconomic level (Llambi 1994; Zlolniski 2011). However, the recruitment of the majority of the displaced peoples specifically into agribusiness production required the racialized construction of the socioeconomic role assigned to them. Underpinning the displacement of peasants of Mexico, limitations on their socioeconomic and political mobility, and thus a supply of labor for strawberry production in the North American ICN are social orders that subordinate indigenous peoples and women. The construction of the fieldworker identity imposed on indigenous peoples of southern Mexico is a racialism process necessarily involving much deconstruction,9 conveyed here broadly by reference to indicative strategic actions. European colonists annihilated most indigenous people, then placed survivors in planned settlements (Kearney 1988). The Mexican state then constructed a national mestizo identity, a process of integration and nation-building that marginalized indigenous peoples (Cardoso de Oliveira 1992; Barabas and Bartolomé 1999; Bracamonte y Sosa and Lizama Quijano 2003; Solís Robleda 2003). The Mexican Revolution established formal democratic governance institutions, a collective land use system (“ejidos”), and systematic state control over unions, collective bargaining, and thus wage labor (Middlebrook 1995; Bensusán 2020). As part of its neoliberal turn, the Mexican president announced the privatization of lands in 1991, which disproportionately displaced indigenous communities, by declaring, There will be employment in the fields and this means more salaried work … the moment has arrived to recognize this situation and to

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promote the unionization of agricultural day laborers, to ensure that the labor relation will be one of just treatment. (quoted in Lara Flores 1996: 72) The message reinforced the ascription of fieldwork to indigenous people. Meanwhile, the government denied agricultural workers coverage under the national social security system and supported the proliferation of protectionist contracts—agreements between companies and “unions” collaborating with them and the state to prevent independent worker unionization and collective action.10 The contemporary period of the last 30 years—also when international trade of strawberries emerged—is marked by a neocolonial subordination of indigenous peoples to fit the labor demand of agribusiness in North America. Substituting the diverse historical experiences of indigenous peoples, primarily the state and employers cocreated an idealized identity of the docile worker capable of enduring strenuous fieldwork and disinterested in the modern conveniences afforded only by sufficient wages (Martínez Novo 2004). At Sakuma Brothers and agribusinesses throughout North America, the reification of this identity limits economic opportunities for displaced indigenous peoples, including those from communities in southern Mexico, primarily to agribusiness. It implies a replaceable supply of labor for the industry, under certain, changeable conditions. The effective end of migration by workers picking strawberries at Sakuma Brothers marked the opening of possibilities in employment relations at the company. In the 1990s and 2000s, Sakuma Brothers employed workers for the harvest season, provided rough shacks for housing,11 and enjoyed the benefit of paying enough for workers to reproduce their labor power in the offseason in Mexico, where living costs and average unit labor costs are fractions of US levels.12 As the US government adjusted its immigration policy, its closure of much of the border with Mexico and intensification of deportations and detentions of immigrants increased the risks of crossing the border. More and more, workers stayed in Skagit county after Sakuma’s berry harvest, increasing their interactions with each other and the community in the company’s environs. Unsurprisingly, given their financial dependence on minimal labor costs, Sakuma Brothers continued to seek immigrant labor, notably with a sudden emphasis on visaholding immigrants after decades of undocumented employees. At the start of the workers’ unionization campaign, the company stated, Our want is simple: to have a stable, legal, and cost effective work force to harvest our crops. The Requirements are clear and our analysis over the past 10 years has concluded the seasonal labor pool is shrinking. Immigration reform and having an executable Guest Worker program could fix this problem. (Sakuma Brothers, Inc 2013)

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The workers had another idea of fixing employment at the company, a process to which we now turn.

Workers’ path to union representation and collective bargaining with Sakuma Brothers The projects of agribusiness, displacement, immigration control, and social construction of the idealized field worker affect millions throughout North America. The 500 or so workers who unionized and now negotiate work rules with Sakuma Brothers broke through many of these barriers through the exercise of dignity. With less than 2 percent union density in US agribusiness, the formation of Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ) and its collective bargaining relationship with Sakuma Brothers is an anomaly. The workers, it is argued here, changed the terms and conditions of their employment through processes of dignity, first and most crucially to build workers’ capacity to act collectively, then to build a coalition, to disrupt the profiting process, and finally to establish collective bargaining with their employer as a means of governing work. Prior to the 2013 strike, workers at Sakuma had gone on strike but lacked the bargaining power to advance sustainable improvements. In 2004, the company lowered the piece rate and fired workers for not picking enough, and workers walked out of the fields. Management met with a group of workers and agreed to increase the piece rate and provide paid lunchbreaks, and then took away both concessions the following season (Holmes 2013: 177–180). Two years later, company management asked Rosalinda Guillen, founder of the organization Community to Community (C2C), to help reach an agreement with striking workers, as opposed to negotiating with the workers. Guillen had helped workers unionize and win a union contract at Chateau St. Michel in eastern Washington in the 1990s, led United Farm Workers (UFW) union and political campaigns in California into the 2000s, and had recently started the women-led C2C to advance food sovereignty,13 drawing on work by the Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil.14 However, a worker who then commanded authority over some workers rejected her participation and offered himself as a liaison to management, which placed him on a manager-worker committee that prevented strikes for several years. When workers struck in 2013, they acted on different ideas of change. As hundreds of workers and their families marched to management in support of López, they decided to invite Guillen to advise them. Ramón Torres, subsequently elected FUJ’s president, recalled that Guillen arrived to tell the workers that they would need to decide what they wanted; she could offer suggestions on how to realize their goals. FUJ’s current political director, Edgar Franks, described her role, saying, “Rosalinda instills confidence. The lawyers pointed out the law doesn’t protect the undocumented

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workers; the labor law doesn’t protect their freedom of association as agricultural workers.” Guillen described her theory of change: If farmworkers call, we’re going to go. That’s what we do. We’re going to go, but we don’t provide social services, we don’t do like, this little mediation and then leave the structure the way it is. As an organizer, I’m going to see if there’s leadership there that’s willing to lead, to create a change. With this approach, Guillen was recognizing the workers’ dignity, rejecting outside savior models and engaging the workers as peers capable of collective improvement of a shared society. The workers responded by pursuing long-lasting change. As Torres later described it, their goal was to gain respect as participants in the rules to which they are subjected at work and surrounding community. Guillen and C2C began to provide the workers with information on the UFW’s history and the US industrial relations system, and the workers began to develop their own identity as a collective with power, in contrast to the reductionist identity imposed on them as inputs to agribusiness. Following the initial 2013 strike, workers at Sakuma Brothers began to build their capacity to act as a collective, associational power, through dignity processes, recognizing each other’s capacity to participate in the rules to which they are subjected. Torres described the thinking among his coworkers, “right away, democratic was the focus immediately, even though they didn’t think of it conceptually, just that everyone needed to participate in decisions—majority or nothing. We didn’t know anything about unions then.” His comments reflect the low level of unionization in US agribusiness,15 and his coworkers’ particular experiences. Many had participated in elections and governance by “traditional authorities” in their heritage communities of southern Mexico. The elected traditional authorities are tasked with leading collective deliberations and decisions by and for the community, such as building infrastructure and settling disputes. The workers adapted the practice to their project at Sakuma Brothers, electing Torres as president and Filemon Pineda vice president of a committee tasked with leading the struggle to improve their employment. The election of Torres as president and his subsequent work indicated the dialectical change occurring among the workers. Although one of the few mestizo workers, Torres was elected by the workers with predominantly indigenous heritage because, “he spoke honestly,” “almost got into a fist fight with a supervisor [who was] yelling and screaming at a woman,” and understood some English. Yet the social hierarchies in which the workers were embedded needed deconstruction to clear the way for solidarity building. Guillen recalled a breakthrough moment on redefining gender relations. Just after being elected to the FUJ committee, Torres showed up to facilitate a meeting wearing a t-shirt with a beer

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advertisement featuring a sexualized image of a woman. Guillen told him to take it off. He refused, saying, “I’m not going to let somebody tell me what to wear,” to which she replied, “you mean you’re not going to let a woman tell you what to wear?” Torres relented, changed the shirt, and proceeded to facilitate the meeting. Afterward, he told Guillen, “I’m sorry I got mad, because you were right, and I’ll never do that again.” She reminded him that she knew he would not, reaffirming her confidence in him. Five years later, when members sent Torres to help workers organize in another part of the state, he lamented to Guillen that the group did not elect a female president of their union committee. She encouraged patience, “You have to educate, form the political consciousness at the level that will be fundamental and solid.” Guillen later reflected on such changes among FUJ members: They don’t have that governance and democracy anywhere else in their community. They’re poor. They’re brown. But within themselves they’re building this internal process that is giving them dignity and respect for each other and is now building dignity and respect from the external community around them. Upon electing leaders, workers also named their nascent union Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), emphasizing their inclusive praxis. The union convened daily meetings at the company housing camp nearest the office where workers pick up their checks, to engage as many workers as possible. They went door to door to invite fellow workers and facilitated multilingual meetings. Hundreds participated in the meetings, recalled many workers in interviews. One of them, who was 13 years old at the time, explained the participatory approach: I speak Mixteco, so I communicated a lot with people who speak Mixteco. There’s also a person who speaks Triqui and communicated with the people who speak Triqui. And my job was to listen to what they had to say and translate to the committee, or the president, or someone who’s taking down the notes, to make sure that everyone was able to speak. On legal strategy, participation was also emphasized. The labor lawyer who led negotiations for FUJ’s first contract with Sakuma Brothers reported, “Every meeting was multi-lingual—Mixteco, Triqui, Zapoteco, Spanish, English—often with children of workers translating.” Through engagement of each other across their respective languages to develop their collective, the workers were recognizing each other’s dignity, thereby creating the solidarity necessary for collective action. FUJ’s early collective actions elicited strong resistance from Sakuma Brothers. After their initial strike, the workers conducted intermittent

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strikes, lasting from hours to six days, demanding reinstatement of discharged peers and pay increases. Management discharged Torres, and hundreds of workers marched to management’s offices to demand his reinstatement. In response to workers’ collective actions, management hired a security firm that began surveilling workers in their housing camps and controlling entry and exit, hired consultants to halt the workers unionization drive, photographed workers engaged in strikes, and publicly smeared activists. Management also sought to replace the mostly undocumented workers by applying for labor through the H-2A program. In response, FUJ submitted 490 statements by workers expressing their availability for work to the Department of Labor, which oversees the visas, and the company withdrew its petition.16 At the entrances to the company housing camps, signs were posted reading, “Private Property. No Trespassing. All Visitors report to Office. Washington Farm Bureau.” Indicating Sakuma Brothers support from the industry, the Washington Farm Bureau also launched a “I [heart] berries” campaign, and its members encircled workers with their tractors outside courts during hearings of charges filed by the union. While the series of actions indicated FUJ’s associational power, management’s responses informed the workers that they would need to do more. The next step taken was to build a coalition. Having studied the UFW grape boycotts, the workers implemented a boycott to extend leverage across the commodity network, a tactic that would require allies. FUJ organized forty boycott committees between 2013 and 2016. While the boycott began focused on Sakuma’s, FUJ broadened to Driscoll’s after another union provided research findings that the berry marketer was then planning a major advertising campaign to further differentiate their product in US markets. Seven grocery stores pulled Sakuma Brothers, Driscoll’s, and Häagen Dazs products off their shelves. Through the process, FUJ recognized that Driscoll’s brand, as the leading berry marketer, was a vulnerability. The union leveraged it, pressuring the brand to lean on its supplier, the workers’ employer, to negotiate, and it worked. In the assessment of Driscoll’s CEO, “We were pretty instrumental in working with Sakuma to do a voluntary [union] election … Would they not if we didn’t encourage it, I don’t know.” In the process of building a coalition, FUJ broadened tactics to include appeals to the public to support their campaign for establishing union collective bargaining with Sakuma Brothers. Applying lessons from the UFW and Civil Rights movements, they articulated the illegitimacy of current conditions and unionization as the legitimate alternative. The iconic UFW slogan “Sí se puede” and Aztec eagle flag appeared at FUJ marches. As their own logo, the union adapted the image of a worker holding a fist in the air from the imagery used by Memphis sanitation workers during their 1968 strike, which was elevated by Dr. Martin Luther King.17 FUJ placards displayed in marches and their housing camps read “I

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am human,” adapting the sanitation workers’ slogan “I am a man” because, as one worker explained in an interview, “these growers don’t see us workers as human beings.” This use of symbolic power served a double purpose for FUJ. Through their creation of public expressions, they developed their union’s identity, and the symbology helped make their campaign legible to a range of allies. Unions welcomed FUJ into the labor movement and provided support. The Washington State Labor Council passed a resolution supporting FUJ’s boycott and recognizing FUJ as a union, thereby affiliating it with the American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). The AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre visited FUJ during its struggle for union recognition by Sakuma Brothers. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) provided the research on Driscoll’s advertising plans, refused to load Driscoll’s berries in support of the boycott, and led boycott rallies outside food retailers along the Pacific coast. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local 6 publicly endorsed FUJ’s demands and its boycott. Local unions of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and United Steel Workers (USW) provided financial support. Members of each of these unions joined FUJ at its demonstrations. FUJ members reciprocated, joining picket lines of teachers and steelworkers and supporting the Fight for $15 demands for higher wages and union representation. In addition to its AFL-CIO affiliation, FUJ joined the Food Chain Workers Alliance of union and labor movement organizations spanning the production, distribution, and consumption stages of the food system. Social movements also supported the workers with actions to protect them from harassment by immigration authorities. C2C, the American Immigration Rights Project Washington Chapter, and the Northwest Immigration Rights Project organized a first-responders network to protect immigrant workers from workplace raids and mitigate federal immigration enforcement. The groups filed a civil rights complaint to prevent local cities from collaborating with the federal Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). Subsequently, FUJ joined the advocacy efforts, and together the coalition helped pass a statewide prohibition of local government collaboration with CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).18 While the unions added muscle to FUJ’s boycott and the community groups created space from immigration authorities, labor lawyers pressed the legal duty of Sakuma Brothers to respect the workers’ rights to concerted activity. The legal strategy began with a case to force compliance with state laws requiring paid breaks. Lawyers representing FUJ helped the union win a $850,000 settlement and backpay for unpaid rest breaks, required under state law, the largest farmworker wage-and-hour settlement on record in Washington (Cornwell 2014). In subsequent cases, the lawyers rested FUJ’s case on the LNLA of Washington state, which exists in several states and protects workers’ freedom of association and rights to concerted

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activity for the purpose of improving employment terms and conditions. Under the LNLA, FUJ’s lawyers filed cases, and state and county judges enjoined Sakuma Brothers from placing security personnel at the workers camps, denying housing and work to participants in strikes, and imposing a lower wage rate.19 The courts also ordered the company to refrain from investigating FUJ’s internal affairs, to remove language from its employment application requiring workers to never engage in activity that could be contrary to the company’s interests, and to remove restrictions on visitors to workers at the company housing camp.20 In 2017, the court ordered a Sakuma Brothers manager to convene workers and inform them that he had lied about the respective actions and positions of the union and company regarding the pay rate, and then ordered Sakuma Brothers to commit to contract arbitration.21 As one of the FUJ lawyers noted, the union won every single case before three different judges, increasing members’ perception of their union’s effectiveness, and further pressuring their employer into collective bargaining. In the lawyers description, I look at the legal work … as air war for a ground game. We’re not decisive, but we help. The Act gave that cover. If people were intimidated by goons and a judge found that behavior against the Act, they enjoined against it and acknowledged the righteousness of the workers’ struggle in public. After three years of campaigning, FUJ and Sakuma Brothers reached an agreement on a union recognition election. An FUJ lawyer explained that the union was confident in winning an election while Sakuma Brothers management seemed to miscalculate workers’ support for the union. Management may also have begun adjusting strategies from resistance to acquiescence after workers blocked their own replacement with the H-2A program; Driscoll’s sought resolution to avoid a tarnished brand; and courts ruled in workers’ favor. As a result, the union proposed and management agreed to language in the election agreement that ensured a first collective bargaining agreement by requiring the parties to reach an agreement within 115 days after the election or submit their contract proposals to an arbitrator who would be limited to awarding one or the other proposal.22 The election agreement set the bargaining unit to “seasonal harvest employees picking berries,” excluding workers employed for mechanical blueberry picking, field maintenance work, and processing. Management and the union agreed on former National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Regional Director Richard Ahearn to oversee a secret ballot election to choose “representation by FUJ or no representation,” a joint meeting to explain the election to workers facilitated by the NGO Fair World Project, and neutrality—FUJ would halt all “economic actions” including strikes and the boycott, and Sakuma Brothers would not oppose unionization or retaliate against workers’ supporting unionization.

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On September 12, 2016, an overwhelming majority (77 percent) of workers voted for FUJ representation at Sakuma Brothers. Indicating ongoing union resistance, Sakuma Brothers prohibited the FUJ president from company property, so the election occurred at a school parking lot nearby. John McKoy, the only Native American member of the Washington State Senate, observed. A lawyer involved reflected, “In a way, [it was] poetic, at a school where workers’ children go and [ballot counting] in the back of John McKoy’s pickup truck.” The struggle continued into negotiations. FUJ presented a complete contract draft as their proposal to Sakuma Brothers at their first negotiations meeting. FUJ’s negotiator had worked for the NLRB, American Civil Liberties Union, Washington Public Education Association, and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Sakuma Brothers had hired a law firm from St. Louis known for union avoidance strategies. After eight months of the company’s negotiators refusing to negotiate economic issues, FUJ initiated the arbitration process, and the parties signed their first collective bargaining agreement on June 16, 2017. The contract did not immediately mean FUJ and Sakuma Brothers mutually recognized each other’s capacity to participate in work rules. The first season under a CBA tested that possibility. During the 2017 harvest, FUJ filed grievances biweekly, all of which went to an arbitrator for resolution at the end of the season. While management realized that the union would hold them to the contract, FUJ realized that it would need to resolve workers’ concerns quicker. Following arbitration facilitated by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which decided cases favoring both the union and management, the company replaced its legal representative, and FUJ and Sakuma Brothers began a new type of relationship. During the subsequent three seasons, the union and management developed a problem-solving dynamic. Only one formal grievance was filed, and it was resolved without arbitration. FUJ and Sakuma Brothers’ representatives communicated almost daily to resolve issues. Each day, the union and management coordinate a test pick. The union selects three and management two people who pick for an hour, then they calculate the average picked in an hour and use it to set the next day’s hourly wage rate.23 The union and company also negotiated a healthcare fund, which distributes revenue to the union for disbursements to reimburse workers’ health care costs, otherwise unaffordable due to workers’ immigration status. The two renegotiated the entire contract in 2019 and an economic reopener in 2020. Regarding the company’s early union resistance position, the union’s grievance representative said, “There’s no indication that they’re making efforts. In the past, the anti-union folks have only made it more difficult.” He added, “It’s not always easy stuff to resolve, but we spend a significant amount of time, a lot of time, to resolve issues. We’ve really been able to find some resolutions.” Regarding the company’s

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Table 2.1 FUJ member comments on union representation Wages

Treatment

Control

“The difference is that before they just paid us what they wanted, but now that there’s the union, they respond to the people.” “Yes, I think it’s fair. Now, under the contract, we make more than we made prior to the contract.” “It matters, because they pay more for the berries, and they give us breaks—before we didn’t have these things.” “Before Sakuma wasn’t right with the people, and the union came in with the strike, and with this the situation calmed … if one day your check is missing a pound or so, you have to talk to the union, and they take care of it.” “They don’t nag people; before they threatened people that they were going to fire them, but not now.” “Yes, we participated [in the strike] … everyone participated … because it was disorganized … now it’s under more control.” “Before, they told you that you weren’t working fast enough, or picking enough pounds, and didn’t let you take breaks. Now no.” “If I say something about the work, they used to just fire me. And now if I have a complaint, they can’t just fire me. I can go to the union. That’s a really big thing for the workers here, because we all need to work.”

Source: Interviews by the author, 2020.

position, the CEO reported, “The Company now works with the Union in establishing wages and working through disciplinary processes.” Workers represented by FUJ point to higher wages, more respectful treatment, and control over working conditions as the main benefits of collective bargaining with Sakuma Brothers. Table 2.1 presents some of their appraisals. FUJ’s internal operations also indicate commitment to democratic practice. In their second year under the CBA, workers voted to establish a union (or agency) shop, meaning workers choosing to be FUJ members pay 2.5 percent of their wages, and non-members pay 2.25 percent in agency fees. In 2020, about 20 percent paid dues, and the rest agency fees; a share that, according to interviewed workers, reflects the persistent challenge of raising wages at the price-taking company and low wages in the non-union jobs available to workers during the seven-month offseason. In addition to an elected president, vice president, and committee, FUJ has a staff lawyer who leads dispute resolution with the company, a political action organizer, and two member organizers. All worked in the fields except for the lawyer. The president and vice president convene regular meetings and lead an orientation for all workers at the beginning of the season, where they explain collective bargaining and the current contract. The member organizers speak Mixteco and Triqui, respectively, and visit workers at Sakuma Brothers most days during the harvest. The dues and agency fees

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cover the elected leaders’ and staff expenditures and salaries, which are indexed to the field workers’ pay rates, $2,600 per month in 2020.

How workers built bargaining power through dignity processes The persistent and diverse collective actions taken by FUJ resulted in material improvements to their employment, including their ability to negotiate its terms and conditions. Why their approach worked matters. They are among very few groups of workers to gain union recognition, collectively negotiate a union contract, and, through it, improve their working conditions in agribusiness in the United States, ever. Despite facing dispossession, criminalization, racialized marginalization, and poverty wages, they achieved such historically extraordinary improvements in employment. Their approach offers insights to all workers, even if their gains have been limited by the power dynamics of the strawberry ICN in which they are working. Instructively, dignity catalyzed FUJ’s trajectory, explaining much of their progress. Conceptualized as a process, the role of dignity in FUJ’s improvement process becomes clear upon considering the conditions in which the workers began their campaign. Peaking strawberry sales, the existence of the LNLA protecting concerted activity, strike leverage, the workers’ settlement in their employer’s community, and the social constructs dividing the workers all affected bargaining power between the workers and Sakuma Brothers. The conjuncture and its limits as an explanation for FUJ’s trajectory

Considering market conditions, strawberry sales were peaking around the time of the 2013 strike. Growth in strawberry sales accelerated in the 2000s and early 2010s, reaching a record of 7.9 pounds per capita in the United States in 2013 (USDA ERS 2014). It may be reasonably expected that such market conditions were increasing revenue for Sakuma Brothers.24 By itself, more revenue may reduce reluctance of any management to collective bargaining and associated higher wage bills. However, management of Sakuma Brothers did not appear to consider accepting unionism until years into workers’ campaign of strikes, a boycott, and court cases. In terms of potential impact on workers’ expectations, any actual increased revenue may not have been evident to the workers, whose numbers had not increased significantly and who did not have access to the company’s financials at the time. The legal landscape was at least as relevant. While the US National Labor Relations Act excludes agriculture, Washington state’s LNLA protects employees concerted activity. The LNLA provided the foothold on which FUJ won all of its court cases. The cases provided material improvements,

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for example, providing workers with backpay and full legal pay going forward, and bolstered workers’ perceptions of the instrumentality of their union. However, if the law alone were sufficient, one would expect to see similar outcomes at other US agribusinesses. Nineteen US states have LNLAs, accounting for the bulk of US agribusiness production.25 Labor law, then, did not solely determine outcomes in this case; like market conditions, its effects depended on bargaining power. The ability of workers and management to sustain a work stoppage was meaningfully equivocal leading up to the 2013 strike. Sakuma Brothers did not have alternative production sites, and while its processing enabled some sales in the event of a harvest strike, most of the fruit processed was from its own fields. Its land represented both an asset—it avoids rent, has collateral for financial credit, and has deep support from the business community—and an anchor—it needs to invest in its field’s fertility and in hiring labor there as opposed to relocating. A harvest strike thus disrupts Sakuma Brothers profits. On the other hand, the company had apparent capacity to replace strikers, either by hiring more undocumented workers or using the H-2A visa program. While a harvest strike disrupts Sakuma Brothers, workers’ strike leverage was limited. The labor process involved individual workers incentivized by piece-rate wages to pick fast and little capacity for a few workers to shut down production, as is the case in some factory assembly lines.26 Work was supervised by foreman, against whom workers are inclined to direct grievances and seek favorable treatment, as opposed to directing their demands to the company itself. Second, workers at the company had limited resources to sustain a strike. As the first or second generation of peoples displaced from peasant livelihoods with seasonal wage labor as their primary available employment, workers had few alternative income sources. One of the workers explained that US agribusiness employment does not provide for savings, I’ve worked here many years in the United States, and we never have a fixed job for the year. We work two, three months for a company and go to another, and there are places that pay $10 per hour, well, and that pay the minimum, and when it’s piece rate we get a bit more, but it’s different, because what we earn, we spend, okay. The idea is to save money, but here no. Third, social hierarchies functioned to divide workers. The disempowering identity as inputs to agribusiness imposed on indigenous peoples of southern Mexico had been adapted to the company’s production process. Leading up to the 2013 strike, Sakuma Brothers’ fields were organized on a social hierarchy in which workers were divided by ethnic groups, women suffered discriminatory treatment, and status was bolstered by practices such as hiring white, local teenagers to check the fruit picked predominantly by

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immigrant fieldworkers (Holmes 2013; Interviews by the author). To achieve gains from a strike, workers would need to unite, direct demands to the company, and mitigate resource constraints. At the time of the 2013 strike, dynamics of the labor market were also changing. For decades, Sakuma Brothers relied on a surplus labor supply. As one of many production companies in a strawberry ICN, the company was increasingly a price taker on both sides, as market power concentrated among buyers, at breakneck pace since the 1990s, and among input suppliers, notably indicated by Sakuma Brother’s sale of the Norcal nursery to PLANASA. Those economic pressures intensified the production company’s interest in low labor costs, which it satisfied with surplus immigrant labor. At least since the Mexican government’s compulsion of millions of peasants into wage labor in the 1980s, insufficient employment opportunities in Mexico and for immigrants in the United States sustained a surplus supply of labor. Conflation of indigeneity and field work reinforced the surplus by limiting the new wage workers’ mobility. From millions of new wage workers effectively relegated to agribusiness employment, Sakuma Brothers needed to recruit 500–700 workers for each berry season. In these conditions, many workers left Washington after each harvest, maintaining intermittent relations with coworkers and cautious if any relations with the community. Yet by the 2010s workers at Sakuma Brothers were increasingly settled in the community where the company is located. Settlement changed the company’s labor force from migrant to resident and increased workers interactions with each other and community members. Year-round residence in Washington as opposed to migration to Mexico between harvests also increased the income necessary for workers to live, sharpening the immediate material motivation to engage in concerted activity. These conditions remind us that the ICN is a set of relationships created and adapted through decisions by the diversity of actors in them. Each clearly affected bargaining power. However, if any one, or the set of these conditions were decisive, then similar outcomes should have emerged throughout the US strawberry sector, if not agribusiness production more generally. The uptick in sales was at the sector level. Most of US agribusiness production is located in states with LNLAs.27 Harvest strikes were mitigated by management capacity to replace workers and the organization of the labor process. The changes to immigration enforcement and thus migratory patterns contributed to millions of workers settling as residents in the localities of employers instead of migrating seasonally.28 Understanding the outcomes of workers’ collective actions, union collective bargaining and improvements of employment conditions, then, directs our attention to workers’ activities. Dignity as the catalyst in FUJ’s struggle

The turn among workers at Sakuma Brothers in 2013 that led to union collective bargaining was a shift from individual to collective activity. The

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range of activities between the first strike through subsequent strikes, court cases, the boycott, contract negotiations, and grievance resolution all indicated that the workers were acting as a collective. In other words, these activities demonstrated associational power, “the capacity to act as a collective” (Rhomberg and Lopez 2021: 39). Consistent participation by members and the problem-solving dynamic eventually established with management indicated strong associational power.29 That workers acted collectively does not, however, explain the turn. Prior considerations of why certain worker collective actions achieve workers’ demands point to solidarity. Employers’ act of hiring workers and setting their wages physically unites a group of workers and presents them with a common interest, around which they may form bonds of solidarity.30 Sakuma Brothers certainly brought workers together in this manner. However, differentiations operating throughout the society as divisions, including on racial and gender lines, often divide coworkers.31 The observance of hierarchy based on ethnicity and gender at Sakuma Brothers prior to the 2013 strike suggests that such social constructs were dividing workers. Toward a collective consciousness, workers might progress through stages, first recognizing commonality with coworkers, then perceiving management as an adversary, considering struggle between workers and capital as fundamental to modern society, and then envisioning alternative social arrangements (Mann 1973). Critical moments, particularly strikes, can accelerate the development of such consciousness, many have observed (Blackburn 1967; Fantasia 1988; Lefebvre 2003). At Sakuma Brothers, multiple strikes prior to 2013 indicate at least a sense of commonality with coworkers and struggle with management, but they did not lead to sufficient power to affect change; in fact, management responded by temporarily offering concessions then taking them away and coopting one of the workers. There was, then, nothing automatic about the 2013 strike leading toward unionization at Sakuma Brothers. We then need to look for an explanation of what made the activities starting in July of 2013 different, effective; in other words, identify a mechanism through which solidarity was created. Moving toward an explanation, Adam Reich and Peter Bearman find that when workers’ interactions produce bonds of solidarity, in their words “relations in which we engage to achieve an external … goal,” the experience is so profound as to be observable in the neural activity of participants (Reich and Bearman 2018). As importantly, they note that the basis is trust. Yet this returns to the question of what workers at Sakuma Brothers did to create trust and solidarity, which can be explained by applying a processual understanding of dignity. Considering dignity as a process explains why workers unionized as FUJ and established the extraordinarily rare collective bargaining relationship with a US agribusiness employer. Figure 2.1 shows the model presented in Chapter 1, here including observations from which it was derived. Through recognizing each other’s dignity, workers at Sakuma Brothers

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Precarious Employment

Capacity to Act as Collective

Coalition

Capacity to Disrupt

Enforceable Laws & Contracts

Decent Work

Human dignity - No collective bargaining - Poverty wages - Gender-and ethnic-based hierarchy - Risk of Deportation - Lack of health insurance

+ “everyone needed to participate in decisions” + Adaptation indigenous democracy + Multi-lingual meetings + Deconstructing patriarchal norms + Fixing union staff pay to member wage rates

+ Recognized workers as “leaders” + Immigration enforcement buffering + Legal “air war” + Union endorsement & resources

+ Strikes + Prevention H-2A replacement workers + Court victories + Boycott

+ Collective bargaining agreements + Court support of concerted activity (LNLA) + Problem-solving union-management relations

+ Union rep + Joint wage setting + Fewer hours + Mitigating discrimination & health risks + Health care + Breaks + Bathrooms & water - Wages still low

Figure 2.1 Process of FUJ changing employment relations at Sakuma Brothers, 2013–2020.

created their capacity to act as a collective, that is, associational power. Through mutual recognition between workers and allies, they developed a coalition. The strength of the workers’ associational and coalitional power was demonstrated in the strikes, prevention of replacement with H-2A workers, boycott, and victories in court cases. Through collective bargaining, the union and management began to mutually recognize each other’s capacity to participate in work rules, leading to a problem-solving relationship. Through this dignity-based sequence of building bargaining power, the workers shifted from precarious to decent terms and conditions of employment. Workers began to build associational power at the critical moment when management fired López. His coworkers decided between concessions that would reinforce management’s control and a new, unknown path. They called on Guillen for advice, and she told them that she could offer technical tips, but only they had the ability to change the governance of their workplace. She was inviting their participation in the process of, mutually recognizing each other’s capacities to participate in the rules to which they are subjected. As in prior years, the offer could have fallen aside and had little effect; dignity, after all, is a mutual recognition process. Instead, the workers reciprocated, recognizing Guillen’s dignity by inviting her guidance. Together, they proceeded to apply the practice in increasing scope. Internally, workers’ recognition of each other’s dignity created their solidarity, a process that involved deconstruction of the hierarchies dividing them. While management organized them according to ethnicity and gender in the fields, dividing Triqui, Mixteco, mestizo, and US citizen workers, the workers organized their collective inclusively. Workers and

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their families gathered, deliberated on what to do, all along translating across their respective languages, and through these meetings openly and actively recognized each other’s capacity to participate in the rules of the collective that they were building. This meant deconstructing identities assigned to them, including the ascription of fieldworkers based on a racialized notion of indigeneity. The transformation was not easy, as evinced by the process through which the elected union president recognized the pervasiveness of patriarchy in his own life and changed shirts, literally and in meaningful ways for building solidarity with coworkers and community members. The associational power built in the formation of FUJ enabled the workers to carry out strategic intermittent strikes throughout the 2013 season, to resist replacement, and to expand their approach with a coalition. The workers used short, repeated strikes to avoid complete loss of income on which they depended. Their blockage of their employer’s attempt to replace them with H-2A workers, delivering hundreds of letters to the Labor Department, was a show of the solidarity that they had developed. Yet it did not bring their employer to negotiate with their union. Building coalitional power expanded the workers’ campaign for union collective bargaining with Sakuma Brothers. The coalition enabled the workers’ boycott, successful legal cases, and avoidance of deportation. An ally described their work with FUJ as “blunting, to soften the political environment and the fear and the ignorance of who we are as farmworkers.” All of the coalition activities hinged on the process of mutual recognition of each other’s capacity to participate in rules of society. Guillen described her approach: “I’m here to listen to you, to what you need, and support you. It’s about building that confidence and that trust and equity in recognizing each other as leaders in an impacted community that want to create change.” A lawyer who represented FUJ in court expressed the interpersonal dynamic, saying that “workers need room and space for themselves.” From his experience, the lawyer who led first contract negotiations for the union explained, “families were always involved in the meetings … everyone takes a very intentional approach to keep decisionmaking in workers’ hands—they tell me what to negotiate. It’s not like some unions, where workers see the union as a separate entity.” These allies were conveying their experiences of dignity processes with the workers. Based on that mutual recognition, the workers and their allies developed the coalition that pressured management to engage in collective bargaining. Over three years, FUJ and its coalition built sufficient bargaining power to bring Sakuma Brothers to negotiate with the union. The strikes, blockage of H-2A, court victories, and boycott reflected the workers’ and their allies’ capacity to act collectively. The tactics succeeded in shifting management from resisting the union toward negotiation, albeit with persistence. It was only after the first year under the union contract that management switched law firms and took steps toward a constructive

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relationship with FUJ. Over the next couple years, management and FUJ developed a problem-solving relationship, demonstrated with their coordinated wage setting with test picks, resolution of concerns without arbitration, and negotiations of multiple contracts with increased provisions, such as the healthcare fund. Through these actions, the company and union recognize each other’s capacity to participate in rules of the workplace, demonstrating that dignity is less about sentimentality than dialectic relations. While workers gained control over and improvements in their working conditions, management gained a reliable, experienced workforce and means of resolving problems with the union. In other words, regardless of any individual managers’ personal sentiments, by accepting workers’ capacity to participate in work rules, management gained labor stability, essential in the strawberry sector. As in all capitalist employment relations, the ongoing collective bargaining relationship does not mean that workers and management do not have conflict. They negotiate the level of exploitation of labor. Within this constraint, they resolve immediate conflicts through dialogue, based on recognition of each other’s right to participate in decisions concerning the labor process. At Sakuma Brothers, it is also notably a limited relationship. FUJ represents hand-pickers of berries, who work from June until October, a short season reflecting the specialization of production companies to compete in the strawberry sector. The workers operating the blueberry harvesting machine and those working in Sakuma Brothers’ packhouse are not represented by the union, a limitation to FUJ’s ability to disrupt the company’s profits and thus bargaining power. Also, FUJ represents workers in a berry industry that is predominantly non-union, which means that Sakuma Brothers faces pressure it to keep wage bill low from competitors. In other words, while representation by FUJ likely presents the highest-quality conditions of strawberry harvest work in North America, it remains a low-income job. Facing the limitations of wage labor, some FUJ members created the Tierra y Libertad cooperative. While building their union, C2C introduced the union to the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST) in Brazil. Through their exchanges, FUJ members adapted MST strategies to their locale in Washington and began Tierra y Libertad with the vision of developing a network of worker-owned and operated cooperatives involved in producing, processing, and distributing food and other products. In its first five years, Tierra y Libertad won a state development grant, used it to purchase 60 acres of land, planted blueberries, and was selling sufficient berries annually to generate a surplus to invest in further development of the cooperative. Coop members emphasized in interviews the control over the labor process that they enjoy. As one member put it, “At my old job … My boss would come around and tell me I’m stupid because he wanted things moved differently. One day I just asked him to do it, and the boss didn’t

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know how.” Members plan to expand the diversity of crops that they produce and integrate processing of some, such as corn into meal and tortillas, as next steps for Tierra y Libertad.

It took dignity to shift from precarious toward decent work in a strawberry ICN Through the story of Familias Unidas por la Justicia and Sakuma Brothers, this chapter offered explanations to the questions why workers face persistently poor working conditions in the profitable strawberry sector and why certain workers achieved many of their demands for improved employment conditions in the sector. ICN analysis identified the factors reproducing poor working conditions. As a production company viced between concentrated input and output markets, the company depended on low labor costs for profitability. The dependency was satisfied with political and social forms of power. National state policies drove peasants into wage work, denied their rights as immigrant workers, and excluded their employers from duties under labor law. Racialized ascriptions of economic position based on essentialized notions of indigeneity limited the new wage workers to few industries, primarily agribusiness, and were adapted to the supervisory hierarchy of their new workplace. It took more than workers’ aggregation at an employer and striking to build bargaining power. The workers sequentially developed associational and coalitional power, disrupted the process of capital accumulation, and established a productive collective bargaining relationship with their employer, all through processes of dignity. Workers, allies, and, to a meaningful degree, management mutually recognized each other’s capacity to participate in the rules to which they were subjected. While having shifted from precarious to decent terms and conditions of work at their employer, the workers nevertheless face the challenge of seasonal employment and union protection at a single employer. Even with these limitations, the trajectory of FUJ is historically extraordinary. To other workers, it provides an example of the possibilities for change opened up through active engagement in processes of dignity.

Notes 1 Historians have argued that the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from the National Labor Relations Act was a strategic move by New Deal policymakers to enact the law, for which they needed supportive votes from Southern Democrats, who would not support granting collective bargaining rights to Black workers. By excluding industries reliant on Black labor, agriculture and domestic work, the NLRA gained the Southern politicians support and passed. (See Frymer. 2008; Goluboff. 2010; Katznelson 2005; Sitkoff 1978) The political compromise exemplifies racial capitalism, the term theorized by Robinson (2000: Chapter 1) to describe the co-

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2

3

4

5

6 7 8

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Dignity as Catalyst constitutive relationship between the reification of social hierarchies based on perceived differences between groups on the one hand and, on the other, the development of capitalism, which requires exploitable labor. The state of Washington enacted the Little Norris LaGuardia Act (RCW §49.32. 020) in 1919. It states, “WHEREAS, Under prevailing economic conditions, developed with the aid of governmental authority for owners of property to organize in the corporate and other forms of ownership association, the individual unorganized worker is commonly helpless to exercise actual liberty of contract and to protect his or her freedom of labor, and thereby to obtain acceptable terms and conditions of employment, wherefore, though he or she should be free to decline to associate with his or her fellows, it is necessary that he or she have full freedom of association, selforganization, and designation of representatives of his or her own choosing, to negotiate the terms and conditions of his or her employment, and that he or she shall be free from interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives or in self-organization or in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protections; therefore, the following definitions of, and limitations upon, the jurisdiction and authority of the courts of the state of Washington are hereby enacted.” United States federal regulations grant the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) authority to operate within 100 miles of the national border, an authority routinely abused to conduct searches without probable cause, that lead to deportations and other immigration enforcement actions ( ACLU 2020). Workers traveled across the US-Mexico border annually for seasonal work at US agribusinesses in the 1980s and 1990s. Since, the US government (Department of Homeland Security) forced border crossers into the most dangerous borderland, the Sonoran desert, by building walls and increasing border enforcement. The US government also increased deportations throughout the country, including of parents of US citizens—ICE increased immigration-related arrests 30 percent in 2017 over 2016. As an immigration lawyer explained, in recent years, the US government also ended the practice of granting work authorizations to asylum seekers during their case proceedings. Data from USDA ERS 2021. The relevance of “white” as a socially constructed category is explained by Harris (1993), who details how “whiteness and property share a common premise—a conceptual nucleus—of a right to exclude” throughout US history. On the difficulties of unofficial border crossing, see Footnote 3. Officially under the US H-2A visa program, employers can rehire the same workers year after year for up to ten months, and the workers are permitted to work only for the employer with whom their visa is linked. In practice employers can terminate their employment in the United States and, according to workers’ anecdotes, effectively blacklist workers from other employers. See Chapter 1, Footnote 19. In 2019, Sakuma Brothers Holding Co. reported $17 million in sales. Its subsidiaries Sakuma Brothers Farms, Inc. reported $6 million, and Sakuma Brothers Processing, Inc. reported $11 million ( Orbis database 2020). Robotic machines that harvest strawberries have been increasingly advertised as productive, yet managers interviewed report that the machines remain more expensive than human labor power to date. Companies reportedly leading research and development of the machines include Agrobot in Spain, Shibuya Seiki in Japan, and Harvest CROO Robotics in the United States. By racialism, I am referring to Cedric Robinson’s (2000: 2) concept, meaning the “legitimation and corroboration of social organization by reference to the ‘racial’ components of its elements.” As Minkah Makalani (2021) points out, Robinson’s

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12 13 14

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concept of racialism pushes us to see beyond the historically contingent manifestations of racism and to see the naturalization of hierarchies that permeate all social structures, including modes of property relations. The Instituto Mexicano de Seguridad Social (IMSS) provides workers with health care, pensions, disability, and unemployment insurance. When established, IMSS excluded agriculture. Reforms in 1960 extended coverage to permanent workers in agriculture. Reforms in 1995 extended coverage to all workers, but the vast majority of agricultural workers have not received full IMSS benefits, a delivery gap noted in Chapter 3 on bargaining power in strawberry production in San Quintín, Mexico. See Velasco et al. 2014: 195–202; Bensusán et al. 2007. Seth Holmes (2013: 47–49) described the housing provided to harvest workers by Sakuma Brothers as cabins, 10 feet by 12 feet, with tin roofs, plywood walls, no insulation, two windows often covered with cardboard, old mattresses and rusty springs, with orange-colored water running from the faucets and musty refrigerators. David Bacon (2016) photographed and described the “hard camp conditions.” Intan Suwandi (2019: 60–61) calculated that average unit labor costs in Mexico are barely more than 40 percent the average unit labor costs in the United States, a ratio that has decreased since the mid-1990s. On food sovereignty, see McMichael 2016. Rosalinda Guillen was born to parents from Texas, United States, and Michoacán, Mexico who worked in US agribusiness and moved the family to La Connor, Washington. There Guillen worked at the local bank until the late 1980s, when she helped form the Rainbow Coalition to support Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. Workers at the Stimson Lane Wines vineyard Chateau St. Michelle in eastern Washington contacted the coalition, and Guillen helped them lead a boycott that led to their unionization and collective bargaining with the company. The United Farm Workers hired Guillen, and she led union organizing campaigns, then political campaigns in California, notably helping reform the Agricultural Labor Relations Act to establish mandatory mediation-arbitration to ensure first a first contract for newly unionized workers. The AFL-CIO sent her to the World Social Forum, where she met the Landless People’s Movement, whose participants convinced her that their model, what they refer to as a solidarity economy—based on reciprocity instead of competition—is a viable alternative that represents progress beyond unionism. For Guillen, the proposition also recalled the broader vision of Cesar Chavez. She formed Community to Community with other women to create the conditions for workers to create their own representative collectives, including unions and cooperatives, by removing or mitigating political, economic, and social barriers. There were an estimated 1.16 million hired workers in US agribusiness production in 2020, according to the Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (2020). Less than 2 percent were represented by unions, including UFW, Farm Labor Organizing Committee, and FUJ at the time, a historically consistent level. The US Congress established the H-2 temporary guest worker program in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, and in 1986 differentiated industries, designating H-2A visas exclusively for agricultural labor. A company hires workers from other countries through the H-2A program by applying to the US Department of Labor, which certifies that “A) there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, and qualified, and who will be available at the time and place needed, to perform the labor or services involved in the petition, and B) the employment of the alien in such labor or services will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of workers in the United States similarly employed” (8 USC § 1188(a) (1)). However, the certification is muddled by minimal requirements on applying companies to recruit locally and the distortions of the “adverse effect wage rate,” which is set by the US Department of Agriculture and historical depression of wage

60

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20 21 22 23 24

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Dignity as Catalyst rates in US agribusiness ( Geffert 2002; Guerra 2004; Stockdale 2013). The workers’ blockage of Sakuma Brothers petition for H-2A workers is the only known case of a denial of a company’s request for H-2A visas based on workers’ intervention. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to the sanitation workers of Memphis the day before he was assassinated Among Dr. King’s points in the famous “I have been to the mountaintop” speech were: “that’s all this whole thing is about … We are determined to be people”; “Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal.” The law prohibits the state agencies from asking you about or collecting your place of birth, immigration status, or nationality unless it is for an ongoing criminal investigation; stopping or detaining you to determine immigration status; Giving ICE/CBP your personal information; holding you on ICE/CBP detainers or ICE administrative warrants; allowing ICE/CBP access to interview you in jail. If ICE/ CBP is in the jail investigating a criminal offense, you have the right to remain silent and refuse to speak with ICE; the jail must get written consent from you before ICE/ CBP can interview you; denying you services or benefits if they have an ICE detainer, notification request, or immigration warrant; notifying ICE/CBP when you will be released from custody; Contracting with ICE and CBP to do immigration enforcement ( https://www.nwirp.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/ KWW_KYR_One-Pager_English-Spanish_Final_June2019.pdf). Familias Unidas por la Justicia, an unincorporated association, and Felimon Pineda, and individual v. Sakuma Brothers Farms, Inc. Skagit County Sup. Ct. No. 13-2-01641-1 (2013); Familias Unidas Por La Justicia v. Sakuma Bros. Farms, Inc., Skagit County Sup. Ct., No. 14-2-00924-3, 2014 WL 3408022; Familias Unidas por la Justicia v. Sakuma Brothers Farms, Inc. Skagit County Sup. Ct. No. 17-2-01242-7 (2017). Familias Unidas por la Justicia v. Sakuma Brothers Farms, Inc. Skagit County Sup. Ct. No. 14-2-00924-3 (October 1 and November 3, 2014). Familias Unidas por la Justicia v. Sakuma Brothers Farms, Inc. Skagit County Sup. Ct. No. 17-2-01242-7 (August 24 and September 27, 2017). FUJ and Sakuma Brothers 2016. The interest arbitration procedures were adapted from Major League Baseball salary arbitration procedures, according to the lawyers who developed them. Setting the hourly wage rate takes into account additional factors, such as the amount of fruit in the fields, the previous day’s rate, whether any test pickers moved particularly slow or fast, and buyers’ prices. Annual reported income for the privately owned Sakuma Brothers Holding Company increased from $6.1 to $6.4 million between 2011 and 2012, a level that persisted until a large increase to $18–$20 million for the years 2015–2019 ( Mergent Intellect database). Given the gap and little change in the number of workers over the 2010s, it is likely that the increase in income reflects sales of assets, such as the Norcal Nursery in 2017, and increased processing of berries produced by other companies. In terms of whether workers in US agribusiness production might have material reasons to engage in concerted activity, notably in the 2010s mean and median annual incomes of US agribusiness fieldworkers were less than $24,999; their real wages were less than 60 percent of non-farm wages; 33 percent of their household incomes were below the poverty line; more than half relied on public assistance programs; at least 53 percent lacked health insurance; and at least one-third reported chronic health problems. See US Department of Labor 2018 and Holmes 2013. In Contested Terrain ( 1979), Richard Edwards developed the typology of management control over labor: simple control—direct physical, economic, and verbal coercion, technical control—physical organization of the labor process to direct worker behavior toward increasing productivity, and bureaucratic control—human resource

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29 30

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management practices that reduce workers’ collective perception of employers as antagonistic. As Arrighi and Silver (1984) and others have pointed out, technical control creates the possibility of few workers shutting down production, quintessentially in an auto plant where one assembly line worker stopping can disrupt the entire line. Burawoy (1979) developed the concept of manufactured consent that aptly describes workers’ focus on their piece rate and relations with their direct supervisor as indicators of satisfaction with the terms of their employment. California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin and Puerto Rico have enacted little Norris LaGuardia Acts ( Willis 2000). Between 1989 and 2001, the portion of workers employed in production in US agribusiness who are not legally authorized to work in the United States increased from 14 percent to 55 percent, and has since hovered around 50 percent, according to the US Department of Labor National Agricultural Workers Surveys (NAWS). Yet between 1996 and 2016, the number of workers in US agribusiness production who are considered settled, not migrant, increased from 41 percent to 80 percent, also according to NAWS ( USDA ERS 2020). The trend toward settlement likely only increased after 2016, as the US government further intensified enforcement activities against unauthorized immigrants ( ACLU 2020). Following Wright (2000: 976), that the strength of associational power is indicated by the ability to ensure cooperation by a workers’ collective’s own members and by management. Paraphrasing Marx 1847 on capital’s dependence on labor as simultaneously organizing labor as “a class in itself as against capital” and managerial wage setting as the process which “unites them in common thought of resistance” through which “this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself.” While many have written on the influences of social hierarchies on workers, here I am following Gramsci’s (1996) fundamental point that solidarity must be constructed in light of historically constructed conditions.

References Absolute Reports. (2020). Global Carbendazim Market Research Report. https:// www.absolutereports.com/global-carbendazim-market-15430802 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). (2020). Justice-Free Zones: U.S. Immigration Detention Under the Trump Administration. https://www.aclu.org/report/justice-freezones-us-immigration-detention-under-trump-administration (accessed 2 January 2021). Arrighi, Giovanni and Beverly J. Silver. (1984). “Labor Movements and Capital Migration: The United States and Western Europe in World-Historical Perspective.” in Labor in the Capitalist World-Economy, edited by C. Bergquist. Beverly Hills: Sage, 183–216. Bacon, David. (2016). “Why These Farm Workers Went on Strike—and Why It Matters.” The Nation, 3 October 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/ why-these-farm-workers-went-on-strike-and-why-it-matters/ Barabas, Alicia y Miguel Bartolomé (coordinadores.). (1999). Configuraciones étnicas en Oaxaca. Perspectivas etnográficas para las autonomías, 3 tomos. México: INAH, INI. Bensusán, Graciela. (2020). “The Transformation of the Mexican Labour Regulation Model and its link to North American Economic Integration.” ILO Working Paper 15. Geneva: ILO. ISBN: 9789220336922. Bensusán Areous, Graciela, Bouzas Ortiz, Alfonso, Hernández Cervantes, Aleida, Juan Pineda, Claudia Patricia, Xelhuantzi López, Maria, Muñoz, Mara, Robles, Jorge and

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Reyes Ramos, Luis Oliver (2007) Contratación Colectiva de Protección en México. Informe a la Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores (ORIT). Blackburn, Robin. (1967). “The Unequal Society,” in The Incompatibles: Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Bracamonte y Sosa, Pedro and Lizama Quijano, Jesús. (2003). “Marginalidad indígena: una perspectiva histórica de Yucatán.” Desacatos, 13: 83–98. Burawoy, Michael. (1976). The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labor: Comparative Material from Southern Africa and the United States. American Journal of Sociology, 81(5): 1050–1087. Burawoy, Michael. (1979). Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cardoso de Oliveira, Roberto. (1992). Etnicidad y estructura social. México: CIESAS. Chefs Collaboration. (May 2016). [podcast]. https://soundcloud.com/chefscollab/chefpower-hour-what-chefs (accessed 23 September 2020). Community to Community (C2C). (2013). “Huelga! Mixteco and Triqui Farmworkers commence second Work Stoppage at Sakuma Brothers Farms, Inc.” Press release. 6251-001. 2013. Familias Unidas por la Justicia digital files. Labor Archives of Washington, Libraries Special Collections. University of Washington. September 2020. Cornwell, Paige. (2014). “Sakuma Brothers berry growers to pay $850,000 settlement.” The Seattle Times, June 12, 2014. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/ sakuma-brothers-berry-growers-to-pay-850000-settlement/ Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. (2014). An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press. Edwards, Richard. (1979). Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books. Fantasia, Rick. (1988). Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Frymer, Paul. (2008). Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Geffert, Garry G. (2002). “H-2A Guestworker Program: A Legacy of Importing Agricultural Labor,” in The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers’ Lives, Labor, and Advocacy, edited by C. Thompson and M. Wiggins. Austin: University of Texas Press. Goluboff, Risa L. (2010). The Lost Promise of Civil Rights. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Goodyear, Dana. (August 14, 2017). “Strawberry Valley”. The New Yorker. (accessed 21 November 2019). Guerra, Lisa. (2004). “Modern-Day Servitude: A Look at the H-2A Program’s Purposes, Regulations, and Realities.” Vermont Law Review, 29: 185–214. Guthman, Julie. (2004). “Back to the Land: The Paradox of Organic Food Standards,” Environment and Planning A, 36(3): 511–528. Guthman, Julie. (2019). Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry. Oakland, California: University of California Press. Hall, Stuart. (1997). “Race the Floating Signifier.” Lecture, available at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=PodKki9g2Pw (accessed 29 August 2021). Harris, Cheryl. (1993). “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review, 106(8): 1707–1791. Holmes, Seth M. (2013). Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

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Katznelson, Ira (2005). When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-century America. New York: W.W. Norton. Kautsky, Karl. (1899/1988). The Agrarian Question: In Two Volumes. London and Winchester, MA: Zwan Publications. Kearney, Michael (1988). “Mixtec Political Consciousness: From Passive to Active Resistance,” in Rural Revolt in Mexico and U.S. Intervention, edited by Daniel Nugent. San Diego, CA: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies. Lara Flores, Sara María. (1996). “Mercado de Trabajo Rural y Organización Laboral.” in Neoliberalismo y Organización Social en el Campo Mexicano, edited by H. Cartón de Grammont. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 69–111. Lefebvre, Henri (1970/2003). The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Llambi, Luis (1994). “Comparative Advantages and Disadvantages in Latin American Nontraditional Fruit and Vegetable Exports,” in The Global Restructuring of AgroFood Systems, edited by Philip McMichael. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 190–212. Mann, Michael. (1973). Consciousness and Action Among the Western Working Class. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd. Makalani, Minkah. (2021). “Cedric Robinson and the Origins of Race.” Boston Review. http://bostonreview.net/race/minkah‐makalani‐cedric‐robinson‐and‐origins‐race.(3 March 2021). Martínez Novo, Carmen. (2004). The Making of Vulnerabilities: Indigenous Day Laborers in Mexico’s Neoliberal Agriculture. Identities, 11(2): 215–239. Marx, Karl. (1847/1999). “The Metaphysics of Political Economy: Strikes and Combinations of Workers,” in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx/Engels Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ McMichael, Philip. (2016). “Commentary: Food Regime for Thought.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43(3): 648–670. Mergent Intellect (n.d.). [database] https://www.mergentintellect.com/ (accessed 2021). Middlebrook, Kevin J. (1995). The Paradox of Revolution: Labor, the State, and Authoritarianism in Mexico. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Orbis. [database]. (2020). https://orbis.bvdinfo.com Reich, Adam and Peter Bearman. (2018). Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart. New York: Columbia University Press. Robinson, Cedric J. (2000). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Rhomberg, Chris. and Lopez, Steven. (2021), “Understanding Strikes in the 21st Century: Perspectives from the United States,” in Power and Protest (Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Vol. 44), edited by Lisa Leitz and Paige N. Gulley. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited, 37–62. Russi, Luigi. (2013). Hungry Capital: The Financialization of Food. Washington: Zero Books. Sakuma Brothers, Inc. (October 2013). “Recent Story in the Stranger Manipulates the Truth to Reach Writer’s Conclusion.” 6251-001. 2013. Familias Unidas por la Justicia digital files. Labor Archives of Washington, Libraries Special Collections. University of Washington. (accessed September 2020). Sakuma Brothers, Inc. “A History of Farming and Family.” https://www.sakumabros. com/about-us (accessed 1 July 2021).

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Sitkoff, Harvard. (1978). A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue. New York: Oxford University Press. Solís Robleda, Gabriela. (2003). Bajo el signo de la compulsión. El trabajo forzoso indígena en el sistema colonial yucateco, 1540–1730. México: CIESAS, Porrúa, ICY. Stockdale, Kara E. (2013). “H-2a Migrant Agricultural Workers: Protected From Employer Exploitation on Paper, Not in Practice.” Creighton Law Review, 46(4): 755–776. Suwandi, Intan. (2019). Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA ERS). (2014). “U.S. strawberry consumption continues to grow.” https://www.ers.usda. gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=77884 (accessed 20 March 2021). United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA ERS). (2020). “Farm Labor.” [webpage]. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/ farm-labor/ (accessed 20 March 2021). United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA ERS). (2021). “Top 4, 8, and 20 firms’ share of U.S. grocery store sales, 1992–2016.” USDA ERS, using data from U.S. Census Bureau, Monthly Retail Trade Survey, company annual reports, and industry sources. Sales based on North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). United States Department of Labor (USDOL). (2018). Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2015–2016: A Demographic and Employment Profile of United States Farmworkers. Research Report No. 13. January 2018. https://www.dol. gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/naws/pdfs/NAWS_Research_Report_13.pdf United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). (2020). “Patent Assignment Search.” https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/patent/search (accessed 9 August 2020). Velasco, Laura, Christian Zlolniski and Marie-Laure Coubes. (2014). De jornaleros a colonos: residencia, trabajo e identidad en el valle de San Quintín. Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Weisbrot, Mark, Stephan Lefebvre and Joseph Sammut. (2014). Did NAFTA help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years. Center for Economic and Policy Research. http://cepr.net/documents/nafta-20-years-2014-02.pdf. Wells, Miriam J. (1996). Strawberry Fields. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Willis, Henry. (2000). California’s Little Norris-LaGuardia Act – A Favorable Preliminary Report. The National Lawyers Guild Newsletter of the Labor and Employment Committee. http://www.nlgweb.org/committees/labor/Little_Norris-LaGuardia.htm (accessed 22 September 2020). Wright, Erik O. (2000). “Working-Class Power, Capitalist-Class Interests, and Class Compromise.” American Journal of Sociology, 105(4): 957–1002. Zlolniski, Christian. (2011). “Water Flowing North of the Border: Export Agriculture and Water Politics in a Rural Community in Baja California.” Cultural Anthropology, 26(4): 565–588. Zlolniski, Christian (2019). Made in Baja: The Lives of Farmworkers and Growers behind Mexico’s Transnational Agricultural Boom. Oakland: University of California Press.

3

Divided, Demobilized: Containment of an Uprising in Strawberry Production in San Quintín, Mexico

On March 17, 2015, tens of thousands of workers went on strike from the strawberry fields of San Quintín, Baja California, Mexico.1 In an extraordinary moment in the history of agribusiness in the country, the workers halted production and sales during the peak strawberry harvest. Since 2001, strawberry production had grown 195 percent by area (Zlolniski 2019: 44) and accounted on average for 13 percent of Baja California’s annual agricultural revenue (SIAP 2020), by supplying wintertime berries to US produce shelves. Workers blocked the trans-peninsular highway that connects the agribusiness export hub to US sales markets 200 miles North. The Alianza de Organizaciones Nacionales, Estatales, y Municipales por la Justicia Social (Alliance of National, State, and Municipal Organizations for Social Justice, Alianza) organized the strike. With the union it formed in the process, the Sindicato Independiente Nacional Democrático de Jornaleros Agrícolas (Independent National Democratic Union of Agricultural Workers, SINDJA), the Alianza (2015) issued the “March 17 Manifesto” stating the strike demands: 1 Revocation of protection contracts between employers and union federations 2 Payment of pensions reflecting full tenure 3 Registration in the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS) for medical services 4 Six-day workweeks and paid leave on the seventh day, holidays, and vacation 5 Payment of overtime wage rates 6 Maternity leave of six weeks prior and six weeks after births 7 Paid paternity leave of five days 8 End of and zero tolerance for sexual assaults by managerial staff 9 No retaliation against striking workers 10 Daily payrate of 300 pesos (an increase from then prevailing rate of 120 pesos per day) 11 Payrate of 30 pesos per box of strawberries, and double rates on Sundays and holidays DOI: 10.4324/9781003329916-3

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12 Payrate of 17 pesos per bucket of blackberries, and double rates on Sundays and holidays 13 Payrate of 8 pesos per bucket of tomatoes 14 Just payment and good social coexistence between employers and workers 15 Removal of the certifications Equitable Food Initiative (EFI) and Fair Trade USA. Workers struck to pressure employers for improved employment conditions from a position of worsening precarity. Nationally, workers lost purchasing power during the prior two decades and in 2015 needed more than six minimum wages to cover the price of a basic food basket for a family of four.2 At San Quintín agribusinesses, pay rates had increased absolutely but not in real terms since the 1990s, as costs of living rose faster than wages (Zlolniski 2010: 168; Interviews by the author). Employers also shifted from day rates to piece rates in the 2000s, holding wages relatively constant while accelerating productivity, which increased 175 percent between 1990 and 2019 according to national statistics (Zlolniski 2019: 114; SIAP 2020; Interviews by the author). A 2009 survey found that San Quintín fieldworkers took home 700–800 pesos per week while spending 750–1,500 pesos per week on groceries plus 315–571 pesos per month on water, gas, and electricity (depending on family size) (Velasco et al. 2014: 166). The year of the strike, unemployment in Baja California was less than 5 percent yet 29 percent of residents were living in poverty, nearly one-fifth lacked health services, and more than half lacked social security services (INEGI 2016).3 San Quintín had followed the World Bank recommendation to “catch the GVC wave;” the “benefits GVCs can deliver” were not accruing to fieldworkers.4 The manifesto by the Alianza and SINDJA demanded legal compliance. Employer protection contracts deny the freedom of association and collective bargaining rights that the state guarantees in the national constitution and labor law.5 The constitution further establishes the state’s commitment to protect workers right to strike and to a living wage. National labor law also establishes workers’ rights to eight-hour workdays, premium overtime wage rates, a weekly day off, paid vacation and holidays, maternal and paternal leave, and freedoms from gender-based violence and employer interference in union activities.6 Social security law establishes the duty of employers to register workers in the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (Mexican Social Security Institute, IMSS), through which workers access healthcare and pensions among other services.7 In parallel to, and for the Alianza in conflict with workers’ legal rights, private certifications, especially EFI, FTUSA, and Rainforest Alliance, had begun to proliferate during the strawberry production boom in San Quintín. Despite the strike’s large scale and call for legal compliance, employers and the government rejected most of the demands. Workers occupied the

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highway for more than 24 hours and continued intermittent demonstrations for weeks. Their collective actions halted on June 4, 2015, when members of the Alianza signed an agreement with employers and state officials to increase wages fifteen percent, register workers in IMSS, and register SINDJA as a national union federation. Over the next several years, work intensification and inflation eroded the settlement wage increase. In San Quintín in 2020, the prevailing rate for strawberry boxes picked was 18–19 pesos ($0.90–$0.95), for average day rates of 360–570 pesos ($18–$29) depending on the employer, fruit yield, and work speed.8 For fieldwork outside of the two to three months of peak strawberry harvest, employers paid by the day, on average 235 pesos ($11.75). Meanwhile, workers in the locale paid approximately $11 per day for water, food, gas and electricity—not including costs of a home and transportation.9 The government registered SINDJA,10 but protection contracts continued to block collective bargaining. Most workers remained unregistered in the social security system. The indicator of progress on eliminating genderbased discrimination in the fields was a program to hire women for roles previously offered only to men at one of the hundreds of production companies in the sector. Meanwhile, more employers obtained private certifications. Table 3.1 shows the gaps between employment duties under Mexican laws and practices in 2020. This chapter examines the gap between the strike demands and outcomes. After identifying the sources of learning on the matter, the factors explaining why such a gap was likely are identified through ICN analysis. The history of workers collectively acting to redefine their conditions in the strawberry ICN is outlined. The 2015 strike informs future collective actions toward better working conditions in the San Quintín production hub of the North American strawberry sector and, more generally, our understanding of the historical creation of bargaining power. In brief, the state and employers defused the strike and rejected workers’ demands by suppressing the action and dividing strike leaders and rank-and-file workers. Further limiting changes resulting from the strike, the associational power demonstrated by the mass action proved fragile, reflecting stunted processes of dignity. While the confluence of economic, political, and social forms of power limited improvements in the years immediately afterwards, the mass strike planted seeds of possibility in the consciousness of many San Quintín fieldworkers who continue to unite and advocate for better terms and conditions of their employment.

Learning sources To learn about bargaining power in strawberry production in San Quintín, I asked and listened to workers, managers, government officials, and observers between 2019 and 2021. A visit to San Quintín during the peak of the 2020 harvest, in February and March, provided the opportunity for

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Table 3.1 Employer obligations and compliance status, strawberry sector, San Quintín Legal Requirement

2020 Status

Freedom of association & collective bargaining rights Wages

ILO Conventions No. 87 & 98 articulated in Federal Labor Law Art. 357, 357 bis, 358.

Social security

Blocked by employers’ protection contracts since the 1980s. Removal of contracts requires votes of 30 percent of workers employed. $18-$28 per day during harvest $12 per day offseason compared to $11 per day costs for water, food, gas, & electricity. 12 Less than 40 percent registered. 13

Social Security Law Art. 15 requires employer registration of workers within 5 days whenever working at least 4 days per week. Federal Labor Law Art. 67 Most fieldworkers reported requires double regular payrates non-compliance. for more than 8 hours in a day; Some fieldworkers, tractor Art. 68 triple for more than 9 drivers, security guards extra hours in a week. reported partial compliance. “Integrated salary” pay Federal Labor Law Art. 64 modality obscures employer requires a paid 30-minute break compliance by failing to for workers who cannot leave itemize amounts paid. 14 the workplace; Art. 69 a paid day off for every 6 days worked. Federal Labor Law Art. 74 requires leave or double regular payrates on established holidays. Federal Labor Law Art. 76–81 require paid vacation Federal Labor Law Art. 87 requires annual payment equivalent to 15 days wages or amount proportional to days worked. The Constitution Art. 123.A.IX requires employers to distribute a portion of profits to workers annually. Federal Labor Law Art. 2 requires Employers began hiring women for all positions at 1 no employment discrimination company. Most companies on the basis of ethnicity, effectively reserve highernationality, gender, age, paid jobs for men. disability, social condition, health, religion, migration status, opinions, sexual preferences, or civil status.

Overtime wage rates

Paid breaks

Holidays Paid vacation Annual bonus

Profit sharing

Discrimination

Constitution Art. 123 stipulates minimum wage to be a living wage. 11

(Continued)

Divided, Demobilized 69 Table 3.1 (Continued) Legal Requirement

2020 Status

Occupational Federal Labor Law Art. 3 requires Fieldworkers reported lack of safety & health working conditions that assure information from employers workers’ health; Art. 51 grants on chemicals applied to fields workers the right to refuse & refusal by public hospital to dangerous work; Art. 132 report chemical-exposure requires employers to prevent cases. occupational accidents and diseases; Art. 343-C requires employers to inform workers of health risks. Parental leave Federal Labor Law Art. 170 grants Fieldworkers reported arbitrary employer compliance. mothers 6 weeks leave prior & 6 weeks after birth, or 6 weeks after adoption; Art. 132 grants fathers 5 days paid leave after birth or adoption.

most conversations. I supplemented interviews by reviewing prior relevant publications, harvesting strawberries for a day, and observing the strawberry harvest and workers’ organizations for two months. Unless otherwise cited, quotes and other information in this chapter are from 68 interviews, whose participants included 41 fieldworkers, six workers who are also union activists, five managers—including four from production companies in San Quintín and one from Driscoll’s, three state officials at Mexico’s Secretaría del Trabajo y Previsión Social (Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare, STPS) and IMSS, seven activists, and six academics. While 86 percent of interviewed workers identified as indigenous and 44 percent as women, managers were men with European or mestizo heritage.

The creation of strawberry production in San Quintín for a profitable North American sector Historical use of economic, political and social forms of power created and reproduced working conditions of strawberry production in San Quintín for the profitability of the North American strawberry sector. The international network of companies in the sector has been configured to insulate capital from disruptions by labor, including by separating workers across political borders and production, transportation, and sales processes. Neoliberal development policies imbricated with racial and gender hierarchies have organized and sustained a surplus and differentiated labor market. Legal exemptions and selective law enforcement strengthened managerial discretion, not least by suppressing workers’ collective actions.

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Strawberry production in San Quintín expanded the North American commodity network. Against natural limits on profitable strawberry production concentrated in the United States, including climatological and ecological conditions and seasonality, production in San Quintín and Mexico generally pushed the profit frontier with absolute and relative increases. Since the late 1990s, the addition of strawberry production in Mexico for regional sales meant the addition of land and labor, and product in the winter months prior to the summertime production season in the United States. Mexico’s Pacific coast provides the temperate, ocean-modulated climate and sandy soils ideal for strawberries. Once established, production growth averaged 14 percent in Mexico compared to 0.3 percent in the United States in the 2010s (FAO 2020). Thirty years since first reporting any strawberry exports, Mexico was the second-largest country source of strawberry exports worldwide. Within the country, Baja California has accounted for nearly a quarter of production, all in San Quintín, nearly all exported (SIAP 2020). Located a few hours drive south of San Diego, San Quintín additionally provides a production location near enough US markets for the quick delivery demanded by the highly perishable fruit.15 Throughout the 2010s, Mexico accounted for more than 99 percent of fresh strawberry imports to the United States, supporting the doubling of strawberry sales in that country, where berries became the highest revenue category in retail produce.16 Strawberry production in Mexico also raised profits of the regional sector in relative terms with lower costs. As Miriam Wells (1996: 44),17 while seeking to control nature is part of the formula, “control over labor [is] the central determinant of profitability” in the strawberry sector. Labor accounts for an estimated 60 percent of strawberry production costs,18 and between Mexico and the United States, the wage differential is substantial. Harvesters earned approximately $18 to $28 per day in San Quintín compared to $14 to $18 per hour in the United States in 2020.19 The low labor costs increase margins, captured primarily by the lead firms of the regional strawberry network. While control over labor, including wage rates, enabled expansion of the North American strawberry sector, it was not automatic but achieved through network organization of participating companies, creation of a surplus and differentiated labor market, and a legal regime inflating managerial discretion. The organization of capital in the North American strawberry sector concentrates value in retail and marketing firms, empowering them to act as the lead firms directing exchanges throughout the network, including between production companies and harvest workers. In its neoliberal turn following debt crises and in exchange for access to international finance, the Mexican government repeatedly devalued its currency, liberalized capital accounts, privatized land, water and industries, reduced spending on education and health care, and shifted subsidies from small agricultural producers to agribusiness exporters (Echánove 2001; SAPRIN 2004; Velasco

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et al. 2014; Zlolniski 2019). With the NAFTA, Mexico’s government consolidated structural adjustment policies, reduced tariff barriers, and strengthened protections for international investors via investor–state dispute settlement and intellectual property rights commitments. In response, nationals, primarily from the states of Jalisco, Michoacán and Sinaloa, invested in strawberry production in San Quintín. For example, the García family accumulated 19,000 hectares of formerly communal (ejido) land in the valley and became leaders of San Quintín agribusiness (Martínez Novo 2004: 217). US capitalists also invested. Driscoll’s, through its strategic partner Reiter Affiliated Companies (RAC),20 established Berrymex, which became the dominant berry company of Mexico and contributed to Driscoll’s capture of market share. Driscoll’s CEO reported at the time, “We have developed and patented our own plant varieties, and would not have risked bringing them to Mexico unless NAFTA protected our patents” (quoted in Crawford 1997). In other words, Driscoll’s obtained its berry dominance through the expansion of production in Mexico under the conditions of strong investor protections and low labor costs. As berry production expanded, retailers took over the sales stage of the commodity network. Walmart began food sales in the 1990s with 30 percent lower labor costs than the leading grocers at the time, several of which were unionized (Lichtenstein 2008). By 2020, Walmart accounted for nearly one-third of US food sales.21 More than any other company at the time, the retailer captured market share by taking advantage of the US government’s gutting of anti-trust law under the “consumer welfare” doctrine and permission of aggressive anti-union activities by employers, conditions addressed in Chapter 5.22 Concentrated market share empowers the largest retailers and marketers of strawberries to direct capital away from the production process, in which profiting faces natural obstacles, while setting terms of production. While most berries from San Quintín are marketed by Driscoll’s, a production manager explained that lack of capital is the only reason any agribusiness accepts the leading marketer’s terms. Suppliers to Driscoll’s plant its patented varietals, manage production according to its specifications, and pay 18–25 percent commission for marketing services (Guthman 2017; Interviews by the author). As the marketer’s general council explained, the company maintains captive relations with production companies, in the sense that Driscoll’s substantially determines production decisions while the suppliers manage the labor process.23 Driscoll’s and Walmart’s respective capture of market share in the marketing and retail nodes of the sector were symbiotic phenomenon. As Walmart consolidated, it demanded year-round supplies and preferred fewer suppliers to reduce transaction costs (Mohapatra et al. 2010), supporting Driscoll’s expansion to Mexico to offer year-round supplies from overlapping harvest seasons. While pushing expansion, Walmart also demanded price reductions. According to Driscoll’s CEO, the retailer

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demanded that the supplier “take it from your other customers.” Highlighting the position of the hundreds of production managers in Mexico supplying Driscoll’s and Walmart, one manager reported, “with the buying power that they have … they punish you some with the price.” The extraction of value from production lowers the amount of capital over which production workers and managers might bargain. As indication of the direction of capital flows, typical wage rates in San Quintín were approximately 3.9 percent of US strawberry retail prices in 2020.24 Further limiting capital flowing through production companies is their reliance on input suppliers whose market share also empowers them to set prices. Ten companies own 70 percent of strawberry plant patents; one, Corteva, dominates fumigant manufacturing; two, Yaffa and CQM, dominate fertilizers; and among the largest chemicals companies worldwide dominate fungicides and pesticides (Chapter 1, Footnote 19, herein). Capital is thus squeezed out of production by a vice composed on one side by oligopolistic suppliers and on the other by oligopsonistic buyers. In addition to market concentration, the international network organization of the strawberry sector insulates the retailers and marketers from pressure from labor. When workers went on strike in 2015, the retail and marketing buyers shifted to alternate suppliers. With San Quintín’s harvest disrupted that year, annual production for 2015 decreased in Mexico and grew in the United States, where it had decreased the previous three years (FAO 2020; SIAP 2020). The following year, Mexican production decreased in San Quintín (−14 percent) while increasing in the states of Michoacán (35 percent) and México (28 percent) (SIAP 2020). Following the strike, an attempt to lead a boycott of Driscoll’s fell flat, with the harvest workers blocked by immigration laws from traveling to primary, US sales locations to rally support for a successful boycott.25 Thus, the San Quintín workers’ disruptive capacity was blunted, the strike contained as a problem for production managers in San Quintín to manage while lead firms continued business. With capital flows directed toward lead firms and risk toward production, the organization and maintenance of a surplus and differentiated labor market for production enabled the strawberry boom in San Quintín. Production managers have high labor costs relative to total operating costs and depend on price elastic input and output exchanges. Thus, their competitiveness turns on capacity to replace workers, a condition established through political-economic decisions mediated by racialism and patriarchy. National state dispossession of primarily indigenous peoples from livelihoods based on communal land use compelled millions into wage labor, tens of thousands of whom harvest berries in San Quintín. With the agrarian reform of 1992, the Mexican government replaced the promise of access to land established in the Mexican Revolution with encouragement of employment in agribusiness (Lara Flores 2005). The reform extended

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capitalist property rights over “ejidos,” collectively owned lands transferred hereditarily on which reciprocity directs commerce (Velasco et al. 2014; Interviews by the author). The government also reduced fiscal support for agriculture, most of which was directed to small producers, by 60 percent in the 1980s (Lara Flores 2005). The reduction of trade barriers under NAFTA brought a flood of US-subsidized corn, the dominant grain consumed in Mexico, foreclosing ejido-based livelihoods. Nonremunerated employment in agriculture and forestry fell 58 percent between 1991 and 2007, meaning some 4.9 million people, mostly of indigenous heritage, were dispossessed of the means of production (Weisbrot et al. 2014: 13). As workers explained, in indigenous communities where the ejido system predominated, peasants were suddenly pit into competition with multinational corporations and yet provided “no means to sell products, for the lack of a highway, no airport, roads, nothing;” “there was everything there—chickens, birds, rabbits, lettuce, vegetables, radishes, fruits—so much, but there’s no market.” Meanwhile, export agriculture never offered the possibility of absorbing all the new wage workers; it offered seasonal wage labor for some workers and contributed to inflated living costs by prioritizing export commodities over domestic food supplies (Lara Flores 2005). Production companies in San Quintín recruited the new wage workers from predominantly indigenous communities as seasonal labor. Starting in the 1980s, employers sent labor recruiters to bring workers from the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero, Durango, Sinaloa, and Sonora (Lara Flores 2005; Zlolniski 2010; Velasco et al. 2014). Employers sent workers away after harvests, establishing a migrant labor force and, with it, the pretext for depressing wage bills below local living costs by externalizing labor reproduction costs to workers’ home communities (Burawoy 1976; Kearney 1988). Yet fieldworkers began to settle, becoming the majority population of San Quintín in the 1990s (Martínez Novo 2004). And by the 2000s, wintertime strawberries became the most valuable export and buyers demanded evermore specific production practices, creating a production company demand for a more stable workforce (Velasco et al. 2014; Zlolniski 2019). Into the 2010s, approximately 80,000 workers were living in San Quintín, many the children and grandchildren of those dispossessed in southern Mexico in prior decades. An estimated 80 percent of the municipality’s population are indigenous peoples, from 43 different groups.26 By locals’ estimates, the same percentage of workers reside in and consider San Quintín home. The settling of the workforce locally forced employers to reproduce control over labor costs without migrant labor, achieved over the decades of the strawberry sector growth with social orders and selective law enforcement. Indicative of their ability to replace workers, employers discharge workers every one to three months, confident that enough workers are available, given few alternatives and negligible savings feasible with low

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wage rates. In addition to evincing low worker bargaining power, employers’ dismissal practice reduces remuneration duties. As a local labor lawyer explained, national law stipulates that all workers become permanent, and therefore entitled to more benefits, after working for at least four days per week for 26 weeks. Bolstering the labor surplus, lack of alternative employment in San Quintín has deepened dependency on income from fieldwork. In the valley, access to non-agribusiness, agribusiness services, or management employment is limited, particularly for indigenous and women residents. Packhouses offer “dizzying,” often 18-hour shifts. Fewer still attempt their own businesses. A couple explained that from their convenience store, “everything earned now is not to work outside,” a strategy threatened by international corporations’ expansion.27 More workers used to migrate to work in the United States, but that option became increasingly limited to those who can obtain an H-2A visa.28 The visa presents its own challenges, as employers using it test workers’ fieldwork skills prior to hiring, have the ability to send workers back at any time, and are known to rehire only their preferred workers. Like most workers at Sakuma Brothers, most workers in San Quintín’s strawberry fields work as hired labor in agribusiness after state-led enclosures displaced them (or their parents) and due to the ascription of fieldwork to a socially constructed notion of indigeneity. As conveyed in the previous chapter, the surplus labor market supplying strawberry production in the North American ICN derives from neoliberal reforms that compelled indigenous peoples into agribusiness based on colonial, racial logics of incorporation into modernity. As part of the interconnected processes of dispossession of indigenous people and their incorporation, an elite concept of indigeneity has ascribed fieldwork to indigenous identity, to the benefit of the strawberry ICN’s low-cost labor demand. For most workers in the area’s strawberry sector, then, “race is thus, also, the modality in which class is ‘lived,’” as Stuart Hall (1996: 341) put it. Substituting their diverse historical experiences, primarily the state and employers, and to a degree some of the newly proletarianized workers themselves, co-created an idealized identity of indigenous fieldworkers (Martínez Novo 2004). The ahistorical, reductionist identity assigned to diverse indigenous peoples emerges in public discourse, the press, and discussion with managers, state officials, and workers. The stereotype is that indigenous means short and thus naturally adept at stooped fieldwork, unskilled, frugal, and thus more than content with any wage, accustomed to impoverished living conditions as “traditional,” and docile and thus nearly incapable of resistance (Martínez Novo 2004; Interviews by the author). Thus, a manager in San Quintín noted, “Normally people know how to pick [strawberries], but if people come from Chiapas and don’t know, then we have a little school to show,” using the Mexican state most identified with contemporary resistance to colonialism as a euphemism for unskilled. To reinforce the trope of workers’

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gratefulness for employment in the fields, without offering evidence employers blamed “external groups and hooded men,” federal intelligence agents blamed drug cartels, and politicians accused rivals of leading the 2015 strike (García Soto 2015; Tijuana Noticias 2015). The elites were insinuating that indigenous people lacked the capacity to do so. Unsurprisingly, workers perceive that employers and government actors strategically construct such a stereotype of indigenous peoples as dependent on their patriarchal care and ready, willing, and able work hard work in the fields under poor conditions. While managers frame their employment offer in terms of individual competitiveness—“We give the opportunity to anyone who wants to learn,” as a manager said, workers experience their relations differently, through collectivist frames—“We still live racism, which is the divider,” as a worker said. Lorenzo Rodríguez, a fieldworker and the first general secretary of the union SINDJA, elaborated on the function that ascribing fieldwork to indigeneity performs for the agribusiness industry: They know perfectly well that the poor people of Mexico, the indigenous, the people with fewer resources, their only means is through education. And they know that for me to send my children to school, I need a good salary. So they say, “we cannot raise the salaries so high that he can send his children to school, because then we won’t have workers.” For indigenous women, subordinating forces are interwoven, providing employers an additional mechanism to suppress the bargaining power, and thus wages, of all workers by devaluing female, indigenous labor. Workers reported that there had been widespread sexual abuse as agribusiness developed in San Quintín in the 1990s and 2000s. Management remains dominated by men with European heritage, and employee opportunities are divided, with pack houses hiring predominantly mestizo women and, in fields, tractor-driving, irrigation and other “technical” and betterremunerated positions reserved for men. A worker self-identified as an indigenous woman summarized, “The foremen did not treat us well—a lot of assault, many vulgar, gross language, and yes, physical assault as well.” Others scoffed at supervisors who “have their lovers [whom] they put … in the lighter jobs,” such as fruit checking. An activist explained that only one company began to open all non-managerial positions to women in 2020. According to the company’s general manager, “Work results are better with women—not to say that there aren’t hard women, but … the man, we can be harder, and it can create problems for the companies,” reproducing expectations of female docility. Referring to the complex of oppressions endured, an indigenous woman worker explained, “You return to work because you have to feed the family.” The maintenance of a low-cost labor supply for strawberry production in San Quintín has been further supported by the enhancement of employer

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discretion and suppression of workers’ collective action through selective law enforcement. As labor relations scholar Graciela Bensusán documented (Bensusán 2020), the country’s labor relations system passed through two periods of corporatism before adopting the current neo-liberal model. The government prioritized industrialization and thus protected workers in select industries from 1917 into the 1970s, when it began to prioritize export-led development. Selective law enforcement, including support for collective bargaining avoidance, supported the capital growth strategy. In announcing land privatization, the Mexican president proclaimed, “The moment has arrived to recognize this situation and to promote the unionization of agricultural day laborers” (quoted in Lara Flores 1996: 72). The discourse defined fieldworkers as “day laborers”—that is, effectively outside labor and social security laws. National laws establish extensive rights for workers (see Table 3.1). For decades, however, studies have documented the denial of these rights to agribusiness fieldworkers in San Quintín (Garduño et al. 1989; Lara Flores 2005; Velasco et al. 2014). Since the 1980s, the government moved slowly to extend labor and social security law coverage to temporary agricultural workers, eventually settling on a definition of temporary agricultural worker as contracted for less than 27 weeks, and finally requiring employers to fully comply with the laws in 2012 (Velasco et al. 2014: 195–200). Current law stipulates that workers become permanent, and therefore entitled to full legal rights and benefits, after working at least four days per week for 26 weeks. Yet legal enforcement has continued to be lax. Workers interviewed in 2020 responded with incredulity to the question of any government inspections. A group of women replied in near chorus, “What do you mean, their presence? You don’t see them. What government? We don’t see any agencies.” Another worker reported, “It seems that the company doesn’t allow inspectors to enter.” SINDJA general secretary Rodríguez explained that workers who pursue remediation through the Labor Secretariat are often encouraged by the state’s representatives to accept half of what they are owed, because pursuing full payment would likely entail hiring a lawyer and enduring a multi-year process. The legal ambivalence and under-enforcement shield employers from higher wage bills, protection strengthened by suppression of worker collective action. The presidential proclamation of the time for unionism also spuriously represented the state’s position. Far from protecting freedom of association and collective bargaining rights, the state was supporting employerprotection contracts, which have proliferated in Mexico since the 1980s as a means for employers to avoid collective bargaining. The practice emerged out of the combination of regulations and norms granting employers substantial control in choosing their union counterpart on the one hand and concentrating power in union leadership without democratic praxis and accountability to members on the other (Bensusán 2006). Under protection contracts, an employer pays a union entity to ensure that there is no

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independent worker collective action. When workers first began collective actions in San Quintín in the 1980s, employers responded by signing protection contracts, primarily with affiliates of the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (Confederation of Mexican Workers, CTM), the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (Mexican Regional Labor Confederation, CROM), and the Confederación Revolucionaria de Obreros y Campesinos (Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants, CROC) (Velasco et al. 2014: 237–239).29 The employers typically have paid the protection unions directly, thus not showing deductions on workers’ paystubs. Workers and Labor Secretariat officials interviewed in 2020 reported that they had never seen a representative of the unions party to the employer-protection contracts. During the 2015 strike, employers’ first response to the Alianza, whose demands included nullification of the protection contracts, was a proposal to avoid the Alianza and to sign a settlement with the protection unions. To date, employer-protection contracts in agribusiness remain. Additionally, while workers’ right to strike is established in Mexico’s Constitution (Article 123.XVII) and Federal Labor Law (Article 2), the federal police forcefully suppressed the 2015 strike in San Quintín. As strikers recalled, the first day began with workers blocking the highway and communicating with the police and ended with a flood of municipal and federal police using anti-riot tactics. The federal government documented that the police used force on strikers, jailed dozens, and cut off radio, phone, and Internet service in the valley (SEGOB 2017), justifying the response by highlighting the few instances of vandalism.30 The state’s forceful response sent thousands of workers’ home; after a few days, most returned to work. Subsequently, during negotiations to settle the strike, federal police raided the neighborhood of Lomas de San Ramón, known locally for robust community collective action. Police arrived in armored vehicles, entered homes and physically assaulted residents, who responded by barricading the neighborhood and burning down an armored police vehicle and the nearest police station (SEGOB 2017; Interviews by the author). Thus, production in San Quintín has contributed more volume and higher margins to the North American strawberry sector by extracting value from a systemically disempowered workforce. The lead firms, the retail and marketing companies, obtain strawberries at their price, timing, and characteristic preferences while avoiding direct employer duties and reducing exposure to location-based strikes by maintaining multiple suppliers in different locations. The production companies, viced between the market dominating buyers and suppliers, maintain competitiveness by suppressing labor costs. National state-led processes of dispossession, ascription of fieldwork to indigenous identity, patriarchal practices toward female workers, and legal bolstering of employer discretion created and have reproduced a surplus and differentiated supply of labor. Workers can strike during the short strawberry harvest but face the task of organizing

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tens of thousands of workers dependent on the work for their livelihoods to participate in challenging a corporate network designed to insulate itself from their pressure and a state antagonistic toward their collective action. In other words, the production node of the North American strawberry ICN based in San Quintín has been structured to extract extraordinary profits from fieldworkers. As a challenge to the network, the 2015 strike was a historic act even though the changes sought remain an ongoing project.

The 2015 strike during San Quintín’s strawberry harvest Tens of thousands of fieldworkers went on strike in San Quintín on March 17, 2015, halting strawberry production during peak harvest and, by occupying the trans-peninsular highway, halting all exports. With their action and demands, the strikers targeted the economic, political, and social forces that suppress their bargaining power and, thus, social position. They demanded that the Mexican government “comply with the international agreements like the rights of indigenous peoples, human rights, union rights, and the right to strike.”31 Their demands included higher incomes, state protection and employer respect of their rights under labor and social security laws, and end of impunity for perpetrators of gender-based violence and discrimination. The mass action demonstrated a high degree of associational power, and its demobilization indicated stunted processes of dignity. The Alianza organized the 2015 strike drawing on accumulated local knowledge regarding the necessity of unity among all workers and focus on employment as a key to improving livelihoods in San Quintín. As conveyed in its name, the Alliance of National, State, and Municipal Organizations for Social Justice, the Alianza brought together community, indigenous rights, and labor activists advocating at multiple levels of Mexico’s federal politicaleconomic system. Together, they led San Quintín’s overwhelmingly agricultural workers to pressure the most valuable economic actors of the locale at their most vulnerable moment. The Alianza leadership, which consisted of 14 core members, mobilized workers over the course of two years prior to the 2015 strike. Their strategy, however, had much longer roots. When export agribusiness began accelerating in San Quintín in the 1980s, national social organizations led efforts to improve the poor working conditions. Employers were transporting and housing workers seasonally and using armed guards and fences for additional control. Workers lacked potable water and sanitary housing, and supervisors harassed them, especially women, with impunity (Velasco et al. 2014: 236, 284). The Frente Indígena Oaxaqueño Binacional (Oaxacan Indigenous Binational Front, FIOB) and Frente Indígena de la Lucha Triquí (Indigenous Front of the Triqui Struggle, FILT) emerged to advocate for the millions of recently dispossessed, predominantly indigenous, new wage workers migrating for employment throughout North America. Primarily comprised of people from the Mixtec and Triqui indigenous groups, FIOB and FILT focused on

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political activity. The Central Independiente de Obreros Agrícolas y Campesinos (Independent Central of Agricultural Workers and Peasants, CIOAC), founded by peasant and communist political party leaders, also organized a base in San Quintín. For anthropologist Michael Kearney (1988), CIOAC in particular signified a process of reappropriating indigenous identity by workers in contrast to that ascribed to them by employers and state officials. CIOAC led multiple collective actions that contributed to wage increases and improvements in workers’ housing. However, state repression depleted activists, employers shielded themselves with protection contracts, and internal disputes, including the apparent assassination of CIOAC leader Maclovio Rojas, reduced the new wage workers’ capacity to act as a collective (Velasco et al. 2014: 238–247). In the 1990s, worker collective action in San Quintín applied new tactics to struggles focused on securing land for residences independent of employers (Velasco 2002; Velasco et al. 2014: 249–267; Zlolniski 2010, 2019; Martínez Novo 2006). To move out of employer-owned and controlled labor camps, workers occupied land, closed the highway, negotiated over prices for parcels, and advocated toward the government for land registration, a hospital, and services to support their growing communities. San Quintín became the permanent home for workers as strawberry production accelerated, surpassing tomatoes as the region’s primary export. In addition to new tactics, the decade marked changes in employment relations, influenced by workers permanently settling and no longer migrating seasonally and increasingly conducting collective actions independently of national and regional organizations. To compete to supply the demands of lead firms of the regional sector, production companies introduced piecerate pay for harvest workers, thereby increasing productivity without labor costs, driving down real wages. Workers recalled that by the 2010s, “people didn’t have enough to get by, and it had been years since they increased wages”; “gas pressed us because it went up, eggs … everything was getting more expensive, and 90 pesos [per day] didn’t cover it … we were fed up.” The Alianza formed in the 2010s by applying many of the lessons learned from the prior decades of struggle for social improvement in San Quintín. Communities that workers built in the 1990s adapted the traditional authority structure of governance from their heritage communities in southern Mexico,32 and several of the elected community authorities participated in the Alianza leadership. Shifting from previous efforts to organize based on single ethnic groups, the Alianza worked to bring workers from diverse heritages into their movement. As one Alianza leader described, “I began with the Triqui community here. But internally wasn’t enough. I had to unite all the groups of people.” The Alianza mobilized workers community-by-community, “one day here, the next in another, and so on,” as another of the leaders described it. Also reflecting observations of the preceding decades, the Alianza worked to focus workers’ attention on their shared position as employees of an export

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agribusiness sector reliant on low labor costs. In person and via broadcasts over the multilingual Indigenous Radio Xeqin,33 the Alianza highlighted the gaps between employment conditions and legal rights as a shared problem that required collective labor action to address both immediate concerns of low wages and the overall employment relationship through independent union collective bargaining. The Alianza tested the government’s commitments to labor and social security laws by sending petitions to local-, state-, and national-level officials, then broadcast to workers the lack of the state’s response. As one worker said, the government agencies “acted like they did not see our complaints.” The Alianza also pointed out to workers that they collectively held the on/off switch to San Quintín’s economy, given employer’s dependence on their labor during the strawberry harvest, the crop’s high value, and the sector’s reliance on a single highway for transport of the perishable export to US markets. The Alianza was articulating the illegitimacy of employment conditions and striking as the means to establish a legitimate new arrangement characterized by labor law compliance and worker participation in workplace governance through independent union collective bargaining.34 Reflecting the Alianza’s efforts, the strike demonstrated substantial capacity to act as a collective. Starting around two in the morning on March 17, 2015, tens of thousands of workers went on strike and occupied the trans-peninsular highway, blocking transport into and out of San Quintín. By some accounts, 80 percent of workers participated (Vargas 2015). The Alianza had planned seven blockades along the highway, and workers mounted several more, blocking transportation along some 60 miles, from Punta Colonet to Rancho Los PINOS. As Rodríguez, subsequently elected general secretary of SINDJA, reflected, he and fellow workers joined the strike because “They [the Alianza leaders] spoke truth, a reality that we experienced.” Through the mass action, the Alianza also drew some support from allies. Several national organizations issued statements of solidarity, and some of their members participated in organizing.35 US-based organizations also expressed solidarity,36 including the then emerging Familias Unidas por la Justicia, whose members shared familiar ties with workers in San Quintín. Unionists based in Mexico and the United States petitioned the US government to support the strikers, citing expressed commitment to labor rights, and a US Labor Department delegation encouraged its counterparts in Mexico to negotiate with the Alianza. Months after the strike, the Alianza announced a boycott of Driscoll’s. However, the initiative never gained traction, as it did not involve fieldworkers, was perceived by many of them as a risk to their jobs, and did not organize the committee structure that enabled implementation of the successful United Farm Worker boycotts, which inspired it.37 Meanwhile, the state and strawberry sector responded decisively to end the strike and minimize its impact. The national police arrived by the afternoon

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of the first day, using anti-riot tactics to clear the highway, arrest strikers, and cut off radio, cellphone, and internet in the area. The suppression drove most workers back to the strawberry fields within days. A striker and subsequent labor organizer noted, “that’s when I realized that the people were not well organized to deal with that situation.” Employers let it be known that strikers would be penalized. As a young mother expressed, “I knew that there was a strike. I didn’t participate … if you joined the strike, you risked being fired. They fired everyone who participated.” While not everyone was fired, she perceived employers’ bargaining power advantage. Negotiations demonstrated workers’ limited leverage. The employer association Consejo Agrícola de Baja California (Agricultural Council of Baja California, CABC) first proposed negotiating a settlement with the employer-protection unions CTM, CROM, and CROC, rejecting the Alianza’s standing. As described by participants, during four meetings the employers offered no concessions before proposing a 12 percent wage increase and registering workers in IMSS. The Alianza had demanded a 67 percent increase, from 120 to 300 pesos per day, based on a cost-of-living study by academic researchers. The Labor Secretariat committed to investigating working conditions and addressing childcare, education, and healthcare deficits in San Quintín. Significantly, cracks became evident in the burgeoning labor movement’s ability to sustain collective action. With the move from direct action to negotiations, Alianza leaders reduced interactions with rank-and-file workers, many of whom felt in the dark about what was happening. Within the Alianza, decision-making coalesced around a few, particularly one leader. Participating women recalled being sidelined. As one organizer explained, she thought of the strike as “the day that we put forward our demands as women, and break the system. We have a problem of machismo … I insisted and joined the negotiations … the Alianza broke because power concentrated in three people … they excluded us.” Another organizer recounted, “I saw that I was the only woman … I invited the leaders and their spouses to dinner to get to know each other,” and none of the Alianza leaders went. Material needs also weighed on workers. As a mother who did not strike said, “I had to care for my children.” Neither the Alianza nor its allies were in a position to sustain striking workers. As negotiations dragged on, the strawberry sector strengthened its position. Employers in San Quintín reported to the media that the strike was devastating the industry, predicting a 30 percent decline in production (Corpus 2015; Sun 2015). As noted, national records showed that the lead firms of the North American strawberry sector shifted to alternate suppliers. The 2015 annual production decrease in Mexico was counterbalanced by an increase in US production, and during the following season a decrease in San Quintín production (−14 percent) was over-compensated by increases in the states of Michoacán (35 percent) and Mexico (28 percent) (FAO 2020; SIAP 2020). Meanwhile, this was the moment when national police

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invaded Lomas de San Ramón, reportedly at the request of a production company owner, and the police’s assault on residents provoked their firm resistance. By then, workers’ leverage was dissipating quickly. Participation in Alianza-led actions declined from tens of thousands on the first day of the strike to an estimated four thousand for a march two months later, followed by a lull in collective action (Cruz 2016: 208). Declining participation in collective action indicated demobilization among workers and reduced pressure on employers and the state. On June 4, negotiations concluded. Under the settlement, employers agreed to raise wages 15 percent, to register workers in IMSS, cease employing children, and not retaliate against strikers. Government officials agreed to release detained strikers, register SINDJA as an official union, and initiate housing, nutrition, and health programs. The settlement further divided strike leaders and workers by sustaining the “integrated” pay modality under which wages and benefits are not itemized, obfuscating compliance with legally required benefits. Several Alianza negotiators refused to sign. One recalled, Our fight ended June 4. The document said at the time that pay was going to be integrated, that benefits were going to be included, and the fight was that they would be apart. I didn’t agree that you should sign. You have to consult. If they [workers] are in agreement that you sign the document with its conditions, then good, but they’re the only ones who can decide.

Impacts of the 2015 strike The 2015 strike marked a change, although few of its goals were achieved in the near term. An Alianza leader concluded that through the strike, “we changed the mentality of the youth, in the adult workers, and in the producers [employers].” In interviews, many workers and some managers also positively assessed the strike, especially the resulting increase in compensation. The strike also resulted in the registration of SINDJA as a national union, establishing an independent union for fieldworkers in Mexico. Since the strike, SINDJA has represented workers with grievances, disseminated information on labor laws, and welcomed members, including through meetings in workers’ communities. The union has applied lessons from the strike, not only with emphasis on direct worker representation and engagement but also on gender equity. However, five years after the strike, most demands issued during the strike remained unfulfilled. Employerprotection contracts continued to block collective bargaining; the government had not invested in the social programs that it committed to in

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negotiations; and employers registered more, but not even half of all workers in the social security system. Companies responded primarily by increasing public claims of high labor standards through private certifications. As the largest buyer, Driscoll’s created a supplier code of conduct and began requiring its suppliers in Mexico to obtain certifications from FTUSA. Andrew and Williamson, the third-largest company marketing San Quintín strawberries, obtained ETI certifications for its production facilities, and Rainforest Alliance certifications of strawberry producers in Mexico doubled. Although FTUSA and EFI allocate some additional money in the commodity network to fieldworkers, the private certification models are fundamentally flawed. Three decades of analysis of private regulation of labor standards, including certification and corporate social responsibility models, has repeatedly highlighted weaknesses.38 The certifications counter public pressure on the sector and demonstrate little capacity to detect and remediate poor labor standards. Among the fundamental limits is that the theory of change—that shoppers would prioritize certified product sufficiently to shift a commodity network from reliance on cheap labor to accommodating workers’ rights—has not come to pass, over decades. Another limitation is built-in conflicts of interest: the certifications are designed for companies to pay for inspection and certification from auditing and standard-setting organizations that rely on the companies for business. Most certifications, including those used in San Quintín’s strawberry sector, also maintain confidentiality between the audited company, auditing company, and accreditation and standard-setting organizations, thereby side-lining workers from the process of judging respect for their rights and shielding the organizations involved from scrutiny. Confidentiality reduces potential collaboration between the private assessments of labor standards by certification initiatives and public regulation. Additionally, lack of worker participation in certification development, implementation, and verification reduces the priority of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights. Reducing audit reliability, management often coerces workers to tell private auditors what they want, and auditors tend to speak with workers in settings with management present. Furthermore, companies selectively obtain certifications for certain facilities while continuing to sell product from non-certified facilities, enabling misleading messaging about the scope of their labor standards claims. Consistent with the documentation of these flaws in other contexts, workers in San Quintín criticized the private regulation initiatives. A worker at a supplier to Driscoll’s highlighted the use of the certifications by lead firms to control labor in production, reporting that prior to a certification auditor visit, “the company gives us a talk and tells us what they’re going to say and how we need to respond—that ‘everything is good’; ‘we work as we like.’ They tell us that if we don’t, they can sanction and close the company.” Other workers reported that their employer claimed that the FTUSA

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premium was used to provide water barrels and blankets that in fact were distributed by the government. While workers affirmed that they received additional compensation through the EFI certification, they added that management controls the certification committees that are presented as forums for worker voice. One worker said of EFI and FTUSA, “It is makeup, because it doesn’t protect you … it is to say everything is good at the farm.” For its part, the government of Mexico has reformed its labor regime since the 2015 strike. The government amended the national constitution, reformed labor laws, and committed to increased enforcement in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) that replaced NAFTA. Federal law now prohibits employer and governmental interference in union activities and establishes mechanisms for workers to determine their union representation, leadership, and collective bargaining agreements (Bensusán 2020: 19–23). The legislation also stipulates that all unions must comply with the new laws, including through a democratic election of executive board members and by amending procedures for workers to vote on collective agreements (Bensusán 2020: 22). The USMCA provides mechanisms for pressuring the Mexican government and employers to comply with the new labor laws. The three governments committed to uphold ILO core labor standards, including explicitly the right to strike in the Labor Chapter (23) of the USMCA, meaning violations of these standards are subject to the same dispute settlement system as other provisions of the agreement and can lead to arbitration and sanctions on a government as last steps of the complaint process.39 Furthermore, the USMCA established the Facility-Specific Rapid Response Labor Mechanism, under which petitions may be filed alleging an employer in Mexico violated freedom of association and collective bargaining rights, and if the US or Canadian government requests, the Mexican government or a panel established for the purpose may investigate and impose remedial measures.40 In a new precedent, the process is backed up by the ability of the complaining government to suspend trade preferences of the company concerned. While creating a foothold for labor, the reforms have yet to translate into changes in San Quintín’s strawberry sector. Suppression of unionism has continued. In 2019, an employer fired 12 security guards; SINDJA assisted the workers to file a complaint with the Labor Secretariat; the employer invited the workers to return to work, where thugs beat them; the union assisted the workers to file a criminal complaint; a SINDJA leader’s home was burned down; and no investigations were conducted.

Restrained dignity and the limited outcomes of the 2015 strike Understanding the internal dynamics of the labor movement that led the 2015 strike in San Quintín informs how employment terms and conditions

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might be improved in production nodes of the North American strawberry sector. If workers ever needed a reminder that they, not employers or national states, are the primary force for improving working conditions, the history of strawberry production in San Quintín has provided one. The sector was historically constructed to extract value from workers disempowered by economic, political, and social forces. Applying market dominance, retailers, led by Walmart, and marketers, led by Driscoll’s, drove the strawberry boom by expanding production with the integration of supplier companies in Mexico and by increasing margins through exploitation of labor costs held lower at suppliers in Mexico than those in the United States. The Mexican government contributed to low labor costs by dispossessing millions of peasants, compelling them into an oversupplied labor market for export agribusiness, which it also supported with infrastructure, direct subsidies, protections of international capital via the NAFTA/USMCA treaties, permission of protection contracts, underenforcement of labor and social security laws, and suppression of workers’ collective actions. Employers recruited the dispossessed, new wage seekers for jobs with poor conditions, and avoided collective bargaining of better terms with protection contracts. The mobilization of a racialized ascription of fieldwork to indigeneity limited economic opportunities for the new, largely indigenous workforce while suppressing demands for improved employment conditions as unnatural assertions by outside provocateurs. Further deepening the power imbalance, patriarchal norms divided workers at workplaces and in their communities. Exports, sales, and profits boomed,41 indicating that workers’ precarious position was part of a functioning ICN. In short, strawberry fields of San Quintín were created to raise profits through the super exploitation of field workers. As the ICN analysis of strawberry production in San Quintín highlights, demanding collective bargaining and improved working conditions meant demanding a shift in power from the companies and government to workers. Through the 2015 strike, workers indeed altered the balance of bargaining power, and thus changed some working conditions, notably with wage increases and recognition of their union SINJDA. Yet sustaining improvement proved beyond the level of power built leading up to the strike. Certain conditions may have set the stage for the strike but were not determinant. For one, workers were no longer migrating seasonally but instead had made San Quintín home. This meant that workers needed remuneration that covered costs of living in their communities around the strawberry production companies, which were higher than costs in their heritage communities (where reciprocal exchange had reduced dependence on money) and increasing in the years leading up to the strike. However, both workers and managers reported that real wages had stagnated for many years prior to the strike—according to several, since the 1990s. Residing primarily in San Quintín may have also accelerated workers’ class consciousness, as they no longer migrated to ethnically differentiated heritage

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communities but instead shared ethnically mixed living communities and workplaces, where the primary social difference was more clearly that between employers and wage workers. Yet workers at San Quintín’s agroexport companies had primarily resided in the area also since the 1990s. Another factor may have been increased sales, indicated by higher exports and revenue from sales to the United States in the early 2010s. This might communicate to workers the potential for companies to increase wages, an expectation that would have required access to the sales or export data which was not easily accessible to workers in San Quintín. It might have also indicated a period of work intensification, if employers were pressing workers for more output; yet such intensification was not a primary grievance of the 2015 strike. The actions taken by workers, then, are the key to understanding the 2015 strike and its outcomes. Assessing workers’ collective trajectory with the dignity-based model of power building illustrates the moments of progression and stagnation. Such assessment suggests that the degree to which they improved conditions reflected the degree that they proceeded through processes of dignity. Figure 3.1 models the process, with plus signs representing actions that contributed to building power and minus signs those that detracted from workers’ efforts. The causal mechanism, human dignity, is partially filled in to indicate evidently incomplete processes of dignity. The essentiality of associational power and its dependence on solidarity, and fundamentally on dignity, was clear. Collectively, workers could leverage the regional strawberry sector’s dependence on their labor to press for an increased share of the value they produced. For such a shift, they would need strong capacity to act collectively.

Precarious Employment

Capacity to Act as Collective

Coalition

Capacity to Disrupt

Enforceable Laws & Contracts

Decent Work

Human dignity - FOA & + Alliance of labor, collective indigenous, bargaining community blocked by focused activists employer + Unified diverse protection ethnic groups contracts + SINDJA - Immiserating remuneration - Factionalized - Denial IMSS leadership health care & - Sidelined women pensions - Genderleaders based abuses

+ Radio Xeqin mass communication + Statements of solidarity, international petition, & some funds from allied organizations - Ally initiatives disconnected from workers needs

+ Strike - Call for boycott without workers’ participation or organized committees

+ State recognition of SINDJA - State force against workers - State permitted employer protection contracts - Non-enforcement labor & IMSS laws

+ Wage increases + IMSS registration increases - Employer protection contracts remain - Wage erosion - Most workers not IMSS registered - Discrimination continues

Figure 3.1 Process of workers’ collective action in San Quintín in the 2010s.

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The mass participation in the 2015 strike evinced substantially developed associational power. As conveyed in its name, the Alianza began when activists focused on the overlapping dimensions of workers’ lives—employment, indigenous culture, and community development—came together under the shared goal of shifting their relationship with employers and the state. Hence, the Alianza leaders included traditional authorities elected by workers in their communities, participants in prior labor collective action led by CIOAC, and indigenous advocates involved with FILT and FIOB. These leaders recognized the necessity and effectively unified workers in San Quintín across its diverse ethnic communities, including Mixtec, Triqui, Zapotec, and mestizo. With the strike, the Alianza demanded freedom of association and recognition of the independent union SINDJA to replace the system of employer protection contracts with the organizational mechanisms for workers to negotiate the terms of their employment, a worker-controlled union and collective bargaining. Indicating the associational power built, tens of thousands participated in the strike. However, the demobilization of the strike and negotiations that ended it evinced restrained solidarity reflecting stunted processes of dignity. Two ruptures in particular weakened workers’ associational power. One, the Alianza leadership factionalized, displaying breakdowns in recognition of each other’s capacities to participate in the rules of their collective and thus weakening solidarity. As multiple participants in the strike negotiations recounted, decision-making consolidated around a small group, which allegedly received payments from government officials that influenced their negotiating positions. The signing of the strike settlement that expressly continued integrated salaries—which many Alianza leaders held as a nonnegotiable demand—and investments made and engagement in politics by some leaders after negotiations seemed to corroborate dissenters’ suspicions. Indicating the high level of frustration, a faction broke from the Alianza and formed a separate union, the Sindicato Independiente de Jornaleros Agrícolas y Similares (National Independent Union of Workers in Agriculture and Similar Sectors, SINIJAS). Two former Alianza leaders who formed SINIJAS left it thereafter. They reported that SINIJAS obtained registration with the support of politicians and was subsequently used as a vehicle for one person to “get rich—I don’t know how, but we know how they manage such secretariats,” referring to the practice of protection unions to exchange contracts for payments from employers, thereby protecting them from collective bargaining with independent unions. The second rupture in the process of building associational power was the sidelining of women in the Alianza and thus the decision-making processes regarding the strike and subsequent negotiations. The women who recounted being denied equal participation in the Alianza left it and moved on to form separate organizations. The women workers who shared reasons for not participating in the strike pointed to the lack of organizers’ attention to immediate needs, such as childcare, for them to have joined.

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The effects were to deny the dignity of women participants in the labor movement led by the Alianza and thus a weakening of solidarity and capacity to act collectively. Ally actions also indicated lack of mutual recognition of capacities to participate in collective decision-making, and thus fell short of forming a coalition. Allies issued statements of solidarity, sent donations, filed a complaint with the US government, and announced a boycott. However, the efforts insufficiently responded to the needs of workers in San Quintín to sustain the strike and gain leverage in negotiations. As participants in the strike recalled, the first day of the action indicated insufficient preparations to address needs such as mitigation measures to reduce workers’ exposure to violence by police and dismissal from employers. Through worker-ally relationships based on recognition of each other’s capacities to participate in strategic planning, allies might have learned of these needs, and the groups might have mutually developed strategies to enable safer strike participation and thus a longer-lasting strike and stronger bargaining position. Stunted processes of dignity within the workers’ movement and between them and allies translated into low capacity to sustain pressure on companies and the state by sustaining the strike or implementing other tactics such as the boycott. After successfully uniting across activist and ethnic groups, the Alianza’s divisions between leadership and ordinary workers and across gender lines eroded the group’s associational power. Ally support with little engagement of workers missed an opportunity for supporters to help sustain the strike and build workers’ bargaining power. Facing a state willing to suppress labor with force, production companies able to replace strikers from a surplus labor supply, and lead companies able to insulate themselves by shifting to other production locations, shaky capacity to act as a collective proved decisive. Even as employer commitments to increase wages and IMSS registration and government recognition of SINDJA indicated the potential of workers to affect change, dismissal of most strike demands, subsequent erosion of wages, and continued avoidance of collective bargaining with protection contracts reflected the lack of leverage backstopping the Alianza at the negotiating table in 2015. In the years following the strike, workers in San Quintín have worked to apply the lessons learned and build associational power. Women labor activists led changes in gender relations, initially organizing the worker collectives Mujeres Unidas en Defensa de Jornaleras Indígenas (Women United in Defense of Indigenous Female Agricultural Day Laborers, MUDJI) and Alianza de Mujeres de Diversos Colores (Alliance of Women of Diverse Colors). Both organized women against gender-based discrimination and violence. MUDJI proceeded to also engage the newly formed union SINDJA. Together, MUDJI and SINDJA began political education workshops in workers communities, personal invitations to join the union to workers at the start of the workday,42 mass dissemination of labor laws to workers via pamphlets and videos posted to social media platforms, and

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direct representation of aggrieved workers before employers and the labor secretariat. At a workshop in a worker’s home in 2020, the message was resonating. One attendee responded to SINDJA’s presentation, “They [employers] are used to robbing us. We need a union.” Subsequently, workers elected Abelina Ramírez Ruiz, the founder of MUDJI, to serve as SINDJA’s second general secretary.43 The path toward decent work in the strawberry fields in San Quintín is uphill. The sector provides cheap production, primarily benefiting the lead firms of the North American strawberry ICN. While clear in its commitment to export agribusiness, state support for the field workers’ rights has been ambiguous at best. Any changes will thus result from workers’ use of the sector’s dependence on their labor as leverage, which requires strong associational power and, most likely, enhancement by a coalition of allies. The 2015 strike equally evinced that associational and coalitional power are not automatic and are weakened by divisions, in this case between leaders and workers, across genders, and between frontline workers and allies. Although the strike fell short of achieving many demands, its demonstration of workers’ potential set many on a path toward further change, and recent efforts led by SINDJA demonstrate that the struggle continues.

Notes 1 Previously referred to as the San Quintín Valley, in 2020 San Quintín separated from Ensenada and became the sixth municipality in the Mexican state of Baja California. The municipality San Quintín includes the valley’s towns Eréndira, San Quintín, San Vicente, Camalú, Colonia Vicente Guerrero, Colonia Lázaro Cárdenas, el Rosario de Arriba, Puertecitos, el Mármol, Cataviña, Punta Prieta, Bahía de los Ángeles, Punta Colonet, and Villa de Jesús María e Isla Cedros. 2 The basic food basket cost 435.58 pesos daily for a family of four while the minimum daily wage was 70.1 pesos in 2015 ( CAM 2015). 3 Note that the figures were lower than they would be for San Quintín due to the statewide scope of the survey, which included higher income urban areas of Tijuana and Ensenada. 4 The World Bank Group, 2015 “Global Value Chains,” quoted in Mayer and Phillips 2017: 141. 5 Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Artículo 123.XXII Bis.; Ley Federal del Trabajo, Artículos 357, 357 Bis, 358. 6 Ley Federal del Trabajo, Artículos 61, 68, 69, 74, 132, 133, 134, 161, 334. 7 Ley de Seguro Social, Artículo 15. 8 Companies paid 18–19 pesos per box (n=19), and workers (n=47) tended to pick 20–30 boxes per day. 9 Workers (n=47) reported spending 160.54 pesos on water, 1,211.54 on food, 101.38 on gas, and 85.18 on electricity per week on average. 10 In Mexico until recently, union’s right to collectively bargain with employers depended on legal recognition, by the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare’s Associational Registry for federal-jurisdiction industries and by Local Conciliation and Arbitration Councils for local-jurisdiction economic activities. The registration process provided control over unions to the government (See Middlebrook 1995: 172–185). The 2020 Organic Law of the Federal Center for Conciliation and Labor

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Divided, Demobilized Registration (Ley Organica del Centro Federal para Conciliación y Registro Laboral) created the Federal Center with the mandate to register all union activities in the country under new procedures. The law replaced tripartite structures with a Governing Board composed of heads of public institutions—the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare, Ministry of Finance and Public Credit, National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data, National Institute for Statistics and Geography, and National Electoral Institute—as the oversight body of registrations. The Political Constitution of the United States of Mexico (Art. 123.A.VI) states the minimum salary paid to workers should be sufficient, accounting for regional conditions, to satisfy normal needs in the life of the worker, their education and honest pleasures, considering the worker as head of a family. This is the contemporary meaning of “living wage” ( Anker 2011). Workers (n=50) reported spending 160.54 pesos on water, 1,211.54 on food, 101.38 on gas, and 85.18 on electricity per week. Local IMSS office data showed a total of 46,165 employees registered in the social security system, 6,000 of whom were registered as permanent workers, and, of those registered as temporary workers, 10,000 were in agriculture. Conservatively assuming 16,000 agricultural workers registered on any basis (despite the obviousness that some number of the 6,000 permanent workers are in other industries) would suggest that 40 percent of the 40,000 workers employed in San Quintín agriculture were registered in IMSS in 2020, most only for part of the year. The implications include lack of healthcare and destitute elderly. For example, a grandmother with 20 years of fieldwork experience received 44 weeks of wages as her pension, an 82-year old father of an assertive son received a fifth of his pension after 30 years of fieldwork, and multiple workers who needed cancerous tumors removed and broken arms repaired were told by the national health system that they would have to come up with funds for treatment because their employers had not registered them (Interviews by the author 2020). The “integrated salary” (salario integrado) modality means that pay stubs do not itemize contributions to legally required benefits, such as overtime pay and allocations to the social security system; as a result, employers claim that all legal contributions are made while workers regularly discover that they are not, for example, when they seek pensions and are told that a fraction of their worktime was registered. Strawberries have a one-to-two-day shelf life in ambient conditions, increased to seven to eight days when chilled, due in part to their high water content, which increases risk of the mold botrytis cinerea and other contaminants ( Rijpkema et al. 2014; Samadi et al. 2017; Kelly et al. 2019). Driscoll’s reportedly delivers 75 percent of its strawberries the day it procures them from supplying production companies ( Food Safety News 2018). UN Comtrade (Mexico also accounted for an increasing portion of US imports of frozen and preserved strawberries, averaging 71 and 64 percent annually during the 2010s, according to UN Comtrade data); Shelman 2017; Cook 2011. Wells 1996: 44. University of California Cooperative Extension researchers estimated that labour costs accounted for 60 percent of total costs for strawberry production companies in the state’s Central Coast Region ( Bolda et al. 2016). While their data is from a location other than those studied here, it is consistent with descriptions shared by production managers interviewed in San Quintín. Wage rates in San Quintín are based on interviews with managers and workers. For US rates, the 2020 Adverse Effect Wage Rate for employment of workers through the H-2A program in California was $14.77 per hour, and strawberry pickers

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21 22

23

24 25

26 27

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29 30 31

32

represented by Familias Unidas por la Justicia earned $16–$18 per hour in Washington state. The brothers Garland Reiter and Miles Reiter own Driscoll’s and Reiter Affiliated Companies (RAC), which they established in 1976. RAC manages contract berry production in North America, and Driscoll’s markets all of the product from RACmanaged production companies, including Berrymex. Walmart US grocery sales of $208,413,000,000 accounted for 32 percent of total US grocery revenue ( Walmart 2021; Fernandez 2020). Walmart’s average labour costs decreased nearly 1 percent from 1971 to 2008 ( Brea-Solís et al. 2015). Instead of the competition-supporting intent of anti-trust laws, since 1982 US policy limited who could be regarded as a victim of monopoly power to consumers and the application of the laws to protecting the lowest price to consumers, and established an effectively unprovable standard for plaintiffs alleging predatory pricing ( Lynn 2006; Orbach 2011; Olson 2014; Edlin 2017). On US government policy of permitting employer avoidance of unionism, see Lichtenstein 2007a, b, 2008, 2009; Pier 2007). Chapter 5 of this book addresses both topics. As noted in Chapter 1, Driscoll’s General Counsel explained, “Growers are sort of like our manufacturing plants. We make the inventions, they assemble it, and then we market it, so it’s not that dissimilar from Apple using someone else to do the manufacturing but they’ve made the invention and marketed the end product” (quoted in Goodyear 2017). These approximations are using $3.08 for a pound of berries sold in US retail and, for harvest wage rates, the average rate reported by workers and managers interviewed in San Quintín. The United Food Workers sent US citizens throughout North America and Europe to set up boycott committees that pressured employers into negotiating contracts with the union in 1970, and Familias Unidas por la Justicia traveled throughout the US West coast to set up boycott committees that pressured their employer into conceding to a union election in 2016 ( Fischer-Daly, 2021). Interview by the author with a former regional official of the National commission of Indigenous Peoples, 2020. Following the lifting of barriers to competition with the national oil and gas corporation PEMEX in 2015, multinational corporations have introduced the gas station plus convenience store model that now dominates the trans-peninsular highway running through San Quintín. As older workers in San Quintín recalled in interviews until the mid-2000s, “there wasn’t a problem, such a strong border issue”; “one could come and go across the border. Since the early 2000s, the US Department of Homeland Security increased arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants and pushed border crossers into the Sonoran desert by building walls and increasing border patrol” ( ACLU 2020). On the history of “official” unions, including CTM, CROM, and CROC, see Middlebrook, 1995. Interviews by the author 2020. “We demand that the International Labour Organization intervene, so that the Mexican government complies with the international agreements, such as the rights of indigenous peoples, human rights, union rights, and the right to strike.” (“Exigimos a la Organización Internacional del Trabajo su intervención, para que el gobierno mexicano cumplan con los acuerdos internacionales, como el derecho de los pueblos originarios, derechos humanos, derechos sindical y el derecho a la huelga”) ( Alianza 2015). As noted in Chapter 2, a number of indigenous communities in the southern Mexican states of Oaxaca and Guerrero are governed by traditional authorities, elected leaders of each community tasked with leading collective deliberations and decisions by and for the community, such as building infrastructure and settling disputes.

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33 Radio XEQIN, “La Voz del Valley / The Voice of the Valley,” broadcasts in Mixtec, Spanish, Triqui, and Zapotec, and is run by the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples—pointing to the complex relations between the Mexican state and indigenous peoples in its territory, one in which the state seeks to control the construction of indigenous identity even while some efforts like the radio station open up space for autonomous activity. 34 Bourdieu (1991) described such interpretations of current illegitimacy and future legitimacy through specified actions as “symbolic power.” 35 Including: FIOB, CIOAC, Central Campesina Cardenista, Unión Nacional de Trabajadores, Nueva Central de Trabajadores, Sección XXII de la Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, and Frente Popular Revolucionario 36 Including: Familias Unidas por la Justicia, United Farm Workers, Farm Labor Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO. 37 A former UFW organizer led the Alliance’s boycott. The UFW grape boycotts in the late 1960s and the contemporary FUJ boycott of Sakuma and Driscoll’s contributed to the union’s gaining recognition and collective bargaining with employers, and both initiatives entailed a large number of boycott committees and supportive action by other unions, e.g. to halt transportation. See Fischer-Daly 2021 and Chapter 2 in this book. 38 See for example: O’Rourke, D. (1997). Smoke from a Hired Gun: A Critique of Nike’s Labour and Environmental Auditing in Viet Nam, as Performed by Ernst & Young; Elliot, K. and Freeman, R. (2003). Can Labor Standards Improve Under Globalization? Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics; Esbenshade, J. (2004). Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Barrientos, S., Gereffi, G., Rossi, A. (2011). Economic and social upgrading in global production networks: A new paradigm for a changing world. International Labour Review; Anner, M., 2012. Corporate social responsibility and freedom of association rights: the precarious quest for legitimacy and control in global supply chains. Political Sociology. 40 (4), 609–644; Finnegan, B. (2013). Responsibility Outsourced: Social Audits, Workplace Certification and Twenty Years of Failure to Protect Worker Rights. Washington DC: AFL-CIO. [online] https://aflcio. org/reports/responsibility-outsourced; Locke, Richard. 2013. The Promise and Limits of Private Power, Cambridge University Press; Kuruvilla, Sarosh. 2021 Private Regulation of Labor Standards in Global Supply Chains, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lebaron, Genevieve. 2021. “A Market in Deception? Ethically Certifying Exploitative Supply Chains.” in Genevieve LeBaron and Jessica R. Pliley (Eds.) Fighting Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 156–78. 39 For disputes alleging violations, the USMCA requires its dispute settlement panel to assume that the violation affects trade unless the government alleged to have failed in its duty proves otherwise, and does not require that the violation gave an employer a competitive advantage. Under the Dominican Republic–Central America–United States Free Trade Agreement, a complainant has to prove that the labor standards violation was in a manner affecting trade and conferred a competitive advantage to an employer, positions of the US-Guatemala panel that prevented findings and remedial action. (Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Executive Office of the President. Agreement between the United States of America, the United Mexican States, and Canada. 7/1/20 Text. https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-tradeagreements/united-states-mexico-canada-agreement/agreement-between; Santos 2019. Reimagining Trade Agreements for Workers: Lessons from the USMCA. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3502815). 40 The USCMA permits complaints by the Mexican government against a US or Canadian employer “only with respect to an alleged Denial of Rights owed to

Divided, Demobilized 93 workers at a covered facility under an enforced order of the” National Labor Relations Board or Canada Industrial Relations Board, respectively. Claims can be brought against Mexican employers only with respect to an alleged Denial of Rights under legislation that complies with Annex 23-A (Worker Representation in Collective Bargaining in Mexico)” (USCMA Art. 31-A.2 Footnote 2, Art. 31-B.2 footnote 5). The Rapid Response Mechanism is written to accept complaints only from covered, “priority sectors,” which include manufacturing, services, and mining, and thereby excludes export agribusiness and other sectors. 41 Strawberry exports from Mexico grew between 1990 and 2019 more than 800 percent, on average 12 percent annually ( Comtrade, 2021). During the same decades, Driscoll’s expanded from sourcing and marketing strawberries in the United States to a multinational corporation sourcing from 400 production companies in 21 countries and selling in 48 countries, raising its valuation to $3 billion (Shanker 2016; Goodyear, 2017; Shelman 2017). Between 1997 (the earliest for which grocery sales are itemized in the company’s annual reports) and 2020, Walmart grocery sales increased 1,302 percent, from $14.9 billion to $208.4 billion ( Walmart, 2021). 42 Depending on the distance to the production company’s strawberry fields, harvest workers typically board buses in their communities between 4:30 and 6:00 am to travel to work and begin between 6:30 and 7:00 am. 43 SINDJA’s first general secretary, Lorenzo Rodríguez, was supportive of the transition and remained active as the union’s organizing secretary.

References Alianza de Organizaciones Nacional Estatal y Municipal por la Justicia Social. (2015). Manifiesto del 17 de Marzo al Pueblo de Baja California, del País, y del Mundo. (on file with the author). American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). (2020). Justice-Free Zones: U.S. Immigration Detention Under the Trump Administration. https://www.aclu.org/report/justice-freezones-us-immigration-detention-under-trump-administration (accessed 2 January 2021). Anker, Richard. (2011). Estimating a Living Wage: A Methodological Review. International Labour Organization Conditions of Work and Employment Series No. 29. Geneva: International Labour Office. Bensusán, Graciela. (2006). Diseño Legal y desempeño real: instituciones laborales en América Latina. México: UAM-X/Editorial Porrúa. Bensusán, Graciela. (2020). “The Transformation of the Mexican Labour Regulation Model and its link to North American Economic Integration.” ILO Working Paper 15. Geneva: ILO. ISBN: 9789220336922. Bolda, Mark P., Laura Tourte, Jeremy Murdock and Daniel A. Sumner. (2016). “Sample Costs to Produce and Harvest Strawberries.” University of Californa Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperative Extension and Agricultural Issues Center. https://coststudyfiles.ucdavis.edu/uploads/cs_public/e7/6d/e76dceb8-f0f54b60-bcb8-76b88d57e272/strawberrycentralcoast-2016-final2-5-1-2017.pdf (accessed 24 January 2020). Brea-Solís, Humberto, Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Emili Grifell-Tatje. (2015). “Business Model Evaluation: Quantifying Walmart’s Sources of Advantage.” Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 9, 12–33. Burawoy, Michael. (1976). “The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labor: Comparative Material from Southern Africa and the United States.” American Journal of Sociology, 81(5): 1050–1087.

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Centro de Análisis Multidisciplinario (CAM). (2015). Reporte de investigación 122. México: Se agudiza la superexplotación del trabajo. Continúa la pérdida del poder adquisitivo del salario de 9.65% con Peña Nieto. México D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Cook, Roberta. (2011). “Fundamental Forces Affecting the U.S. Fresh Berry and Lettuce/Leafy Green Subsectors.” Choices: The Magazine of Food, Farm and Resource Issues, 26(4). https://www.choicesmagazine.org/UserFiles/file/cmsarticle_201.pdf Corpus, Aline. (2015). “Acusa la IP a Gobierno de atraso en San Quintín.” El Norte (Mexico), 17 agosto 2015. Crawford, Leslie. (1997). “New Pioneers Plough Ahead in Mexico: Nafta’s Freer Trade is Promising Fruitful Returns to Farm Investors.” Financial Times, June 25, 1997. Cruz, Jaloma Elena. (2016). El Movimiento Laboral‐Comunitario de Los Jornaleros Del Valle de San Quintín. Acción Colectiva En El Sector Agroexportador Mexicano. Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales ‐ Sede Académica de México. Echánove, Flavia H. (2001). “Working under Contract for the Vegetable Agroindustry in Mexico: A Means of Survival.” Culture and Agriculture, 23: 13–23. Edlin, Aaron S. (2017). “Predatory Pricing: Limiting Brooke Group to Monopolies and Sound Implementation of Price-Cost Comparisons.” Yale Law Journal Forum, 127, 996–1012. Fernandez, Cecilia. (2020). In the bag: Rising discretionary income is expected to support revenue growth. Supermarkets & Grocery Stores in the US, 44511, IBISWorld. Fischer-Daly, Matthew. (2021). “Human Dignity and Power: Worker Struggles against Precarity in U.S. Agribusiness.” Labor Studies Journal46(4): 369–393. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2020). FAOSTAT. http:// www.fao.org/faostat/en/ Food Safety News. (2018). Driscoll’s Using New Technology to Improve Flavor, Food Safety. Chatham: Newstex. García Soto, Salvador. (21 March 2015). “San Quintín: ¿explotación, agitación o narco?” El Universal. Garduño, Everardo, Efraín García and Patricia Morán. 1989. Mixtecos en Baja California: el caso de San Quintín, Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. Goodyear, Dana. (August 14, 2017). “Strawberry Valley.” The New Yorker. (21 November 2019). Guthman, Julie. (2017). “Life Itself Under Contract: Rent-seeking and Biopolitical Devolution Through Partnerships in California’s Strawberry Industry.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(1): 100–117. Hall, Stuart. (1996). "Race, and in "In Baker Jr. Houston A., Diawara Manthia, and Lindeborg Ruth H. Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 305–345. Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI), Gobierno de México. (2016). Anuario estadístico y geográfico de Baja California 2015. Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografia: INEGI. ISBN 978-607-739-667-3. Kearney, Michael (1988). “Mixtec Political Consciousness: From Passive to Active Resistance,” in Rural Revolt in Mexico and U.S. Intervention, edited by Daniel Nugent. San Diego, CA: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies. Kelly, Katrina, Robert Madden, Jean Pierre Emond, and Maria Cecilia do Nascimento Nunes (2019). “A Novel Approach to Determine the Impact Level of Each Step Along the Supply Chain on Strawberry Quality.” Postharvest Biology and Technology, 147: 78–88.

Divided, Demobilized 95 Lara Flores, Sara María. (1996). “Mercado de trabajo rural y organizacion laboral,” in Neoliberalismo y Organización Social en el Campo Mexicano, edited by Hubert Carton de Grammont. México D.F: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 69–111. Lichtenstein, Nelson. (2007a). “Why Working at Walmart is Different.” Connecticut Law Review, 39(4): 1649–1684. Lichtenstein, Nelson (ed.) (2007b). Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism. New York and London: The New Press. Lichtenstein, Nelson. (2008). “How Wal-Mart Fights Unions.” Minnesota Law Review, 92(5): 1462–1501. Lichtenstein, Nelson. (2009). “Sam’s World: How the Obama Era Will Transform WalMart.” New Labor Forum, 18(2): 17–24. 10.4179/NLF.182.0000003 Lynn, Barry C. (2006). “Breaking the Chain.” Harper’s Magazine, 313(1874): 29–36. Martínez Novo, Carmen. (2004). The Making of Vulnerabilities: Indigenous Day Laborers in Mexico’s Neoliberal Agriculture. Identities, 11(2): 215–239. Martínez Novo, Carmen. (2006). Who Defines Indigenous?: Identities, Development, Intellectuals, and the State in Northern Mexico. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Mayer, Frederick W. and Nicola Phillips. (2017). “Outsourcing Governance: States and the Politics of a ‘Global Value Chain World.’” New Political Economy, 22(2): 134–152. Middlebrook, Kevin J. (1995). The Paradox of Revolution: Labor, the State, and Authoritarianism in Mexico. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Mohapatra, Sandeep, Racheal E. Goodhue, Colin A. Carter and James A. Chalfant (2010). “Effects of Forward Sales on Spot Markets: Pre-commitment Sales and Prices for Fresh Strawberries.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 92(1): 152–163. Olson, R. Dennis. (2014). “Lessons from the Food System: Borkian Paradoxes, Plutocracy, and the Rise of Walmart’s Buying Power,” in The Global Food System: Issues and Solutions, edited by William D. Schanbacher. Santa Barbara, CA: ABCCLIO, Inc. Orbach, Barak. (2011, February 28). “The Antitrust Consumer Welfare Paradox.” Journal of Competition Law & Economics, 7: 133–164. Pier, Carol. (2007). Discounting Rights: Wal-Mart’s Violation of US Workers’ Right to Freedom of Association. Vol. 19. Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch. Rijpkema, Willem A., Roberto Rossi, and G.A.J. van der Vorst Jack (2014). “Effective Sourcing Strategies for Perishable Product Supply Chains”. International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 44(6): 494–510. Santos, Alvaro. (2019). “Reimagining Trade Agreements for Workers: Lessons from the USMCA.” https://ssrn.com/abstract=3502815 (accessed 20 January 2021). Samadi, S., A. Ghasemnezhad, and J. Imani. (2017). “Extending Shelf Life of Strawberry Using Some Pre-Storage Treatments”. Acta Horticulturae, 1156: 643–652. Secretaría de Gobernación (SEGOB), Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Comisión para el diálogo con los pueblos indígenas de México. (2017). Notas Informativas sobre el Conflicto de los Jornaleros Agrícolas del Valle de San Quintín, Ensenada, Baja California, Marzo 2015 – Mayo 2017. Servicio de Información Agroalimentaria y Pesquera (SIAP). Gobierno de México. (2020). Datos Abiertos - Estadística de Producción Agrícola. [database] http:// infosiap.siap.gob.mx/gobmx/datosAbiertos_a.php (accessed 19 November 2020).

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Shelman, Mary. (2017). “Driscoll’s: Harnessing Digital Technology to Deliver Delight.” University of California, Davis. California Agribusiness Executive Seminar. Supermarket Business Magazine, 53(10): 2–28. Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network. (2004). Structural Adjustment: The SAPRI Report – The Policy Roots of Economic Crisis, Poverty and Inequality, London: Zed Books. Sun. (August 2, 2015). “Sunday.” SUN (Mexico). https://advance-lexis-com.proxy. library.cornell.edu/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:5GKGW5S1-F09P-Y29K-00000-00&context=1516831 Tijuana Noticias. (23 March 2015). “Respuesta de Jaime Martínez Veloz, acerca de las acusaciones del Senador Ernesto Ruffo Appel.” UN Comtrade. (2021). “United Nations Comtrade Database.” [database] https:// comtrade.un.org/. Vargas, E. (March 23, 2015). “Estiman perdidas superiores a 15 millones de pesos por disturbios.” Ensenada.net. http://www.ensenada.net/noticias/nota.php?id=39308& (accessed 15 April 2020). Velasco, Laura. (2002). El regreso de la comunidad: migración indígena y agentes étnicos. Los mixtecos en la frontera México- Estados Unidos. México: El Colegio de México/El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Velasco, Laura, Christian Zlolniski and Marie-Laure Coubes. (2014). De jornaleros a colonos: residencia, trabajo e identidad en el valle de San Quintín. Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Walmart Inc. (2021). “Annual Reports 1980–2021.” https://stock.walmart.com/ investors/financial-information/annual-reports-and-proxies/default.aspx (accessed 14 April 2021). Weisbrot, Mark, Stephan Lefebvre, and Joseph Sammut (2014). Did NAFTA help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years. Center for Economic and Policy Research. http://cepr.net/documents/nafta‐20‐years‐2014‐02.pdf Wells, Miriam J. (1996). Strawberry Fields. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Zlolniski, Christian. (2010). “Economic Globalization and Changing Capital-Labor Relations in Baja California,” in The Anthropology of Labor Unions, edited by E. Paul Durrenberger and Karaleah S. Reichart. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 157–188. Zlolniski, Christian. (2019). Made in Baja: The Lives of Farmworkers and Growers behind Mexico’s Transnational Agricultural Boom. Oakland: University of California Press.

4

A Fragmented Labor Movement and Persistent Abuses in Strawberry Production in Huelva, Spain

Spain emerged as the world’s largest exporter when international trade of the commodity began in the late 1980s and has maintained the position since. As suggested by key events in the sector’s history (see Chart 4.1), the country’s strawberry sector is the primary production node of a regional international strawberry ICN spanning Europe and northern Africa. Spain’s strawberry export boom followed the country’s accession to the EU and tracked the takeover of the region’s food production, distribution, and consumption by retailers. Production in Huelva, the provincial center of Spanish berry production, has relied on depressed labor costs, sustained substantially with the use of a system of seasonal employment of immigrant workers. Despite decades of growth and sectoral bargaining between national union federations and employers for the sector, as of 2020 wage rates remained below the national minimum, gender-based violence pervasive, job security nonexistent, and workers’ access to healthcare and other essential services limited. The poor conditions of employment in Spain’s strawberry fields primarily derive from the organization of the regional strawberry ICN. Squeezed between oligopolistic input suppliers and oligopsonistic buyers, production companies have maintained profitability through low labor costs created and sustained by employing a structurally disempowered workforce. The Spanish state, with support from the EU and Moroccan state, have subsidized strawberry production companies through two indirect, yet determinative means. The state organized the temporary foreign worker program known as “contratación en origen” (“contracting in origin”) despite high unemployment (more than 20 percent) in the strawberry production region over decades. Additionally, the Spanish government has provided production companies means to avoid certain employment regulations while under-enforcing others. Furthermore, the mobilization of racialized and gendered hierarchies has strengthened employer control over strawberry fieldworkers. Why Spain’s strawberry sector has not been disrupted in order to improve its employment terms and conditions is the focus of this chapter. To advance improvements, fieldworkers would need to contest the complex of economic, political, and social forces used to commodify their labor, DOI: 10.4324/9781003329916-4

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Spain accedes to the EU

EU ends internal fruit tariffs

Harvest use of Moroccan mothers peaks

Chart 4.1 Spain’s strawberry production and exports and sector-expanding events. Source: Author’s compilation of data from FAOSTAT 2021; UN Comtrade 2021; Saverio Caruso 2017; Cabrera and Uclés 2013; FIDH 2012.

yet disconnects between unions and workers have undermined their bargaining power. National union federations established sectoral bargaining and regularly negotiate new agreements with the association representing strawberry production companies, reflecting previously created institutional power. Local unions with militant histories have successfully advocated for more labor inspections by the state. However, sectoral bargaining has codified poverty wages, gender-based violence against workers and wage theft continue in the sector, and unions have led no strikes or otherwise compelled employers and the state to change. Undeveloped dignity processes underlie the absence of worker control. Lack of participation in the unions by women and immigrants who comprise the majority of workers in the strawberry fields and divisions between unions have weakened labor’s capacity to act as a collective and thus achieve improvements. This chapter analyzes bargaining power in strawberry production in Spain as a shadow case, to further illuminate patterns in the international strawberry industry identified in the preceding chapters on production in the United States and Mexico.1 ICN analysis identifies similar bargaining power disadvantages of workers in Spain’s sector. Their employers, unable to pass on higher production costs to suppliers or buyers, are given political and social license to treat workers as commodities, thereby sustaining low labor costs. Meanwhile, workers have not collectively challenged the terms and conditions of employment in the sector. Union operations without sufficient participation by workers in the sector has translated into lack of

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worker bargaining power. Applying the dignity-based model of bargaining power suggests that the absence of recognition of workers’ capacities to participate in the rules to which they are subjected within unions and workplaces has facilitated the persistence of poor conditions. As a movement, labor has not countered managerial control over workers that primarily benefits the lead firms of the European strawberry ICN.

Learning sources Toward understanding bargaining power in Spain’s strawberry sector, I asked workers, union activists, and company managers in 2020 and 2021. While unable to directly observe their activities and interview them in-person due to travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in these years, I communicated remotely and relied more on publicly available data. I interviewed one fieldworker, five union leaders, and four scholars who have studied Spain’s strawberry sector. Managers, associations representing strawberry production companies, and government officials did not respond to interview invitations. Databases on production and exports, prior research, reports by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and other leading human rights organizations, and the extensive media coverage of the sector further informed this chapter.

Integration of Spain’s production into a regional strawberry ICN The position of Spain’s strawberry sector as the world’s largest source of exports and primary production node of Europe’s strawberry ICN was historically co-constituted by national and regional development projects of the EU, Spain, and Morocco, retail capture of contemporary food ICNs, and deliberate social construction of a gendered, racialized ideal type of labor. As displayed in Chart 4.1, Spain’s strawberry sector began in the 1970s—then with small producers exploiting primarily family labor for local sales. The sector began supplying Europe after Spain’s accession to the EU established market access, and exports accelerated with final removal of tariffs for EU trade of berries. With markets opened, strawberry production in Spain accelerated, fueled by a highly controlled labor supply, sustained since around 2000 by stereotyping mothers from Morocco as the ideal fieldworker for the ICN and hiring them through the immigrant worker visa program known as “contracting in origin” (contratación en origen). Applying ICN analysis, this section relates the interdependent processes of the formation of the regional international commodity network and the commodification of labor employed in Spain’s strawberry fields. While the geography and climate of the Spanish province of Huelva provide naturally appropriate conditions for strawberry cultivation, economic, political, and social policies determined the province’s emergence as

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the source of much of Europe’s strawberries. Huelva is situated along Spain’s southwestern Atlantic coastline, providing the modulating effects of ocean air, temperate winters, and sandy soils in which in which strawberry plants thrive. Companies in the province account for about 90 percent of strawberries produced in Spain. On average, 78 percent of the country’s strawberry production was exported each year between 1989 and 2020 (FAOStat; UN Comtrade). Approximately one-third of the berries went to Germany during this period (UN Comtrade). Transportation to European markets, for example, Germany, is easier by truck from Spain by truck than by airplane from Egypt, the world’s fourth-largest strawberry exporter, creating an advantage for Spanish production in the regional ICN dominated by German retailers. Organization of land for strawberry production in Huelva reflects shifting strategies of national states. Huelva is a province in Andalusia, contemporarily an autonomous region of Spain and historically a predecessor of the Spanish state. In Andalusia, the turn toward capitalist property rights was spearheaded by the military defeat of the Emirate of Granada in 1492 by the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, whose unification led to the contemporary Spanish state (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1977: 124). The establishment of Spain also hardened the division of the European from the African Mediterranean, contributing to continual racializing projects (Robinson 2000: Ch. 2, 5, pp. 128–130), which have persisted during the contemporary strawberry boom. Agriculture in Andalusia remained primarily a local system for centuries. The organization of agribusiness accelerated when the administration of General Francisco Franco overthrew the Second Spanish Republic, reversed its agrarian reform, and (re)allocated most land to latifundistas (large landowners). The Franco regime (1939–1975) proceeded to support the construction of more than 600 dams between 1955 and 1970, most with financing facilitated by the US government (Swyngedouw 2007). Following the Franco government’s design, the dams provided electricity for industry in northern Spain and irrigation for agriculture in Andalusia. Latifundistas gained land holdings and subsidized irrigation. While the irrigation system was initially used for grain production, it laid the infrastructure for the subsequent emergence of the strawberry sector. Since the 1970s, land concentration and state subsidization of food production in Spain have continued under a regional, export-oriented, and financialized development approach. Public financing, primarily from the national bank Credit Agricole, declined in the wake of the 1970s international financial crisis and pressures for budgetary austerity from the emerging EU (Marsden and Whatmore 1994: 118). International, private financial firms, led by Rabobank of the Netherlands, grew into primary creditors of agribusiness in Spain and Europe (Ibid). Spain’s accession to the EU and the phase-out of tariffs on strawberry trade throughout the EU, both in 1986, oriented production toward exports. These policies

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established important conditions for the emergence of a European strawberry ICN with production concentrated in Spain. Since the 1990s, retailers have increasingly taken over the direction and control of food production, circulation, and consumption in Europe. As Corrado et al. (2016: 1–24) document, with retailers in the position of lead firms, production consolidated, specialized intensively in fruits like strawberries, and accelerated use of greenhouses, chemicals, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). These trends tightened lead firms’ control over flows of labor, products, and capital, supporting their profitability. Within Europe’s strawberry ICN, land, capital, and low-cost labor has been organized around the Mediterranean, especially in Huelva, to supply Europe’s leading retailers, particularly in Germany, with profitable strawberries. As in other countries around the Mediterranean, strawberry producers in Huelva have consolidated. Average farm size increased 56 percent (from 15.4 to 24 hectares) in Spain between 1990 and 2010 (Corrado et al. 2016: 9). Fruits and vegetables grew to account for 28 percent of the country’s agricultural production by the end of the 2010s (Camanzi et al. 2011: 330). Spain’s strawberry production has been managed predominately by hundreds of companies leasing land from large landowners (Reigada Olaizola 2012, 2013). Most market berries through production organizations (POs), making use of financial supports for POs established in a 2007 reform of the EU’s Common Market Organization to mitigate the bargaining power imbalance between small production companies and the larger companies providing inputs and leading sales of the final product (Arcadia 2019). In Spain, POs cover 71 percent of fruit and vegetable production, and primarily provide technical assistance, marketing, storage, packaging, and transportation services (Camanzi et al. 2011). Some POs operate as cooperatives, others as business associations. The cooperative Sociedad Cooperativa Andaluza Santa María de la Rábida (CORA) was established in 1982, markets its products under the brand name Fresón de Palos, and in 2020 reported $182 million in sales, 154 million pounds of annual fruit production, 1,200 hectares, 5,000 workers, and 150 members (Orbis n.d.; Fréson de Palos 2021). The cooperative Cuna de Platero began in 1988 and in 2020 reported $120 million in sales, 101 million pounds (46,000 tons) of annual production, 600 hectares, and an undisclosed number of workers and members (Orbis n.d.; Cuna de Platero 2021). According to their reporting, the two firms account for more than 40 percent of Spain’s strawberry production. While the PO system is purportedly designed to increase capital in production, the production companies of Huelva are nevertheless buyers of inputs from oligopolistic suppliers and sellers to oligopsonistic buyers. Most production companies are tenants of large landowners (Reigada Olaizola 2012). While initially purchasing strawberry cultivars patented by the University of California (Reigada-Olaizola 2011), increasingly Huelva’s production companies have turned to Planasa. The University of California

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has owned 14 percent of strawberry cultivar patents, and Planasa nearly 7 percent, making the two the second and fourth leading owners of strawberry patents.2 Since 2017, Planasa has been owned by the private equity firm Cinven and has reported double-digit growth (Maxwell 2021). More than 80 percent of strawberries produced in Spain are exported (FAOStat; UN Comtrade). The lead firms of the strawberry ICNs to which Huelva producers are suppliers are oligopolistic retailers. Across Europe and countries around the Mediterranean, “large retailers’ share of the food market grew” from the late 1990s into the first decades of the 21st century (Corrado et al. 2016; OECD 2013). Within Spain, supermarkets and “bigbox” retailers have accounted for more than 70 percent of food sales since the mid-2000s (ANGED 2021: 41), led by Mercadona, Carrefour, Eroski, Auchan, and Día (Díaz-Giménez 2012). For exported strawberries (most production in Spain), the lead firms are the dominant retailers in the main destinations. In Germany, which imported one-third of strawberry exports from Spain in the last decade (UN Comtrade), Aldi and Lidl accounted for more than 40 percent of food sales during this period (O’Brady 2021). To put into perspective, the estimated $650 million value of the entire strawberry sector of Spain is 0.5 percent the annual revenue of Aldi’s parent company, Schwartz Group (Alami 2019; Orbis n.d.). The price-taking position of strawberry production companies in Huelva in European food ICNs implies limited flows of capital through production, where labor accounts for a large share of operating costs. The production companies tend to not own their land, purchase cultivars from a few companies, and buy other inputs from much larger companies.3 They have little capacity to cover higher labor costs by reducing input costs, that is, their fixed capital supplies are relatively elastic. On the other side, they sell the vast majority of strawberries to a small number of retailers that are among the largest worldwide, meaning the suppliers have little capacity to increase prices. Thus, employers in Spain’s strawberry sector have a peaked interest in limiting costs with low-cost, replaceable labor. From their subordinate market position in the European ICN, strawberry production companies of Huelva have demanded support from the Spanish government and the EU. For example, the production companies’ lead association, the Asociación Agraria Jóvenes Agricultores de Huelva (Agrarian Association of Young Agriculturalists, ASAJA), blocked a highway between Huelva and Sevilla, Andalusia’s largest city, to demand financial support in March 2020. At the event, the association’s spokesperson proclaimed, “the ridiculous prices” and “the very high and unjust costs,” “unfair competition,” and the “politics that have supported cohesion and competition in European agriculture” “weigh on us and suffocate us” (Fresh Plaza 2020). The action underscored the sector’s market dynamics at a time of increasing competition. A strawberry cooperative manager reported in 2011, “Before, ten or 15 years ago, everyone would earn money … the workforce did not have the costs that is has now;

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second, there was not so much strawberry and, therefore, the sector was more competitive” (quoted in Reigada-Olaizola 2011: 27–28). Prior to ASAJA’s protest in 2020, researchers documented the falling margins and increasing preoccupation with prices and costs in Huelva’s strawberry sector (Vega Jiménez and Machado 2003: 155). Competition includes exports to the EU from Egypt, Greece, Morocco, and Turkey, which replaced Italy as Europe’s other leading suppliers since the mid-2000s (UN Comtrade). Furthermore, the European Common Agricultural Policy supports grain, dairy, and meat sectors more than the fruit and vegetable sectors, which are concentrated around the Mediterranean (Corrado et al. 2016). In response to pleas for political support, the national state and regional bloc have primarily provided a reliably low-cost supply of labor to strawberry production companies in Spain.

The organization of conditions for highly commodified labor power underpinning the European strawberry ICN In his study of migrant labor employed in South Africa and the United States, Michael Burawoy (1976) emphasized the combined use of political and social institutions to differentiate workers and externalize costs of labor reproduction, thereby increasing exploitation of their labor and lowering production costs. The dynamic is remarkably similar in Spain’s strawberry sector. As price takers from input suppliers and output buyers, with associational power but national and supra-national state actors not able or willing to mitigate power imbalances between companies in the ICNs, production companies in Huelva have maintained their competitiveness and growth through their ability to super-exploit labor. Neocolonial othering of Spain’s southern neighbors, enclosures driven by international finance, patriarchal expectations of women’s reproductive labor, and criminalization of immigrants by “fortress Europe”4 have combined to deliver low-cost labor to production companies in Huelva. Strawberry production in Huelva began in the 1970s and 1980s with a patriarchal organization of labor. Predominantly male production managers used the labor of family members and hired workers who migrated seasonally within Spain (Reigada Olaizola 2012, 2013). Many of the freseros, the strawberry production managers, came from the working class, having previously worked in agriculture, construction, and/or fishing (Reigada Olaizola 2011). In her experience of the trend, a worker named María began working as a migrant agricultural worker in 1988 at age 16, alongside her parents, their boss and his wife, whose children to-date worked alongside and employed María in 2020.5 As the strawberry sector integrated into European ICNs with rising competitors, including Morocco—Spain’s neighbor across the Gibraltar strait where wage rates are a fraction of those in Spain (Martin 2016:27), employers sought more control over labor costs.

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Employers in Huelva did not lack workers or flexible employment rights. The unemployment rate averaged 23.8 percent in their region, Andalusia, between 2002 and 2021.6 Labor market policies provided additional flexibility to employers. Between 2000 and 2015, Spain increased the threshold for agricultural workers to receive unemployment benefits from 35 to 270 days of work in agriculture (Martin 2016:26–27), sharpening workers’ dependencies on wage work. Furthermore, Spain’s legal regime has allowed for temporary, temporary discontinuous, or permanent continuous employment contracts. In Andalusian agriculture, 85 percent of contracts are the temporary modality, despite more than 90 percent of contracts extending longer than one month and increasingly more precise scheduling of harvest seasons (CC.OO. and UPM 2018: 51). In parallel, the state-led curation of a regional labor market has increased the sustainability of supplies of low-cost labor to the strawberry sector. Spain’s contemporary immigration regime has supported the strawberry production companies by providing systemically controlled labor. The system is a regional project and underpins the regional ICNs. Through EU accession, the government of Spain and the EU tightened control over certain human movement into and out of Spain (see Achón Rodríguez 2018). Further institutionalizing the divide between European and “other,” EU membership involved the two-fold opening of EU member state borders to their citizens and tighter closing of the EU regional border to nationals of other countries, especially from the African, Asian, and South American continents (Walia 2021: Ch. 6). While a phenomenon with a long history, European efforts to differentiate themselves from others to support economic growth has, once again, sharpened during the decades of the organization of the European strawberry ICN (Agrela 2002; Walia 2021). Historically, people living in Andalusia and Morocco have shared political borders as much as they have stood on opposite sides, a history that Spain’s EU accession helped to push out of popular imagination (Suárez-Navas 2006). In mid-20th century, northern European countries recruited Spanish citizens under bilateral immigration/labor supply programs, for example, between Spain and Germany begun in 1960, and France in 1956. Through the 1980s, Moroccan immigrants entered Spain on their own and worked in the strawberry harvests alongside Spanish citizens (Hellio 2016). Since the enactment of current immigration laws by Spain, especially around EU accession in the 1990s, citizens of Spain have identified more and more as white and increasingly attributed negative behaviors, such as criminality, to citizens of Morocco and other North African countries (Suárez-Navas 2006; Calavita 2010). This process of racialization has contributed to economic extraction from labor, including of value created by strawberry field workers in support of the sector’s growth (Hellio and Nieto 2017).7 Meanwhile, national states on just the other side of the EU border were among those most intensively restructuring their societies under programs

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designed and overseen by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that emphasized liberalizing national accounts, privatization, austerity, and shifting economic activities toward exports. In the 1980s and 1990s, the government of Morocco implemented seven such IMF-led structural adjustment programs, which increased national income by increasing exports but did not employ the increased supplies of labor that resulted from enclosures, dispossession of rural agricultural communities, and land concentration (Currie and Harrison 1997; Harrigan and El-Said 2010). The predictable outcomes included high unemployment (10 percent overall, 15 percent for women, and 25 percent for youth) and informality (50–60 percent of people officially employed working in the informal sector) in Morocco during the decades that followed (ILO 2013; IMF 2017; Danish Trade Union Council 2015).8 Consonant with the neoliberal order of the era, the country’s minimum wage rate has hovered at the poverty line and, even at such a low level, has not been generally enforced.9 In the context created by regional and national state policies on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, work in Spain’s agriculture industry could increase income up to six times for women from Morocco in the 2010s (Martin 2016: 28). It is therefore unsurprising that annual immigration into Spain increased nearly six-fold, from 924,000 in 2000 to 5.4 million in 2010 (Arango 2013). Crucially, however, people entering Spain from its African neighbors have lacked protections of their mobility, employment, and political rights that citizens of EU member states maintain on the same journey.10 Tightening regulation of the movement of non-European people into the EU has intensified labor stratification to the benefit of Spanish employers and the European strawberry ICN.

The contracting in origin scheme as the mechanism for sustaining low-cost labor supplies The “contratación en origen” (contracting-in-origin) programs have provided the mechanism through which the state underwrote the suppression of labor costs in Spain’s strawberry sector. In 2000, the Spanish government enacted a “Law on Foreigners” that established the legality of employers to contract workers from outside the EU for limited durations, after which the workers’ residence and work permits would expire (Hellio and Nieto 2017). Tinged with the residues of modern European othering of peoples from outside for labor, Spanish colonial occupation in Morocco, and patriarchally gendered divisions of labor, the programs derived from the law transformed legacies and norms into labor market policies. Following Spain’s Law on Foreigners, contracting-in-origin programs gained support from employers, governments, and the EU. In 2000, the Huelva-based company Fredesloc began recruiting Moroccan workers to harvest its strawberries in Spain. The municipality of Cartaya in Huelva and L’Agence Nationale de Promotion de l’Emploi et des Compétences

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(National Employment and Training Agency, ANAPEC) of the Moroccan state collaborated to recruit Moroccan workers for Spain’s harvest as well. With a €1.5 million grant from the EU, ANAPEC and Cartaya continued the scheme between 2005 and 2008. With a €5 million European Commission grant to ANAPEC, the program was replaced by the Foundation for Foreign Workers in Huelva (FUTEH). Under the iterations of the contracting-in-origin programs, employment responsibilities are shared. In the FUTEH program, ANAPEC, Cartaya, multiple employers’ associations, the trade unions Comisiones Obreras (Workers Commissions, CC.OO.) and Unión General de Trabajadores (General Workers Union, UGT), and the NGO Consorcio de Entidades para la Acción Integral con Migrantes (Consortium for the Integration of Migrants, CEPAIM) participate (FIDH 2012: 24). The Moroccan government agency ANAPEC manages the recruitment process and covers some costs. Contracts stipulate three-to-six-month fixed-term durations; pay rates; hours; overtime pay rates; one day off per week; and provision of transportation; accommodations with adequate water, electricity, and sanitation; and medical insurance to the workers hired under them (FIDH 2012: 12, 20–21). Under the program, the CC.OO. and UGT are permitted to visit accommodations provided by employers for workers (Ibid). The employers using the program are also required to pay for the workers’ transportation home if they terminate a contract within a 15-day trial period. Beyond that, a worker discharged would be on the hook to travel home and otherwise considered by the state to be illegally residing in Spain. Officials and managers explained how immigration laws empower employers to control workers through the contracting-in-origin programs. A former employer and then official with the Cartaya Office for Foreign and Seasonal Workers explained the advantage for employers: A contracted labourer from a non-EU source can only work in Huelva while the Romanian goes where she wants. That’s why and how businesses gradually convert their labour. [I] run such a business: I had Romanians, who are EU citizens, coming to work here. In the days following, there might be work elsewhere, in a bar for instance, and she leaves me. Not the Moroccan one, she has to work in agriculture. (quoted in Hellio 2011: 143) The employers maintain substantial control over the movement of workers hired under the programs. Employers finance buses to transport the immigrant workers from Tarifa, the Spanish port of entry from Morocco, require bus drivers to avoid stopping for fear of workers dispersing, and provide Spanish authorities with the workers’ personal information to ensure they are refused legal status should they leave for alternative livelihood activities (Hellio and Nieto 2017: 35). Employers also provide accommodations on or near their production facilities, isolated from

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populated communities, and some retain passports, withhold pay until the end the contracts, and tell the workers that previous “fugitives” returned because of lack of better alternatives (Ibid). According to an ANAPEC official, the workers are bound to the employer with their contract, and only an employer can arrange with the government authorities to transfer workers to another employer (Hellio 2016). Another strawberry production manager explained, Thanks to the contracts in origin, everything is functioning. If right now all the foreigners that are here in Palos had their papers, the campaign would end already, because then my women would say, “Javier, here there is little fruit, and I’m going to go to Lérida to the oranges, or to Murcia to the tomatoes …” As they have their papers, you cannot stop them. What do you do? You have to take up the strawberry. On the other hand, to have a contract in origin, they know that until the boss says, “The campaign is over,” they cannot leave. That is the advantage. (quoted in Reigada Olaizola 2013: 215) An ANAPEC official summarized, “The farmer … remains relaxed. He knows, every year when he needs women, he will get them. We will take care of his labour supply” (quoted in Hellio 2011). In this sense, immigration policy has tightened governmental alignment with employers’ interests in labor control. As the managers’ and official’s comments indicate, racialism and patriarchy are the unstated yet omnipresent components of the contracting-inorigin programs that support its creation and reproduction of a highly commodified labor supply. During the early years of the programs, employers hired women from eastern European countries, especially Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria (Martin 2016). However, through EU accession by Poland in 2004 and Romania and Bulgaria in 2007, the advantage of their citizens to employers in Spain declined, because they could legally work and reside in Spain and other EU member states. Under the first two programs, many recruits dispersed throughout the EU upon entry into Spain, reportedly 90 percent of those hired through the ANAPEC-Cartaya program (Hellio 2011: 145). Employers determined that mobility made the Eastern European women too demanding and began to attribute an innate submissiveness to women from Morocco (FIDH 2012: 13). Together with government agencies, employers added criteria to the contracting-in-origin programs, to hire women from rural areas of Morocco between the ages of 18 and 45 who are married, widowed, or divorced and have children under age 14 (FIDH 2012: 26). A male manager of strawberry production in Huelva articulated the patriarchal logic underpinning the program’s criteria: Why women and not men? Well, it’s very simple. First, the women have more endurance than the men. The woman has more capacity to

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suffer than a man. The woman is more docile than a man. The woman is more selective than a man … The women are more serious; the men are more mischievous than them. Also, the women are finer. (quoted in Reigada Olaizola 2013) Another Huelva employer explained the exploitative use of reproductive labor norms: Normally, the woman has more familiar ties than the man. The woman is more likely to return than the man; and that also helps so that the women are selected. I usually ask if she is married, if she has children; because that is what gives me the most guarantees that she is not going to run away, that she is going to be here, that she is going to return, that next year we can get her. It’s the opposite with young women, single, without commitments or anything. (quoted in Reigada Olaizola 2013) Employment of workers selected for their approximation to the idealized stereotype “creates a controllable, flexible, discardable workforce” (Hellio and Nieto 2017). The addition of criteria to the contracting-in-origin programs based on the attribution of obedience to working mothers functioned for employers. While reports differ, the share of the workforce for Huelva’s strawberry harvest comprised by Moroccan mothers may have risen as high as 85 percent in 2010 and was approximately 26–27 percent in 2019 and 2020 (FIDH 2012: 20; Cabanillas 2019; Altamira and Badia 2020a; Interviews with the author). An estimated 97 percent of recruited workers were returned home after the harvest by 2009 (FIDH 2012: 20–21). Furthermore, most women hired through the programs have been from Morocco’s Gharb region, where, following enclosures, many experienced waged work in the wheat, barley, and durum harvests (Reigada Olaizola 2013: 215). As Hellio and Nieto (2017: 33–34) observe, “The adequacy of the laborers for the job … tends to be justified through a naturalization of feminine capacities and/or a reification of the Moroccan culture, perceived as behind and patriarchal by some Spanish employers.” Indicating employer’s use of the program to gain control over labor costs by sustaining a surplus supply, a study for the International Labour Organization (ILO) reported that the main concern of workers in contracting-in-origin programs was insufficient work, creating competition between workers (Martin 2016). The contracting-in-origin programs have not provided all workers employed in Spain’s strawberry sector; they have contributed to a fractured labor market, further increasing employer discretion over terms and conditions of work. As much as half of harvest workers reside in Spain’s Andalusia region, including citizens and immigrants from African countries who have obtained residency permits after years working in Spain. Approximately another 23 percent are from Romania and Bulgaria. While all of these groups have legal rights to move locations and employers, socially constructed

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hierarchies differentiate them. The non-European, male contingent comprises primarily immigrants from African countries, whose ostracization in Spanish society is illustrated by their unemployment—about one in six Moroccans in Spain had never found employment as of 2016 (Martin 2016: 26)—and living arrangements, in shantytowns regularly disrupted by authorities. For example, in June 2021, police removed solar panels installed for phone charging and light at a camp of predominantly workers of African origins, by the Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores (Andalusian Workers Union, SAT) (La Mar de Onuba 2021). Employers in Spain have paid an estimated 30 percent lower wage rates to immigrants from outside the EU than citizens (Martin 2016: 26). The strawberry workforce is also geographically and legally separated. Citizens live in towns and cities; immigrants with residency permits live in remote shantytowns; and immigrant workers under contracting-in-origin programs reside on or near the employer’s property. Furthermore, the seasonal workers have fewer rights under Spain’s labor relations system. Workers hired for less than six months, as in the strawberry sector, are ineligible for election to union positions. Emboldened by the surplus and differentiated labor supply, employers can pit groups against each other and easily blacklist agitators—militating against collective action by workers. As beneficiaries, the employers and governments directly involved in the organization of the labor supply for Spain’s strawberry sector have strong interests in sustaining it and thus reproducing the conditions that underpin it. For the Moroccan government, the contracting-in-origin program provides a release, an income source for tens of thousands of rural women who otherwise might direct their energy toward internal reforms. For the Spanish government, strengthening employers supports a successful export sector for an economy that has struggled to establish competitive contemporary industries, and supports social control in a region where militant agrarian reform movements pressed for local autonomy in the decades prior to the strawberry boom. Retailers in Europe gain suppliers able to meet their prices for strawberries. Production companies in Huelva gain control over their labor costs, subsidizing their competitiveness and dominance of supplies to European retail markets. As lessees from concentrated landowners, input purchasers from oligopolistic suppliers, sellers to oligopsonistic retailers, and dependents on sufficient manual labor at the precise time of the harvest, production companies maintain profitability by employing the labor power of workers in a flooded labor market differentiated by legal mobility rights and normalized gender and racial hierarchies. In contrast to the beneficiaries, workers—whether citizens, resident immigrants, or workers contracted-in-origin—have been systemically positioned to endure substantial exploitation in exchange for minimal income. Under the economic pressures of the strawberry ICN for low-cost production and the sociopolitical pressures of the surplus and differentiated labor supply created to sustain production companies’ competitiveness in

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the ICN, employment regulations have done little to change persistently poor working conditions in Spain’s strawberry fields.

“Super exploitation is the engine of the sector”: conditions of work in Spain’s strawberry sector Terms and conditions of employment in Spain’s strawberry sector are formally regulated by national laws and a sectoral agreement negotiated by unions and employers. Actually reported conditions indicate lack of enforcement of laws and the sectoral agreement. Workers and worker advocates have reported poor conditions in the sector for decades. Summarizing, a member of SAT said, “Super exploitation is the engine of the sector.” The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH 2012: 23) reported, “Abuse of workers’ rights continues to be widespread on farms in relation to all categories of seasonal worker.” Gender-based violence is reportedly widespread. Disturbingly, public health records have shown an annual peak in abortions during the strawberry harvest, almost all by immigrant women (Altamira and Badia 2020a). A Moroccan woman hired under the contracting-in-origin program reported, “They told us that it was not necessary to work in the fields, that we could go with men for money … some accepted the money, others ended up pregnant and had abortions” (Altamira and Badia 2020a). Paid wages tend to be below the national minimum wage rate. The sectoral agreement sets wage rates below the national minimum rate, and the sectoral rate tends to be paid when workers are employed full days but not partial days, which are typical given the variability in fruit levels and availability of surplus labor. In comparison to the monthly wage rates set nationally (€1,108) and in the sectoral agreement (€1,071), interviewed local residents estimated that monthly housing and food costs alone to add up to €1,000. Employers also reportedly demand intense labor and disregard workers’ basic needs. One worker reported being told by a manager, “If you don’t work fast, I will send you back to Morocco” (quoted in Altamira and Badia 2020a). Quotas are illegal and denied by employers, yet the veteran worker María reported that employers require workers to wear electronic chips to track the number of strawberry boxes they fill each day and condition employment on increasing productivity.11 By exploiting a legal loophole, employers under-report and contribute insufficiently to the national social security system, reducing workers’ access to health care, pensions, and other services. For employing immigrants, regulations also stipulate that workers have access to healthcare, yet many are denied (Women’s Link Worldwide 2019). In 2019, a Moroccan woman named Drissiya had a stroke; when workers insisted on medical attention, the employer took her to a clinic that provided sleeping pills; and the woman lost her capacity to walk and talk (Altamira and Badia 2020b).

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For the many immigrant workers employed in the sector, squalid and controlled living conditions exacerbate poor treatment at work. The contracting-in-origin program requires participating employers to provide safe and hygienic housing with appropriate utilities such as water and electricity, and some do, but many do not. Some employers illegally charge workers for necessities, including water, electricity, and clothing for work (FIDH 2012: 27). Employers using the contracting-in-origin program also restrict workers’ movement from and visitors’ access to their property, reducing the possibility of workers developing relationships with surrounding communities. While living outside of employers’ property offers more freedom of movement to other immigrant workers, particularly those with legal residence and work status, their ostracization as surplus, racialized labor manifests in isolated living without many basics. An activist with the Colectivo de Trabajadores Africanos (African Workers Collective, CTA) reported that approximately 5,000 immigrant workers from African countries live in 49 “slum settlements … huts made of pallets and plastic sheeting. Five to seven people live in a confined space. You have no water and no electricity … I’m tired of it” (quoted in Wandler 2020). Following a visit to workers’ camps, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights reported: In Huelva, workers are living in a migrant settlement in conditions that rival the worst the Special Rapporteur has seen anywhere in the world. They are kilometres away from water and live without adequate sanitation or legal access to electricity. Many have lived there for years and can afford to pay rent but said that no one would accept them as tenants. They are earning as little as 30 euros per day and have almost no access to any form of government support. One person said, “When there’s work, Spain needs migrants, but no one is interested in our living conditions. According to civil society, 2,300–2,500 people live in similar conditions during the strawberry season.” (UNHRC 2020)

Disparities between employment standards and practices in Spain’s strawberry sector Institutionalized means to avoid employment regulations and weak union collective bargaining have contributed to the poor terms and conditions of employment in Spain’s strawberry sector. Employers have been able to effectively evade limits on their discretion imposed through the state and directly by workers. The national Labor Code (Guía Laboral) stipulates a maximum 40-hour workweek, minimum wage, overtime payrates or rest compensation, and employer contributions to the social security system, through which workers access healthcare, pensions, and other social services. However, a 1977 “Special Agricultural Regimen” created the “effective workday”

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(jornada real), a loophole which allows employers to under-report and thus under-contribute to the social security system. Initially based on the notion that employers needed time to travel and physically present records, the arrangement has meant, to date, that employers can, for example, contribute for 15 of 25 days worked by someone during the reporting period. Indicating the widespread avoidance of social security contributions, a unionist with the UGT pointed out, “The Social Security Ministry’s public records of the workdays reported by employers show no change in the same years that the Agricultural Ministry reports major increases in exports.” The practice implies greater employer capture of value created by workers. Spain’s labor laws also provide support for employer flexibility regarding contracting. The law recognizes verbal contracts, interprets illegally written contracts as permanent, and empowers labor inspectors to require an employer to convert contracts to permanent status. But inspections are uncommon (FIDH 2012: 18–19). In the strawberry sector, extensive use of the temporary contract modality means that most workers can be fired without cause, and they have no right to appeal the cause of their dismissal (Jimeno et al. 2020). For specific disputes, labor courts and alternative-dispute-resolution systems provide channels to remediate employment grievances but are risky options for workers with precarious employment. The Extrajudicial System of Labor Conflict Resolution of Andalusia provides conciliation, mediation, and arbitration services in Huelva and throughout the autonomous region. Regardless of citizen status, workers can appeal to courts to uphold their rights, and immigrants who are victims of gender-based violence can apply for residential and work permits. However, the slow pace of the labor courts is particularly problematic for seasonally employed workers. As importantly, the judicial and extrajudicial channels are complaint-based systems, disincentivizing use by workers who are dependent on wages from employers can readily replace them, the situation of most workers in the strawberry sector. Under-enforcement of applicable employment regulations has reportedly also increased employers’ discretion over working conditions in the strawberry sector. A 2012 assessment concluded, “In the opinion of all trade-union representatives who met with the mission, labour inspections in the agricultural sector are insufficient, if they exist at all” (FIDH 2012: 23). María, the aforementioned worker with decades of experience, explained that she has avoided work at all but one company, because its management complies with the laws. A unionist with SAT said of the general situation in the sector, “when there’s an inspection, the workers all know, and the owners know; it’s a farse. We’ve demanded a system of inspections, and they haven’t done it.” Furthermore, sectoral collective bargaining has not even maintained legally established minimum terms and conditions of employment. While sectoral bargaining generally provides a strategic advantage to workers—by

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avoiding a situation in which employers outside of collective bargaining effectively set a wage ceiling, it is not having such an impact in Spain’s strawberry sector. The Convenio Colectivo del Campo de la Provincia de Huelva (Collective Agreement for the Fields of the Province of Huelva)12 regulates employment in Huelva’s strawberry sector. The CC.OO. negotiated the sectoral agreement with the employer association ASAJA in 2018. It covers all workers employed in agriculture in Huelva and establishes a maximum of 39 hours per week, 75 percent premium pay for overtime hours, hiring preference for workers with experience, a prohibition of employing workers under age 16, a protocol for the prevention of and response to sexual assault, and a €41.20 daily wage rate for strawberry harvesting. Notably, the agreement is silent on occupational safety and health, and the wage rate is set below the national daily rate of €46.13 In practice, a SAT member reported that the agreement is not enforced: They don’t comply with the Agreement. They don’t pay the wage rates; there have been raises in the Agreement, but they don’t pay them. They don’t pay the overtime rates. The companies make the formal thing, but then they don’t follow it. They charge for equipment, for housing. There are companies that require overtime, and that don’t pay the rate for work on Sundays. They have them work for 10–12 hours, when the maximum under the Agreement is 9. The Agreement is systematically violated.

Fragmented labor and workers’ lack of leverage in Spain’s strawberry sector Employers can avoid regulation under the sectoral agreement because of workers’ evident lack of leverage. To create state and employer interests in negotiating in good faith,14 workers need to demonstrate capacity to disrupt capital accumulation in the sector, which requires associational power. While recent history of Andalusia includes radical worker movements, a decline in collective action in the region has coincided with the strawberry boom. Meanwhile, the national unions negotiating agreements covering the sector are evidently disconnected from workers in it. Apart from unions, emergent worker collectives and allies are separately advocating for workers in the strawberry fields by addressing specific instances of abuses. Such fragmentation of the labor movement has limited efforts to improve working conditions in the sector. Radical unions have been active in Andalusia for several decades, maintain some political influence, yet have not built sufficient bargaining power to lead workers to collectively pressure for improvements in the strawberry sector. The anarcho-syndicalist union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labor, CNT) refused participation in the national union delegate election system and focused on direct action,

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including leading a strike of olive workers outside of Andalusia’s largest city, Seville, in the late 1970s (Roca Martínez 2014). A breakaway group from the CNT formed the Confederación General de Trabajo (General Confederation of Labor, CGT) in the late 1980s and organized 80,000 members, primarily in urban areas of Andalusia. With a communist, Andalusian nationalist orientation, the Sindicato de Obreros del Campo (Union of Field Laborers, SOC) emerged during Spain’s transition to representative-democratic government and focused initially on agrarian reform. At times, the unions collaborated, including a 40-day strike led by SOC, CNT, and CC.OO that halted all agriculture in the province of Seville in the early 1990s, but such mass collective action has been absent in the strawberry sector. The evolution of the SOC-SAT has coincided with the strawberry sector’s growth. The SOC gained a reputation for prioritizing gender equity, reduced working hours, and state subsidies for agriculture, and for direct action, including occupations of farms, city halls, and highways. Indicative, SOC led 1,654 documented direct actions during a five-year period in the 1980s (Roca Martínez 2014). Authorities regularly arrested and charged SOC leaders involved. In further response to the SOC push for agrarian reform, the Andalusian government created the Plan de Empleo Rural (Rural Employment Plan, PER), which contributed to demobilization of the movement for agrarian reform. The PER created alternatives for Andalusian workers by providing a subsidy to unemployed persons, public administration jobs, and technical training, and the government enlisted the SOC to administer it. In 2007, the SOC changed names to the SAT to engage workers in the growing services sectors. While the SAT has fewer resources than the national unions, it operates with member dues and donations and has reported approximately 20,000 members in recent years (Roca Martínez 2014; Interviews by the author). The SAT continues to lead public demonstrations throughout Andalusia, visit workers—although some employers refuse access, distribute information to workers on their legal rights, file complaints on behalf of workers, provide humanitarian assistance to workers in their camps, and lobby the government to increase inspections. The union has also recently led strikes at agribusiness processing and warehouse facilities, yet it has not led collective actions in the strawberry sector. A SAT representative said, “There are no strikes in Huelva. You can’t, because the workers are too afraid to lose the income from the work.” In parallel, the national unions that formally represent workers in the strawberry sector have institutionalized state support and reportedly operate at a distance from the workers. In accordance with the national labor relations system, the union federations CC.OO. and UGT have the rights to represent workers in negotiations of the terms and conditions of their work in the strawberry fields. Under Spain’s system, unions gain the right to sign binding collective agreements with employers by winning

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10 percent of delegates at the national level or 15 percent at the regional or autonomous community level. The CC.OO. and UGT are the only unions that fulfil the national-level requirements, and unions in Basque Country and Galicia are the only ones that fulfil the regional requirements in their respective regions (Köhler 2018a: 729). By meeting the “super representation” thresholds, the CC.OO. and UGT also receive funding from the state and access to social dialogue forums on public policy with the state and employers (Roca Martínez 2014). Generally, observers of this system in practice have highlighted a tendency of low union membership and few negotiated agreements (Rojo Torrecilla 1990; Köhler 2008b). In the strawberry sector, union representation is institutionalized and limited. The law requires a worker to be employed more than six months to be eligible for union delegate and committee elections, excluding most of the sector’s workers (who are employed seasonally) from important ways of participating in the unions. As the sector was emerging, many observers also highlighted a union representation gap, particularly low levels of union membership among women, immigrant, and youth workers (Richards 2008). Far from indicating a lack of workers’ interest, the gap appeared to reflect a combination of national unions’ focus on the struggles of their existing members and masculine culture (Ibid). While national unions increasingly worked to close the representation gap, it has persisted. Even in cases where unions represent workers in contract bargaining, their activities have been limited. For example, the UGT lobbies the Spanish government to remove the exemption for agricultural employers from full social security contributions, lobbies the EU to condition support to agribusinesses on labor standards compliance, leads collective actions, and has negotiation rights in the strawberry sector. Yet it has not led workers in collective actions in the strawberry sector. A UGT representative explained, “The temporary workers tend not to because it’s temporary, and permanent workers have to abide by the Agreement’s strike rules.”15 Some observers have suggested that the legal system and unions’ strategies have produced a dualized labor market, characterized by relatively high pensions for ‘insider’ workers and, despite relatively low-income levels across the board, highly precarious employment for ‘outsider’ workers, who are overwhelmingly young, female, or have immigrant status (Rueda 2005, 2014; Hausermann and Schwander 2014). The implication that the national unions have under-engaged and under-represented immigrants and women— groups deliberately recruited by employers to work in strawberry sector— exacerbates the bargaining power disadvantages facing workers in the sector. Indicating the disconnect between the unions negotiating with strawberry sector employers and the workers they employ, the FIDH (2012: 28) reported, Moroccan women told the FIDH mission that they had received a visit from some people but did not understand who or what they

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represented. These people asked the women to sign a document that they were unable to read. They signed it to “do the same thing as the Romanians.” In fact these people were representatives from one of the major unions and came to inspect housing. This situation clearly illustrates the distance between the Moroccan women pickers and trade union representatives, as well as the lack of resources of the unions. Further reducing workers’ leverage in the strawberry sector is the fragmentation of the labor movement. For their part, the unions active in the sector are divided. The UGT had sufficient delegates to participate in negotiations but protested the agreement. A UGT official explained, “CC.OO. sold out to the employers. They agreed to a wage table that sets rates below the minimum wage. UGT participated in negotiations and walked out when the CC.OO. agreed to this.” A SAT member also criticized the CC.OO., saying: I personally and many coworkers think of CC.OO. as the employer’s union. They sign the contract, but then they turn the other way. The companies name the union representatives, people from administration, the office. It’s a mafia. I was talking to a worker the other day who has worked in the fields for years and said that he has no idea what he signs when he signs the contract. There’s no consciousness raising. Workers have organized independently of the unions, yet activity appears to be limited to-date by lack of coordination. In the 1990s, immigrants from primarily African countries conducted a series of protests, to which employers responded in part with demands for more control, subsequently arranged for them under the contracting-in-origin program (Hellio 2016). In the 2010s, the CTA emerged among immigrant workers in Andalusia, primarily in shantytowns, many of them with legal status. Most publicly, the CTA has raised attention to their living conditions, including by facilitating the visit by the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty. Engagement of the CTA by unions established in Andalusia presents an opportunity to close the distance between workers, many of whom are immigrants, and the unions. While the CTA and SAT have collaborated in specific actions, and SAT representatives report an established relationship with the Fédération Nationale du Secteur Agricole (National Federation of Agricultural Unions, FNSA) in Morocco, coordination between the unions and immigrant workers has not progressed to the level that would support significant collective action in the strawberry sector. Another group advocating on behalf of workers in Spain’s strawberry sector are activist lawyers. In 2009, lawyers filed complaints by workers concerning sexual assaults, which remained in the judicial process for over a decade. In 2020, two complaints on behalf of eight women filed against five companies also remained in process. Indicating the position of employers, a

A Fragmented Labor Movement 117

representative of the employer association Freshuelva reported no knowledge of the complaints (Andreu and Jimenez 2010). Coordination between unions and lawyers representing workers in the strawberry sector presents another possibility, of directing collective action to accelerate justice in the court system and of increasing unions’ engagement of workers on their immediate needs.

Incomplete dignity processes and workers’ bargaining power disadvantage in Spain’s Strawberry Sector Workers in the European strawberry ICN’s primary production node have endured poor working conditions due to a lack of bargaining power throughout the sector’s takeoff. Employers and governments have demonstrated their interests in low labor costs in strawberry production in Spain. Their organization and reproduction of a differentiated, surplus labor market reduces workers’ strike leverage. The surplus labor market pits workers in competition for needed income, and separations of workers by legal status, residential location, language and culture reduce workers’ interactions with each other. Neither local, residential immigrants, or contracted-in-origin workers have significant alternatives for income or savings that could support them to sustain a strike, a position exacerbated by high unemployment levels. Employers can easily replace and blacklist assertive workers, especially those hired through the contracting-in-origin program. Legal workarounds and lax enforcement reduce risks for employers flouting labor regulations. Meanwhile, unions representing workers in the sector have not organized collective action to pressured employers and the governments to act differently. Even as unions have asked the employers, through negotiations, and the state, through social dialogue and lobbying, for improved labor standards in the sector, they have set aside the primary means to achieve these demands, collective action. Applying the dignity-based model of bargaining power introduced in Chapter 1 to Spain’s strawberry sector clarifies the persistence of poor working conditions in the sector. Figure 4.1 models the incomplete process of building power. The model’s plus signs represent actions that contributed to building power, and minus signs, those that detracted from workers’ efforts. The causal mechanism, human dignity, is partially filled in the model in to indicate evidently incomplete processes of dignity. The capacity of workers in Spain’s strawberry sector to act as a collective is low and hindered by the disconnects between workers and advocates. There are several indications of the low level of associational power. The national unions CC.OO. and UGT have not prioritized representation of immigrant and women workers who account for the majority of strawberry sector workers, and laws on union elections limit the seasonal workers’ participation in the unions. Highlighting the disconnect are reports that workers have no knowledge of the sectoral agreement covering their employment or the

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Precarious Employment

Capacity to Act as Collective

Coalition

Capacity to Disrupt

Enforceable Laws & Contracts

Decent Work

Human dignity - Wages below national minimum - Gender-based discrimination & violence - Low access to healthcare, social services due to social security under-reporting - Squalid housing

+ SAT solidarity actions + Union presence: CC.OO., UGT, SAT

- Low levels union engagement of immigrants, women, youth - Divided unions

+ Activist lawyers + UNHRC report of “unconsciounable labour conditions prevailing” - Lack of coordination between unions and activists

- None demonstrated

- Wages below national minimum - Gender-based discrimination & violence - Exclusion temporary workers from union - Low access to healthcare, social elections services due to - Loopholes in & social security under-enforcement under-reporting of labor & social security regulations Squalid housing

+ Sectoral agreement + Increased state inspections

Figure 4.1 Disconnected labor and delayed process of building power Spain’s strawberry sector.

unions that negotiated it. The union most historically rooted in workers’ communities in the region where strawberry production is concentrated, the SAT, has opted out of the collective bargaining process and reduced its leadership of direct action. Critically, none of the unions have led strikes, boycotts, or other collective actions in the strawberry sector. While the low strike activity could in fact reflect workers’ collective risk assessment, the disconnects between unions and workers point to undeveloped dignity. By not engaging workers in the strawberry sector, unions are effectively failing to recognize workers’ capacity to participate in the rules to which they are subjected, including collective bargaining of work rules and union strategy. Without recognizing the dignity of the workers whom they aim to represent, the unions negotiate with employers and lobby state actors without leverage. Employers and the state are vulnerable to disruptions of the national export sector, yet they can pay little heed to unions that evidently cannot mobilize collective action with workers whose participation in the unions is limited. The disconnect between unions and workers indicates organizational fetishism (Bourdieu 1991; 2000), an expectation by the unions that their formal organization is the source of their power, which in fact is derived from solidarity between the workers they represent. The unions have succeeded in establishing half the wheel of associational power, organization, without its other half, solidarity (Wright 2000). As a result, they have not progressed in improving conditions. Even as the existence of the institution of sectoral bargaining and recently increased labor inspections indicate potential for improvements, lack of associational power translates into lack of worker leverage and, in turn, persistently low wages,

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gender-based discrimination and violence, and lack of access to essential services in the strawberry sector. This chapter has explored why working conditions have remained poor and why workers have not yet built sufficient bargaining power to improve conditions in Spain’s strawberry sector. Clearly, the organization of the sector—employers’ position as price takers in the strawberry ICN, employers’ access to surplus labor and high discretion over employment practices, and workers’ lack of alternative income opportunities—challenge unions’ engagement. As the historical record reviewed in this chapter shows, these are conditions created by employers and governments. In this context, employers have perceived that the existing unions lack the ability to lead the workforce in collective action, in other words, lack associational power. Employers’ competitive strategy, then, sustainably rests on persistently low labor costs and attendant poor working conditions, until challenged by workers’ collective pressure. Low wage rates and under-enforcement of laws and contractual terms reflect the strategy’s implementation. While efforts of the last decade to raise awareness of conditions in the sector may be sowing seeds of a shift toward workers building bargaining power and gaining the recognition of their dignity, to date terms and conditions of employment have remained precarious.

Notes 1 Following Soifer’s ( 2020) discussion of a shadow case as “drawing inference from within-case analysis” of an ancillary case to consider the generality of claims considered in the core cases, this chapter analyzes strawberry production in Spain to then consider in the concluding chapter whether patterns observed in the cases of the previous two chapters are applicable only to North America or might apply generally to contemporary strawberry ICNs beyond. 2 The ten companies that have owned the most strawberry patents issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office are Driscoll’s, Inc. (aka Driscoll Strawberry Associates, Inc.), Regents of the University of California, Plant Sciences, Inc., Plantas de Navarra, S.A. (PLANASA, which includes Societe Civil Darbonne and Darbonne Pepiniere, SAS), Sweet Darling Sales, Inc., Berry Genetics, Inc., Consorzio Italiano Vivaisti (CIV), Agricultural Research Organization, Florida Foundation Seed Producers, Inc., and Edward Vinson Limited (USPTO, 2020). Notably, the EU banned patenting plants from non-laboratory breeding in 2019, after concerns when the European Patent Office previously granted patents one tomato and one broccoli variety. EU-based breeders maintain protection of their plant varieties through plant variety rights, yet unlike patents, others can use the varieties for further breeding (see European Parliament 2019). 3 See Chapter 1, Footnote 19. 4 On Europe’s contemporary immigration regime, see Walia 2021, especially Chapter 6, and Hamlin 2021, especially Chapter 6. 5 “Maria” is a pseudonym used to mitigate the risk of retaliation against the worker described herein, based on an interview with her. 6 Notably, there was little change in 2020 and 2021, as one might expect from the reductions of activity related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The average unemployment rate in Andalusia between 2002 and 2019 was 23.9 percent ( INE 2021)

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7 The organization of labor markets that reduce wages based on workers’ origins by political regimes in the Iberian Peninsula has precedents, including emergent European bourgeoisie hiring labor from ‘outside’ during the Middle Ages ( Robinson 2000: 9–28), and Spain’s colonial occupation of part of present-day Morocco from 1912–1956. 8 The phrase “informal labor” may best be understood as referring to work that is organized in a manner avoiding employment regulations. 9 In 2016, the legal minimum daily rate for professionals (Salaire Minimum Interprofessionel Garanti, SMIG), was 108 dirhams ($11.13), for agricultural workers (Salarie Minimum Agricole Garanti, SMAG) 70 dirhams ($7.22), and for domestic workers 70 dirhams ($7.22), while the World Bank considered less than 70 dirhams ($6.70) per day to indicate a state of poverty ( Meknassi and Rioux 2010; USDOS 2017). The ILO (2015) also reported that the minimum wage hovered at the national government’s poverty line in the 2010s. 10 Following Cheryl Harris’s (1993) argument that “white” has functioned as a property right under US law, her the notion of claiming whiteness refers to the functioning of racialization as border-making, distinguishing degrees of legal rights based on social constructs of inclusion and exclusion from society. 11 Digital tools to control productivity appear to be increasingly used in the strawberry sector. In addition to this report of their use in Spain, workers in Washington State reported recent adoption of scanners in the field, which they felt reduced their control compared to previously used paper cards on which fruit checkers marked the quantity of berries picked, as remains the practice in San Quintín. 12 See Junta de Andalucía (2018) for the agreement text. 13 The national minimum is a monthly rate of €1,108.33, approximately €46 per day for 6-day workweeks. 14 As J.R. Hicks observed (1963: 140–147), workers’ ability to collectively withhold their labor, to strike, creates the incentive for employers to meaningfully negotiate terms and conditions of their employment. 15 The sectoral agreement defines missing work for more than two days and voluntary slowdowns or reductions in quality of work as “grave” actions that may be disciplined with suspensions of 20 and up to 60 days.

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5

The Construction of Walmart’s Power to Set Terms of Exchange in the Strawberry Sector

Retailers began to dominate food systems during the same period of the construction of international strawberry commodity networks. Dominant food retailers now purchase and sell to consumers the majority of strawberries produced in the United States, Mexico, and Spain. As displayed in Chart 5.1, while international strawberry trade grew, so too did concentration in food sales, here exemplified by US food retailers’ capture of more than 40 percent of the market. Food retail concentration also characterizes European markets, where strawberries from Spain are sold. Four companies account for around 75 percent of food sales in the United Kingdom, and five account for 80 percent of sales in France, 62 percent in Germany, and 58 percent in Spain (Lawrence and Burch 2007). The strawberry boom and retailer takeover of food sales were symbiotic phenomena. “The most important factor in understanding the extent of supermarket power is that the retail sector has moved beyond its traditional responsibility for food distribution, and is now strongly influencing patterns of production and consumption,” wrote Geoffrey Lawrence and David Burch 2007: 9), in documenting how retailers have become the lead firms setting commercial terms across ICNs. For sales to consumers, the retailers also employ millions of workers. As shown in chart 5.2, a decline in real average wages mirrors the rise in oligopoly power in food retail, here shown in the United States, indicating that retailers not only wield power to set terms of exchange with suppliers of their products but also wield similar power to set employment terms with the workers they employ. Why retailers have such wide and deep influence over production, distribution, and sales of food, as well as labor relations underpinning these processes, is the question explored in this chapter. Applying ICN analysis, the chapter examines retailers’ use of oligopolistic power in sales markets and oligopsonistic power in relation to labor and companies supplying their products. The chapter focuses on Walmart as the standard setter of the era of retail dominance over food systems. Throughout the 1990s and the first two decades of the 21st century,1 the strawberry ICN boom, Walmart operated as a lead firm in a class of its own. Table 5.1 presents indicators of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003329916-5

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2.5E+09

0.6

2E+09

0.5 1.5E+09

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Chart 5.1 World strawberry exports and US food retail shares of top 4, 8, and 20 companies, 1990–2019. Source: Author calculations with data from USDA ERS (2022) and UN Comtrade.

15.5

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Chart 5.2 US food retail, decline in real average wages and increase in shares of top 4, 8, and 20 companies, 1990–2019. Source: Author calculations with data from USDA ERS 2021 and USDOL BLS, series ID CEU4244500008.

Walmart’s influence. While popular accounts focus on its use of technologies, the company’s most important innovations to its bottom line were in extracting value from labor. Operating in the facilitative context provided by the US government, Walmart applied dual strategies of resisting unionization internally and squeezing value out of suppliers and their workers to shape food ICNs in its own image, including those of strawberries. The Walmart way in practice has been unilateral managerial discretion over each process behind its products at the service of shareholders,

The Construction of Walmart’s Power 127 Table 5.1 Indicators of Walmart’s influence Total revenue Net sales, USA Net grocery sales, USA Stores Countries with stores Total employees (USA) Distribution centers (USA) Suppliers Political spending in USA, 2020 2 Starting salary 3 (annual) Living wage for single person without children in Arkansas 4 CEO annual compensation 5 Returns to shareholders FY2020

$559,200,000,000 $369,963,000,000 $208,413,000,000 11,501 25 2,200,000 (1,500,000) 377 (156) 100,000 $11,503,670 $11 / hour ($19,448/year) $13.29 $22,600,000 ($10,865/hour) $11.8 billion

Sources (except where noted): Walmart 10-K reports 2020, 2021.

especially the company’s founding family. In 2020, Walmart reported more revenue than all but 21 countries, accounted for one-third of food sold in the United States, employed more people than the populations of every US city except the largest four, sourced its products from 100,000 suppliers, paid its CEO nearly 1,000 times the rate paid to employees, and distributed $11.8 billion to shareholders (see Table 5.1). The first section of this chapter highlights the two primary sources of capital used by the company to command food ICNs: super exploitation of workers it directly employs and of workers employed by its suppliers. Given its extensive influence, Walmart has attracted substantial attention. As researchers have documented, Walmart’s share of the US retail market meant that the company accounted for one in five retail sales in the United States and implied elimination of competition—more than two dozen regional grocery chains closed during its first decade in food retail (Lynn 2006; Lichtenstein 2008). With its 100,000 direct suppliers, Walmart also gained notoriety for its “Plus One Principle” (Petrovic and Hamilton 2007: 131), meaning annual increases in the value provided by suppliers in order to receive new orders from the retailer (Bloom and Perry 2001; Appelbaum and Lichtenstein 2006). Walmart’s disregard for employment regulations and resistance to collective bargaining with unions also earned criticism, particularly in the 2000s (Dicker 2002; Rosen 2005; Pier 2007; Lichtenstein 2007a, 2007b, 2008; Moberg 2011). While highlighting central dynamics at Walmart, its relationships with competitors, suppliers, and labor, the tendency in analyses of the company to-date has been to isolate these relationships. Following the ICN analytical framework used throughout this book, the analysis of Walmart in this chapter considers them parts of the whole business model, the Walmart competition strategy.

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On the more general phenomena of retailers gaining transformational power in society, understanding has advanced substantially through studies of relationships in the production, circulation, and consumption of products, most popularly known as global supply chains. Elaborated in Chapter 1, a few insights from this body of research are particularly relevant to understanding retailer power. First, the initial observation that observed inequities across the world economy reflect interacting sets of relationships involved in bringing a product like strawberries from soil to consumption spurred vast empirical documentation and categorization of “lead firms” and “suppliers” (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1977; Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994). Second, such hierarchized relationships do not spontaneously materialize; they depend on political, ecological, and cultural conditions, which themselves are continually (re)created (Fraser 2014). In addition to the general ability of any firm to compete, such multidimensional historical arrangements are needed for lead firms to direct ICNs (Dicken et al. 2001), like the strawberry ICNs of North America and Europe addressed in the previous three chapters. Third, the fundamental condition is always available labor; in other words, at each stage from the field to final sale, “the social reproduction of human labor [is] a critical input into … the transformation of raw materials into final goods” (Bair 2005). Fourth, despite much said about government weaknesses, national states are critical to the creation of conditions for ICNs (Mayer and Phillips 2017), not least by sustaining unit labor cost differences across geopolitical boundaries and providing firms the mobility and flexibility to arbitrage them in their relationships with suppliers and labor (Suwandi 2019). Focusing on firm behavior, several ICN studies further indicate strategies used by lead firms to gain and sustain their position. The combination of concentrated retailer market power and dispersed production facilitates “squeezing” value out of production labor (Anner 2019). Continuously striving to maintain competitiveness, firms adapt and instrumentalize cultural constructs. Hence, the reification and exploitation of gender and racial hierarchies are widely observed in the processes of organizing and maintaining ICNs (Deere 1979; Ramamurthy 2000; Glenn 2002). Such social constructs have been deployed in interaction with economic and political arrangements as means of control over workers, whether at mines in neocolonized South Africa or strawberry fields in the contemporary United States (Hopkins 1966; Holmes 2013). These extant observations and explanations of ICNs challenge us not to rely on structuralist predictions but to identify actors’ historical patterns of behavior to reveal how an ICN lead firm operates (Collins, quoted in McMichael 1995: 120). Observations of the challenges to profit from production, distribution, and sales of food predict the concentration of power in food ICNs away from production (Kautsky 1988; Mann and Dickinson 1978; Russi 2013). Berries, as the highest revenue category in fresh produce (Cook 2011), exemplify the phenomenon. Four marketing and distribution companies account for more than half of all strawberries

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sold (Cook 2011). Driscoll’s accounts for 28 percent of all strawberry plant patents, one-third of all berry sales, and 60 percent of organic strawberry sales in the United States (Dune 2015; Goodyear 2017; USPTO 2020). Selling to Walmart directly or through Driscoll’s, hundreds of production companies accept their terms. “Ninety-five percent of it [the dialogue we have with Wal-Mart] is about the next 50 cents that we are together going to take out of the supply chain,” reported the CEO of consumer products brand Unilever, addressing the implication (quoted in Ball 2004). The combined power of Walmart and a select few marketing companies to set terms with suppliers manifests in capital flowing away from those production companies, driving them to sustain competitiveness through super exploitation of their workers. Yet, these are not forces of nature; they are social forces reflecting decisions by the actors involved, operating under conditions limiting exercise of their will.6 Walmart’s scale is neither inevitable nor the explanation of its power; it begs the question of why the company can set terms across numerous ICNs. The first half of this chapter, then, offers an explanation of the power of retailers over strawberry ICNs by outlining two patterns of behavior of Walmart as the sector’s standard setter. The first pattern is Walmart’s super-exploitative internal employment relations. Among the company’s first competition strategies were its corporate structuring to avoid minimum wage duties and establishment of a gendered hierarchy. Underpinning unprecedented growth and takeover of US food and general retail was its innovative and standard-setting union resistance strategy. Over the 2000s and 2010s, the company’s international expansion both brought it into contexts lacking conditions for total union avoidance and bolstered its coffers, facilitating defeat of challenges to its unilateral control over employment of labor in its home country. Along the way, the company maintained shockingly low labor costs—in fact declining over time during its founder’s tenure as CEO. Among tactics were capitalizing on people’s desperation—foremost among examples, the company’s growth spurt derived from US government requirements that mothers work to qualify for public assistance. These practices have been documented; how Walmart combined them to gain and maintain its dominant position is the story addressed herein. Through suppressing labor costs, the company captured market share, at a level that made it a buyer that few production companies can avoid, solidifying the retailer’s commanding position to direct ICNs. The second pattern is Walmart’s precedent-setting extraction of value from workers producing the things that it sells. In the 2000s, for example, the retailer was reportedly requiring suppliers to reduce prices 5 percent each year (Fishman 2006). While marketing companies themselves grew to meet the volumes and maintain their competitiveness as suppliers to Walmart, they too are price takers. As a Driscoll’s manager reported, when Walmart began selling strawberries, the retailer demanded that the

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marketing company “move 50 percent off” and “take it from your other customers.” Clearly making up the difference with other customers was not possible, as they have to compete with Walmart. Hence, the marketing companies joined the retailer in shaping production to meet its terms. Such powerful demand for reducing costs in the commodity network translates into intensified extraction of value workers in production. With price as the lodestar of ICN governance, disempowering production workers is essential to all firms in the network; it is how suppliers maintain profitability while meeting the terms of exchange set by their customers, the marketing and retail firms. As a result, labor relations in production conform to Walmart’s internal practice of avoiding collective bargaining with unionized workers and attendant increases in the costs of their labor. While strawberry ICNs are structured to suppress worker voice and labor cost, workers reject the inevitability of their immiseration, as evinced by the struggles documented in the preceding chapters, particularly in Washington State and San Quintín. The second section of this chapter turns to workers’ resistance of exploitation by Walmart. Since the company’s beginnings in the 1960s in Arkansas, workers have sought to collectively negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment with Walmart, and the company has avoided ceding control. No workers are represented by unions at Walmart in its home country, and in other countries the company has engaged unions where it is convinced of their weak influence on managerial prerogative. This is not because workers and unions have not attempted to assert rights to participate in the work rules to which they are subjected at Walmart. Observers have already noted that workers at Walmart face difficulties disrupting the retailer’s capital accumulation process, among them being dispersed across thousands of stores (Silver 2003; Wood 2015). The retailer’s employees also face difficulties in a labor market organized to ensure surplus job seekers. Walmart not only employs 1.5 million workers in the United States but also replaces at least 600,000 employees each year.7 A key strategy to gain leverage with Walmart has thus been to address the firm’s impacts both on its workers, communities, and broader society. Coalitions have sought to challenge the retailer’s labor practices, impacts on ecosystems and small businesses, and influence over government (Marie 2002; Warren 2005; Berger and Bolton 2004; Green and Mason 2005; Fletcher 2013). A consistent theme of observers of the limited progress of efforts to improve terms and conditions of employment at Walmart has been the limited involvement of the retailers’ workers. Early efforts by workers at the retailer to gain voice at work encountered resolute resistance by the company. As the company expanded, so too did its pool of available workers, with potential alternative employers closing shops and declining purchasing power of wage workers, both reflecting national policies of support for monopoly practices and high income inequality. Walmart’s growth also meant that its ability to financially outspend existing trade

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unions that might lead unionization among its ranks functioned to discipline even the largest unions. In addition to the valid explanations of the lack of labor progress at Walmart derived from political economic analysis, here labor struggles with Walmart are analyzed through the dignity-based model of bargaining power. Applying the model to the history of labor activism at the retailer in the United States indicates a paucity of associational power and of evident organizational fetishism, i.e. organization without solidarity. This chapter’s application of ICN analysis to the retail end of the strawberry sector draws on multiple sets of data. First are the data sets of Walmart as a publicly listed company and of the US government agencies tracking the retail sector’s general organization, the Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, and terms of employment, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Second, the vast archive of academic and journalistic accounts of Walmart’s history provided another layer of detail. Third, interviews with six key informants with decades of experience in the sector included staff at the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), and the global union federation International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF). Finally, to consider the claim herein that Walmart has set standards of employment relations in food systems beyond its own stores and ICNs, studies of the German food retail industry provide the evidence for a shadow case. The chapter proceeds in three sections. The first section addresses the sources of Walmart’s influence, first its internal employment practices and second its relationship with suppliers and through them, employment practices in production. Next, the chapter turns toward the history of labor organizing at Walmart, first mapping efforts to establish worker voice at the company, second considering the limited success of these efforts through the dignitybased model of bargaining power. Finally, the chapter concludes with a snapshot of employment relations at Germany’s leading food retailers, providing indications of Walmart’s broad imprint on contemporary food systems.

Understanding Walmart’s influence What has made it possible for Walmart to dominate US food sales, turnover more than a half million workers each year, and set conditions around the world for the production of things ranging from computers to strawberries? The firm gained attention for its generally low consumer prices, efficiencyenhancing technologies, poor working conditions, and low prices from suppliers (Abernathy et al. 1999; Brunn 2006; Fishman 2006; Brea-Solís et al. 2015). Yet of this set of strategies, consumer pricing is primarily marketing—often other firms offer equally low or lower prices, and technologies used have functioned to control work time and labor costs internally and throughout the company’s ICNs. Two strategies, then, are the dual

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engines of Walmart’s rise to dominance: employment practices and purchasing practices with suppliers. Together, they fueled Walmart’s takeover of retail. Understanding why Walmart has been able to implement the particularly extractive practices with employees and suppliers is critical to understanding its rise to become the quintessential lead firm of contemporary food ICNs and why the worker struggles for dignity in strawberry fields profiled in the preceding chapters faced such robust resistance from employers, who are effectively operating within strictures set by Walmart.

Employment practices as a contributor to Walmart’s market dominance Companies of many types and operating in diverse contexts tend to increase competitiveness through super exploitation, paying workers less than living costs, immiseration, paying ever lower wages, increasing work time without commensurate pay increases, and increasing productivity or reducing living costs to increase the rate of value accrued through workers’ labor.8 It is thus not surprising that Walmart emphasizes to its shareholders its attention to “controlling our associate wage and related labor costs,” availability of wage seekers, and employment regulations that might threaten its practices and thus bottom line.9 The company’s history is replete with efforts to ensure labor control, exploit labor market changes, and use regulatory flexibility provided by a supportive government. Indicating its effectiveness in these efforts, Walmart’s average real labor costs decreased nearly 1 percent from 1971 until 2008 (Brea-Solís et al. 2015). The company’s value accelerated most when US labor market policies increased available workers (Reich and Bearman 2018). Its rejection of workers’ rights to union representation and collective bargaining contributed to the normalization of union avoidance by US companies (Lichtenstein 2007, 2008; Pier 2007). While these practices are widely documented, the contribution of Walmart’s employment practices to its expansion and why the firm has been able to implement them are critical to understanding its control over ICNs. Walmart’s pattern of highly extractive employment practices began immediately. After opening as one store in 1962, the retailer added three stores in the subsequent two years and signaled its business model. It would pay workers less than the cost of living, differentiate positions by gender, invest the value extracted from the lowering of labor costs in higher volume purchases from its product suppliers, and drive out competitors by marketing low prices to consumers based on lower operating costs, thus capturing market share. Walmart organized its first three stores as three separate companies—WalMart Inc., Wal-Mart of Springdale Inc., and Wal-Mart of Harrison Inc.—under a holding company, with the effect of avoiding its legal duty to pay minimum wages and fissuring the workforce (Ortega 1998; Lichtenstein

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2007a, 2007b). Workers received below minimum wages and were unable to collectively bargain with management of the whole company. While courts eventually found the false pretense of separation illegal, over three years the super-exploitation of workers kickstarted the company’s growth. By the time courts ordered Walmart to provide backpay to workers for violating minimum wage laws, the company had grown fifty-fold.11 Through disregard for employment regulations, Walmart continued to expand by increasing the value extracted from the labor process beyond the limits of the law, and thus sustaining higher capital returns to invest than competitors abiding the law. In 57 class action lawsuits filed in a five-year span alone, workers reported forced work ‘off the clock,’ nonpayment of overtime rates, and denied breaks (Pier 2007). Just within the state of Minnesota, a judge found Walmart guilty of two million infractions of wage and hour laws (Lichtenstein 2009: 20). Also from its beginning, Walmart opportunistically used patriarchy to extract value from workers. As Bethany Moreton (2007, 2010) extensively documents, Walmart’s roots in the Ozark region of the mid-20th century were not incidental but constitutive to its business model. According to the region’s social hierarchy at the time, Moreton notes, a man’s worth depended on his control over property, including wife and children. Thus, the notion of a man working for another as a clerk was an affront to the patriarchal social structure, resolved by the company’s hiring of women as the clerks and men as their managers. The retailer’s approach to employing women, at a time of less than 40 percent female labor force participation nationally, “simply reinscribed the family sexual hierarchy onto the workplace” (Moreton 2010: 54). The process of institutionalizing male authority at Walmart included rituals of annual “Ladies Day” in which women feigned management positions for the day, while the rest of the year taking orders from male managers, whose dominance was regularly fetishized through store events featuring them posing with guns (Moreton 2010). Walmart’s patriarchal hierarchy contributed to its suppression of labor costs. After decades and in response to a class action lawsuit, the US Supreme Court acknowledged in Walmart vs. Dukes (2011) that “women fill 70 percent of the hourly jobs … but make up ‘only 33 percent of management’ … women working in the company’s stores ‘are paid less than men in every region,’ and ‘that the salary gap widens over time even for men and women hired into the same jobs at the same time.’”12 In step with the tight managerial control demonstrated through its use of patriarchal organization, Walmart rejected collective bargaining with workers, also from early on in company history. Quickly, the firm learned that it could ignore with impunity laws that establish workers’ rights to engage in collective action to improve their working conditions. Walmart first rejected worker demands to exercise their collective bargaining rights in the 1970s, when workers sought union representation at two of the firm’s then few dozen stores. Managers fired union sympathizers,

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and workers reported that corporate headquarters told their store manager, “if he caught any employees with union cards, he should fire them even if he had to hire all new employees” (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 201 N.L.R.B. 250, 251 (1973) quoted in Lichtenstein 2008). Walmart then hired lawyer John Tate, who began by telling workers that unions are “blood sucking parasites” and introducing “not actually a profit-sharing plan” (Ortega 1998: 239; Lichtenstein 2008; Berfield 2012a).13 The union involved, the St. Louis-based Retail Clerks Local, filed an unfair labor practice (ULP), and the NLRB ordered Walmart to rehire workers fired for their concerted activity and to post a notice that stated: WE WILL NOT discourage membership in or activities on behalf of Retail Store Employees’ Union, Local No. 655, affiliated with Retail Clerks International Association, AFL-CIO, or any other labor organization, by discharging, or in any other manner discriminating in regard to hire or tenure of employment of any of our employees because of their union activities … WE WILL NOT in any other manner interfere with, restrain, or coerce our employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed them by Section 7 of the Act. (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. 1973, quoted in Lichtenstein 2008)14 Starting in 1978, drivers at Walmart’s four distribution centers at the time signed cards expressing their interest in union representation by the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters (“Teamsters”). The company delayed the vote for four years, during which founder and company president Sam Walton threatened “if the union got in … he’d close her right up,” reported a worker involved (Ortega 1998: 107). Tate, the company’s lawyer, set up a bulletin board smearing the Teamsters, headlined “Walk the 90-Foot Walk of Teamster Shame” (Ortega 1998: 88; Lichtenstein 2008: 1477; Berfield 2012a). After the election petition withdrawal, Walton told the 40,000 employees at the time, “We will never need a union in Wal-Mart” (quoted in Lichtenstein 2008: 1477). With no remediation of violations of the National Labor Relations Act expected other than another ‘we will not violate the law again’ statement,15 the Teamsters backed off from trying to unionize at Walmart for decades. After defeating the drivers’ unionization effort, the company differentiated its workforce (at the time of around 40,000) by beginning to reduce drivers’ workloads and pay them five times more than in-store workers (Lichtenstein 2008: 1477). Over the next decades, Walmart developed the model for avoiding collective bargaining with unionized workers. The company developed the manual “A Manager’s Toolbox to Remaining Union-Free” and trained managers that “as a member of Walmart’s management team, you are our first line of defense against unionization” (quoted in Berfield 2015).16 Managers were instructed not to hire anyone with union experience and, under the company’s “Remedy System,” call the corporate office’s “union

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hotline” and report union activity to the employment lawyers at headquarters, where their reports populated a database used to track and derail perceived labor organizing (Dicker 2002; Pier 2007). Walmart hired the military contractor Lockheed Martin to surveil workers, and when perceiving union interest, fired union supporters and threatened others, telling workers that voting for union representation would result in their replacement (Pier 2007). The company also used the US labor relations system to obtain and enforce court injunctions preventing union organizing activity on company property (Berfield 2015; Reich and Bearman 2018). When workers have filed for union recognition elections, Walmart’s Orwellian-named “People Division” for decades took over store management, intimidated workers in one-on-one meetings, required workers to watch videos persuading them against unions in captive-audience meetings,17 relocated workers perceived as union supporters, and hired workers screened for a vote against union representation (Dicker 2002; Pier 2007; Lichtenstein 2008). In the 2010s, the company integrated the unionavoidance work into “human resources teams all over the country who,” as a company spokesperson told the press, “are available to talk to associates, and we will get questions about joining a union,” to which the HR managers respond with threats, “We would say: ‘Let us remind you of all that Wal-Mart offers, and of what might go away. Quarterly bonuses might go away, vacation time might go away’” (Berfield 2012b). Another Walmart manager cynically reported that employees “have chosen to reject unions time and again” (Management Report 2011). Walmart’s union avoidance provided a competitive advantage rooted in extraction of value from its employees. Throughout the decades of Walmart’s growth to becoming the largest company in terms of sales and employees, economists regularly found that wages at union jobs were 15–20 percent higher on average than wages at non-union jobs in the United States (Lewis 1963; Freeman and Medoff 1984; Kulkarni and Hirsch 2021). When Walmart entered the food retail industry in the 1987 (Lepore 2011), its wage bill was 30 percent lower than unionized competitors (Lichtenstein 2008). In one of the few instances when Walmart partly conceded to union pressure, in the form of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) requests to contribute to healthcare (Featherstone 2007), the company provided healthcare insurance options to its employees for which the workers would pay up to 30 percent of their annual income (Lichtenstein 2009).

Purchasing practices as a contributor to Walmart’s market dominance Labor in the ICNs led by Walmart, employed by suppliers and subsuppliers to produce and transport products sold by the retailer, is the retailer’s second major source of value. Walmart (2021a) reports 100,000

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direct suppliers, which is a fraction of the companies operating under the retailer’s direction as the lead firm of the ICNs. In strawberries, the retailer’s direct suppliers include Driscoll’s and the largest production companies that sell directly to Walmart but do not include the hundreds of companies that contract with the direct suppliers to sell their product at the retailer. Walmart grew to lead the ICNs by squeezing value out of suppliers and sub-suppliers and the workers at them. The share of every dollar spent by consumers that goes to retailers has increased in recent years (Kuhns and Okrent 2019), a capture of value led by Walmart. While the retailer’s tagline “everyday low prices” does not mean it sells every product at the lowest price, Walmart has required suppliers to continually reduce the price of their produce, increase its added value, or both in what it calls its “Plus One Principle” (Petrovic and Hamilton 2007: 131). As Edna Bonacich and Jake Wilson (2005) observed, “some of this cost cutting has led to more efficient operations … at some point all the excess fluff has been cut out of a business, and you start reaching the bone” (Bonacich and Wilson 2006: 235). Walmart effectively “makes markets” by setting prices, inviting bids, and deciding on purchases based on its own analysis of the operating costs of suppliers that they are required to provide the retailer (Petrovic and Hamilton 2007: 132). A former Walmart manager explained, “There is no negotiation … The manufacturer … sits down with the buyer, and the buyer brings up last year’s cost and says, ‘We want to buy this much more this year, but we want you to manufacture for this much less and sell it to us and cut your lead time in half, cut your shipping cost in half …’” (Bonacich and Wilson 2006: 236). A supplier to the retailer in Mexico complained that Walmart squeezed suppliers with low prices “to the point where the opening of new (Walmart) branches is practically 100 percent financed by the costs borne by its suppliers” (quoted in Maldonado 2005, cited in Tilly 2006). Walmart’s demands for large volumes and low prices drove consolidation in food ICNs, exemplified in strawberries. Four companies captured the intermediate position in berry ICNs, marketing and transportation more than half of retailed berries (Cook 2011). Intermediaries like the brands Driscoll’s and Naturipe expanded their contracting with production companies to locations like Mexico in order to supply retailers with berries year-round under fixed-price contracts, and the retailers benefited from continuous sales, reduced labor time previously spent monitoring spot prices and seasonally changing shelves, and lower transaction costs through larger suppliers (Mohapatra et al. 2010). Fulfilling the sales terms required large investments to quickly transport strawberries in temperaturecontrolled vehicles. For example, Driscoll’s has delivered 30 million pounds of strawberries per week overall and supplied up to half of strawberries sold by Walmart, for which Driscoll’s invested in real-time tracking of its strawberry transportation and delivering 75 percent within a day of receipt

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from production companies (Food Safety News 2018, Interview by the author). The oligopolistic organization of the intermediaries reflects the retailers’ balance of securing benefits of large suppliers while avoiding single suppliers to spread risk and increase competition (Kouki et al. 2018). Interviewed strawberry production managers reported that they sell via intermediaries only because most cannot afford the investments in marketing and transportation necessary for direct sales to retailers. While Walmart’s purchasing practices increase its margins, at the level of production, they translate into limits on terms and conditions of work, as production companies “find no other way to meet Wal-Mart’s demands except to squeeze labor to the bone” (Goodman and Pan 2004). The retailer stands by its practices; as son of the founder Rob Walton (2005) wrote, “our low prices are derived from … taking unnecessary costs out of the business.” Some observers mystify the retailer’s low prices (Furman 2005; Hemphill 2008; Morillo et al. 2015), despite the clear social impacts. In strawberry production, for which labor is the largest operating expenditure, its squeeze on suppliers translates into pressure to depress labor costs. Furthermore, as lead firm, “Wal-Mart’s difference … is not a difference in kind, but in degree … the company’s labor practices are not the exception, but rather, the perfection of the rule” (Adams 2006: 214). Thus, production employers are disciplined by Walmart’s purchasing practices to see collectively bargaining with unionized workers as a risk of closure so long as other companies sustain lower labor costs through individualized employment terms. The cases of labor collective action in the North American strawberry ICNs analyzed in chapters two and three are indicative of the strictures imposed by Walmart’s terms. In the case of Sakuma Brothers, the company opted out of the fresh strawberry market entirely, selling all of its strawberries to food manufacturers such as Häagen-Dazs. The sales approach likely reduces overall revenue—fresh-market prices are approximately 50 percent higher than prices in processed markets, according to another production manager, yet it permits Sakuma management control over the allocation of its revenue, facilitating its collective bargaining relationship with Familias Unidas por la Justicia. In contrast, many of the strawberries unpicked in San Quintín, Mexico, during the 2015 strike were destined for Walmart. The retailer did not take a public position or participate in negotiations following the strike. In the years that followed, it required suppliers in San Quintín to pay for certifications, further limiting capital available for negotiation with workers, and financed a report that minimized the strikers’ demands for collective bargaining.18 While documenting Walmart’s practices of extracting value from workers in its stores and ICNs identifies a pattern of practice by the retailer, it does not explain why the company has been able to do so. The retailer built its labor-extraction model through interdependent use of economic, political, and social forms of power.

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Sources of Walmart’s capacity to extract value from workers Walmart assembled the largest group of workers under the same private employer, compensated them less than the cost of living, and steadfastly refused their participation in work rules, often illegally. The primary innovation underpinning the retailer’s dominance is its use of and contributions to shaping political support and surplus labor markets while clouding its practices in a mythology of values. The extraction of value from labor by Walmart has depended fundamentally on US policies, concerning labor and employment, business competition, and international trade and investment. The primary law regulating private-sector collective bargaining, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), is based on the principles of protected freedom of association, trade union independence, worker choice of union representative, worker ability to change unions, defined bargaining units, majority rule, certification of unions by labor law authorities, exclusive representation, duties to bargain, and the right to strike for a new collective agreement (Compa 2014). In practice, the federal and state governments have granted employers the ability to replace striking workers,19 all but encouraged managers to coerce workers into rejecting union representation,20 and made a mockery of enforcement through inconsequential penalties assigned to employers found to violate the laws. Describing the US approach to labor law enforcement and Walmart, Carol Pier (2007) wrote: Employers face no punitive consequences for violating US labor laws. Instead, a guilty employer can only be ordered to restore the status quo ante. US labor laws’ weak remedies, such as orders to reinstate illegally fired workers with small back-pay awards; to cease and desist from unlawful conduct; and to post notices in the facilities at issue, do not effectively deter employers from breaking the law and violating workers’ right to freedom of association, largely because they carry, at most, nominal economic consequences. Benefiting from these minimal consequences, Wal-Mart has repeatedly used illegal tactics to prevent union formation at its US stores. (Pier 2007) Similar to its approach on labor law, the US government has applied a doctrine of derogation to employment law, permitting companies to operate without regard for legal constraints.21 Walmart has taken full advantage. One example is the ongoing worker experience of excessive work even after the scores of violations of wage-and-hour regulations found by courts against the retailer in the 2000s (Pier 2007: 33–34). Perhaps most indicatively, the US Supreme Court dismissed the class action lawsuit

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against Walmart by 1.5 million women while not refuting their allegations of discrimination in pay and promotions throughout the country.22 The importance and limited capacity of labor policies alone to counter the particularly exploitative employment practices documented at Walmart in the United States is demonstrated by the firm’s actions in other countries. Walmart entered Germany in 1997, refused to participate in sectoral and company-level agreements with unions and works’ councils, acquiesced for a time to union pressure, and left after nine years (Kolben 2007: 296–298). In 1999, Walmart entered the UK by acquiring Asda, which included unionized stores, and resisted collective bargaining. After workers voted to strike, Walmart agreed to form a joint dialogue council with the workers’ union federation, the GMB, and to not to interfere with unionization—stopping short of accepting collective bargaining (Kolben 2007: 293–295). In Mexico, where Walmart began in 1991, the retailer established a symbiotic relationship with the employer-protection union federations that dominated the country’s retail sector, because the federations in practice prevented collective bargaining with workers and signed contracts with the employer that were often unknown by the workers and shopfloor managers (Kolben 2007: 299–302).23 Upon opening in China in 1996, Walmart refused to let the AllChina Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) into its stores, prompting the only state-permitted union to threaten legal action (Chan 2007). While state controls on the ACFTU that limit its representation of workers might explain Walmart’s concession to the union’s presence in exchange for access to the largest consumer market, independently organized workers subsequently challenged the multinational retailer, again backed by Chinese law, in this case civil law facilitating collective actions led by worker-elected representatives (Li and Liu 2018). Canada’s labor policy is most similar to that in the United States with important labor-friendly exceptions such as the Quebec province’s laws requiring companies to collectively bargain with workers who unionize through card check and to reach a first contract through arbitration should bargaining reach impasse. Yet when workers secured collective bargaining rights at Walmart in Quebec, Walmart shut the store down, demonstrating that its “deep pockets may frustrate the legal regime” (Adams 2006). Summarizing studies of Walmart’s approach to unionism internationally, Chris Tilly (2007) reported that the retailer has accepted unions where political cooptation of workers’ unions makes them more of a co-manager than challenger, as in China and Mexico. The company’s experiences in Germany and China also demonstrate that states can influence its behavior (Kolben 2007; Chan 2007). The Germany and Canada cases further show that Walmart’s dominance of the world retail market enables the company to simply decline revenue instead of conceding some managerial discretion to unionized workers. Walmart’s market power is twofold, monopolistic in retail sales and monopsonistic in labor and supplier relations, both of which have also been

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enabled by US policy. US anti-trust laws were established “to protect the independent merchant and the manufacturer from whom he buys” (Wright Patman, quoted in Lynn 2006: 31).24 Since 1982, the US government effectively encouraged monopolistic behavior by applying the so-called consumer-welfare doctrine, limiting who could be regarded as victims of monopoly to consumers and regulatory action to protecting the lowest consumer price (Lynn 2006; Olson 2014; Edlin 2018). Jurisprudence since has generally dismissed competitor concerns, for a plaintiff alleging monopolistic practices would have to prove that the alleged monopolist set prices below cost with the intent to drive out competition and that this predatory pricing would likely succeed (Edlin 2018). Walmart thus confidently and regularly reports its loss leader strategy. For example, an executive said “We continue to execute our strategy [of] investing in [lower] retail price … in our food … so that we can drive traffic to our stores … What you’ll see is we’ve actually widened our price gap over the last 13 months, against our competition by 100 basis points” (quoted in Sosland 2013). The first effect of US support for monopolistic practices has been to facilitate Walmart’s capture of the retail market. Between Walmart’s early years and achievement of dominance in US food sales, 1993–2003, two dozen regional grocery chains (chains not individual stores) closed (Lichtenstein 2008). Another study estimated that Walmart’s expansion accounted for at least half of small discount retail closures from 1988 to 1997 (Jia 2008). Analysis of common grocery items found prices 10 percent lower at Walmart than competitors, and that the competitors tend to reduce their own prices after Walmart opens in their market area (Basker and Noel 2009). During Walmart’s most rapid years of expansion, studies in Iowa and Maine found that retailers selling the same merchandise as Walmart lost sales and many closed after Walmart opened in their area (Stone 1989, 1991, 1995a, 1995b, 1997; Stone and Artz 2000; Stone et al. 2002). Researchers reported the market capture in urban areas as well; for example, the closure of 82 of 306 businesses within a four-mile radius of the first Walmart in Chicago during its first year (Moberg 2011). From its monopoly position, Walmart derives and applies monopsony power in surplus labor markets and with its suppliers. Walmart is able to employ workers for low compensation and unattractive terms and replace 600,000 employees each year by acting as a monopsonist in a sufficiently loose labor market sustained by public policy. Monopsony power in labor markets means an employer faces such little competition from other employers that it can “set wages lower than they would be in a competitive market” (Bivens et al. 2018).25 Monopsony power has been increasingly documented in the US labor market (Ashenfelter et al. 2021), particularly in lower-population areas where Walmart first expanded into the largest retailer.26 Economists have found Walmart monopsony effects on two levels. One, “a Wal-Mart store opening reduces county-level retail employment by about 150 workers,

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implying that each Wal-Mart worker replaces approximately 1.4 retailer workers. This represents a 2.7 percent reduction in average retail employment” (Neumark et al. 2005). Two, Walmart openings have reduced wholesale employment by replacing prior distribution networks with the retailer’s ICNs (Basker 2005). Competing retailers have responded by squeezing their workers more. For example, Walmart’s announced plan to open in southern California led food retailers to lock out 59,000 workers represented by the UFCW, compelling them to concede on pensions, health insurance, and wages in 2003 (Milkman 2004). As the Management Report for Nonunion Organizations (2013) recognized, “Low wages at Walmart drive down wages for UFCWrepresented workers at stores that compete with Walmart.” The retailer’s monopsony power reflects relatively price elastic demand for labor (Marshall 1966). Workers at Walmart are replaceable, account for a large portion of retail operating costs, and work for a company committed to allocating surpluses to executive management and shareholders.27 Relatively surplus labor markets, in which workers lack alternatives, have supported Walmart’s ability to set low employment terms. Indicating the surplus of available workers, since 1980, the retail workforce has grown from 10.2 to 15.1 million individuals, while their real wages have fallen by 11 percent and their average weekly hours, since 1972, by almost 14 percent (to 30.2), reported Peter Ikeler (2016: 47, citing US Bureau of Labor Statistics). Workers considering quitting Walmart face few better options, and some are legally compelled to maintain employment. Walmart simultaneously contributed to and benefited from available cheap labor. For example, the retailer pioneered on-demand employment, scheduling workers only for the hours needed based on flows of products (Abernathy et al. 1999).28 Walmart’s market cap grew the most following national reforms requiring employment in order to access welfare benefits, a requirement that increased the retailer’s labor supply and raised the risks to union activity for workers receiving welfare.29 Organizer Wade Rathke (2005b) described Walmart’s position in US labor markets as essentially not competing with other retailers or grocers for employees but against the overall lower waged service sector … Wal-Mart is accustomed to being the largest employers in the labor market and therefore has vast experience at single-handedly setting the market for wages, hours, and benefits. Toward its suppliers, Walmart’s practices also derive as much from favorable markets co-constructed with supportive governments as from competition with other retailers. Walmart (2020: 12) reports that “the volume of product we acquire from many suppliers allows us to obtain favorable pricing,” but it is not volume alone. Reductions of tariffs and strengthening of protections of internationally mobile capital made it possible for Walmart

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to create competition for its large purchase orders among many dispersed production companies. Walmart lobbied the US government and others for such policies, directly and through business associations like the Retail Industry Leaders Association (Lichtenstein 2009; Moreton 2010). By the mid-1980s, Walmart was purchasing half of its merchandise internationally. It simultaneously applied new technologies to control the working time of cashiers to crop pickers, with stock keeping units to record point-of-sale flows (1975), computerization and universal product codes (1983), communications with suppliers via the largest satellite network of its time (1987), requirements that suppliers input data into “Retail Link” (1992), conversion to real-time data transfer by suppliers via the internet-based Electronic Data Interchange (1996), and speeding of information flows with suppliers via radio frequency identification (2004) (Walmart 2021b). The communications technologies provide Walmart the ability to shift purchasing to avoid disruption, as it apparently did when strawberry volumes increased in central Mexico and California following the 2015 strike in San Quintín (see Chapter 3). As the quintessential lead firm of ICNs, Walmart is the company too big to ignore. Even if a production company avoids direct sales to Walmart, like the worker quitting the retailer, the production company finds few better offers from buyers who are competing with it. As strawberry production company owners reported in interviews, Walmart’s purchasing practices have driven down margins by setting lower prices and increasing competition for the large volume sales. One owner reported that his production company has received the same price regardless of the brand he sells, and in one exchange, the buyer cut the price 40 percent between placing the order and payment. Without the ability to increase sales prices, production companies rely on super exploiting labor to sustain profitability, as in the cases of strawberry production profiled in Chapters 2–4. In addition to using economic and political forces, Walmart has long used mythology to shore up its capacity to sustain sufficient effort by its employees, attract sufficient workers to maintain annual turnover of more than half a million, and close entire stores to avoid collective bargaining. The company has worked to redirect workers’ gaze away from actual terms and conditions of work toward membership in the Walmart family, an act of symbolic power (Bourdieu 1991). The mythologizing has certainly not mystified all workers—clearly many quit, but the company invested in it to some notable effect. From the earliest days, the company filled employees with tales of the founder, Sam Walton, as the caretaking head of the family. An exemplary piece of hagiography, a biography of Walton by Robert Slater (2003: 24) claims, “While still a child, Walton moved with his family from one town to another in Missouri, where he observed Dust Bowl farms. He promised himself he would never be poor.” In this description, the patriarch wills himself to prosperity for the noble purpose of caring for his family, while absent are the historical facts that Sam Walton was the son

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of a mortgage banker who profited from defaulting farmers, from whom the Walmart founder proceeded to extract value as their employer. Yet the power of Walmart’s corporate family narrative over time is indicated by the union-affiliated Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) reference to it. At Walmart’s 2012 annual shareholders meeting, the organization proposed a resolution stating, We have cut costs too far, stores are understaffed and associates cannot provide customers the service that Sam Walton built the company on and that we are proud to provide … [quoting Walton] … ‘Listen to your associates, they are your best idea generators’ … There has to be a new relationship based on honesty, based on trust, based on respect. (quoted in Berfield 2012b). The Walton family members, who own the majority of Walmart shares, voted down the resolution despite the cheers it received from most shareholders attending the meeting. The Walton’s understood what the resolution mis-interpreted, that recognition of workers’ dignity lived at the company only in the hagiography of Sam Walton. In contrast, the historical record shows that the founder avoided minimum wage laws, established anti-unionization as the number one task of management, and oversaw 3.3 percent decline in wages over his tenure as CEO (Brea-Solís et al. 2015).

Labor organizing at Walmart The intense avoidance of union collective bargaining by Walmart reflects the importance of extraction of value from labor to its business model. While collectively negotiating workplace rules always means a reduction in managerial discretion and risk of loss of competitiveness to firms retaining unilateral managerial decision-making, the consistency, comprehensiveness, level of investment of Walmart management’s struggle against unionism has underscored the centrality of managerial control over labor to the company. Through the company’s actions, its management conveyed understanding of their dialectical relationship with workers. It is a relationship of interdependence, in which the strategy of each party reflects their understanding of that of the other party. Conditions such as wage rates and hours, then, are outcomes of the two parties’ efforts to implement their strategies, and the reason that in each chapter of this book, the workers’ and managements’ initiatives are presented as actions and counteractions, continuously interrelated. Worker efforts to improve terms and conditions of employment at Walmart, then, must contend with the company’s use of economic, political, and social forms of power. The obstacles to establishing union collective bargaining at Walmart have been formidable, as detailed in the previous section of this chapter. Walmart has always used the power of US labor law to intimidate workers against unionizing and penalize them when

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they attempt, of reserve workers present in US labor markets, and of patriarchy to propel its growth. The labor process in retail has presented further obstacles to workers’ goal of union collective bargaining. In retail, workers are dispersed from each other across many stores and within each store, providing them much less capacity to disrupt their employer’s process of value accumulation, especially compared to workers at a port or assembly line where they are concentrated and might disrupt profits by halting their work (Edwards 1979; Silver 2003). The possibilities of working-to-rule and ‘go-slows’ are also limited, both by dispersion of workers and the interruption of workers’ interactions by the need to attend to store customers (Reich and Bearman 2018). Management’s disciplining of retail workers is reinforced by customers’ demands and facilitated by the use of technologies that permit realtime supervision of workers, such as hand-held scanners and video surveillance. In Walmart’s case, management has used technology to centralize decisions on the number of work hours to be employed by each store, positioning individual store managers to merely allocate the hours among workers (Lichtenstein 2008). The resulting tendency is then for workers to be more concerned about their treatment by direct managers and customers than the company itself (Reich and Bearman 2018). While often naturalized, the labor process in a Walmart store also clearly reflects strategic decisions by management to advance its interest in growth through the exploitation of labor. To understand the potential for workers to construct countervailing power to Walmart management, this section reviews key moments in worker initiatives to change employment relations at the retailer and applies the dignity-based model of bargaining power to understand why little progress toward decent work has resulted. The history of worker efforts to improve employment at Walmart in the United States indicates two patterns in which the means have compromised the ends. One is the lack of worker participation in efforts to improve employment relations at the company. The low participation has been attributed typically and in part correctly to workers’ awareness that the company would retaliate against them. It also reflects lack of support to mitigate this risk from existing unions and labor advocates. If dignity is the catalyst to building workers’ bargaining power, as argued throughout this book, then low levels of worker participation diminished the possibility of a power-building process from the outset. Labor initiatives at Walmart began with low investment in workers’ participation in the company’s early years, when workers faced the best chances for establishing union collective bargaining, given the company’s modest size at the time. In the decades that followed, initiatives were marked by overwhelming anxiety that something is to be done and evident disbelief that something could be accomplished, as the company gained power and political support for collective bargaining waned. The second pattern is organizational fetishism, demonstrated by

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some union and non-union organizations that have advocated for better working conditions at Walmart. The belief that power derives from organizations, as opposed to the workers comprising the organization, manifest in campaign after campaign that sought to achieve better working conditions at Walmart without prioritizing worker participation. The record, that employment at Walmart has continued to be insufficient for livelihoods, underscores the impossibility of riding a half wheel of associational power. Without matching organization with processes of dignity between workers, the solidarity half of the wheel is missing, workers cannot build bargaining power, and decent work remains an abstract possibility.

Historical snapshot of labor organizing at Walmart No group of workers has ever succeeded in establishing union collective bargaining at Walmart in the United States. The first union organizing drive was a response to Walmart’s firing of Connie Kreyling for discussing unionization at a store in Missouri in 1972. The St. Louis-based Retail Clerks Union arranged a few pickets (Ortega 1998; Lichtenstein 2008) to encourage her and fellow workers to elect union representation, but management overwhelmed the effort by threatening to fire more workers for union support (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 201 N.L.R.B 250, 251 (1973) quoted in Lichtenstein 2008). The International Brotherhood of Teamsters led the next union drive at Walmart, with drivers and warehouse workers at distribution centers in Bentonville and Searcy, Arkansas from 1978 through 1982. The campaign again did not overcome management’s intimidation of workers and use of lenient national policy, evinced by merely requiring the posting of notices after violating the labor laws. Management’s vehement resistance seemingly halted unionization. Nearly two decades passed before the next major union drives at Walmart, during which the company became the largest food seller in the United States and retailer worldwide. In the late 1990s, the UFCW sought to defend the conditions established for their 800,000 members at other companies, which then accounted for more than half of US food sales (Lichtenstein 2008). Walmart was paying an estimated 30 percent lower wage rate than the companies with union contracts with the UFCW (Lichtenstein 2008). The union sent staff to organize primarily meat department workers at 300 Walmart stores and filed 288 unfair labor practice charges against the firm between 1998 and 2003. The interim changed the parties’ bargaining power. In the 20 years between the Teamsters and UFCW initiatives, Walmart grew from 40,000 to 1.1 million workers, 315 to 3,996 stores, and $1.2 billion to $166.8 billion in annual revenue (Walmart 2021a) while union membership declined from 17.7 million (20.1 percent of workers) to 14.3 million (10.8 percent of workers) in the United States (Bureau of Labor Statistics). While resources available to the parties do not determine employment relations,

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they are at least partially indicative of strike leverage. To roughly compare the resources available to withstand a strike, US unions could have matched Walmart’s revenue dollar-for-dollar with $6.43 from each member during the first union drive at Walmart but would have needed $7,359 from each member in 1998, and by 2020, $36,761 from each member.30 In response to the UFCW-led campaigns, Walmart demonstrated its unprecedented market power and support from state labor policies. After meat department workers voted to unionize at a Walmart in Texas, the retailer eliminated its meat departments from all US stores, a demonstration of power repeated by closing its entire store in Jonquiere, Quebec, after workers gained collective bargaining rights in 2005. Under Walmart’s leadership of food retail, conditions deteriorated across the sector. When UFCW contracts came up for renegotiation in Los Angeles, leading grocers at the time Safeway, Albertson’s, and Kroger locked out 59,000 union workers, and the union conceded wage and healthcare benefit reductions in order to salvage a collective bargaining relationship (Milkman 2004). In the wake of Walmart’s defeat of union campaigns seeking to use the NLRA system, labor organizations experimented with alternative approaches. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) began two parallel projects to organize workers at the company into the Wal-Mart Workers Association (WWA) and members of the communities around its stores into the Wal-Mart Alliance for Reform Now (WARN). The project’s leader Wayne Rathke (2005a) articulated the logic: Workers would organize if they were offered the opportunity to do so. If they could form and fashion an organization by their own rules and requirements, in order to engage their employer directly on their own self-interest and issues, they would do so. They would join. They would pay dues. They would articulate and identify their own issues, and they—like tens of millions of workers before and after them— would confront the employer and their supervisors when they thought they needed to do so in ways that they felt would be effective. The broad approach toward Walmart gained some traction. Rathke (2005a) reported that in WWA’s initial organizing drive in Florida, approximately half of workers engaged joined as dues-paying members. The WARN project proceeded as one of several “sight fights,” community-based efforts to oppose Walmart’s opening of new stores due to the retailer’s environmental degradation, effective closures of local businesses, reliance on welfare to subsidize its workers, and lobbying for tax breaks (Marie 2002; Berger and Bolton 2004; Warren 2005; Green and Mason 2005).31 More than 200 municipalities blocked Walmart openings (Warren 2005), although the company was then opening 200–300 stores per year (Walmart 2021a). Some participants connected community and labor organizing. As Dorian Warren

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(2005) wrote, “Organizing people—in their geographic communities as well as their workplace—to demand a say in economic policy decisions that affect their lives … builds organizational capacity while also drawing upon the often underutilized networks in which workers are organically embedded.” Yet disconnects weakened the potency of a coalitional effort toward Walmart. For many community initiatives focused on keeping the retailer out, unionism was not the priority, and a labor movement united on the priority of establishing union collective bargaining at Walmart did not materialize (Fletcher 2013). With fissures apparent, the retailer picked off and divided potential coalition participants. The company exchanged construction work for support for openings from the building trades unions and signed “community benefit agreements” with activists that lacked requirements on workers’ rights to unionize and enforcement mechanisms (Featherstone 2011; Lichtenstein 2011). While community efforts were underway, national unions began a series of experiments focused on publicly shaming Walmart. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) launched Walmart Watch. The union sought to experiment given the failed store-by-store attempts to unionize at Walmart and the retailer’s downward pressure on wages economy-wide, according to an interviewed unionist involved with the effort. The SEIU apparently also sought to apply the “corporate campaign” model—involving pressure on investors, corporate reputations, customers, and politicians—that it used to expand membership in the 1990s, most prominently in its “Justice-for-Janitors” campaign.32 However, Walmart Watch did not proceed similarly. The SEIU hired a political strategist to lead the campaign, was sued for it by Walmart for defamation, and shut it down in exchange for a commitment to support national healthcare reform by the retailer’s CEO (Featherstone 2007). The UFCW picked up the experimentation baton and launched the “Wake Up Walmart” campaign. The political strategist hired by the union to lead the campaign articulated the strategy, which notably did not reference workers: We are the ones who shop at Wal-Mart. Together, we have the power to change Wal-Mart … We will be a vehicle through which millions of Americans can join together, from neighborhoods all across our nation, to harness the power of our consumer behavior and use it to reform a company … By educating the American public about Wal-Mart’s negative impact, building community coalitions at the local level, and working with elected officials, we will begin to put public pressure on Wal-Mart to change its ways and do the right thing for America. (Blank 2005) The public shaming may have contributed to Walmart decisions to burnish its reputation. The company raised media attention around its delivery of

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aid to hurricane victims, statements that it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and statements that the US Congress should increase the national minimum wage. Its annual reports increased coverage of the company’s charitable donations. Indicating continuity in practice, a senior manager acknowledged the low level of healthcare benefits the company offered to employees and that the company had shifted to majority part-time workers to lower payments of benefits (Greenhouse and Barbaro 2005). The next attempt to improve employment at Walmart was the Organization United for Respect at Walmart campaign (OUR Walmart). The UFCW established OUR Walmart in 2010, replacing its Wake Up Walmart campaign and hiring a union organizer to lead the new approach. OUR Walmart aimed to pressure the retailer to improve pay, benefits, and working conditions without pursuing union recognition or collective bargaining. Walmart would have no duty to negotiate with the nonunion organization, but OUR Walmart could support workers to collectively act to improve their terms and conditions of employment and expect the NLRB to enforce unfair labor practice charges when the company retaliated. The rationale for creative approaches to improving employment relations at Walmart was clear. “Collective bargaining requires two parties committed to at least a minimal level of good faith in practice and a concession of countervailing level of power between management and labor,” reminded Rathke (2005b). Walmart had consistently rejected such a commitment and concession of power throughout its history. Labor scholar Michael Oswalt (2016) suggested “the customary function of unions—acting as employees’ exclusive agents at work—has hit a wall, so some of the movement’s energy needs to be directed at something new.” What the approach(es) might be was, however, unclear. “If the next big idea was readily at hand … someone would have thought of it,” observed former NLRB Chairwoman Wilma Leibman (quoted in Oswalt 2016). Long-time labor organizer and scholar Bill Fletcher (2013) emphasized the importance of action and fundamentals, highlighting “the strategic importance of successfully organizing Walmart” to all workers’ livelihoods and arguing, “in the absence of building a stable labor union, any and all victories that may be won by the workers will be fragile, at best.” OUR Walmart initially appeared to be creatively using the liminal space between protected concerted activity under the NLRA and the union recognition elections that Walmart had time-and-again defeated. The UFCW provided funding, a part of which continued the PR strategies by hiring the political strategy consultancy ASGK Public Strategies (Greenhouse 2011). OUR Walmart surveyed workers at the retailer, visited them at their homes, and linked organizers and workers (Wood 2015). The campaign reported 50 dues-paying members in stores in 2011 (Greenhouse 2011) and 4,000 total members in 2012 (Berfield 2012b), about 0.27 percent of Walmart’s employees in the United States at the time (Walmart 2021a). The campaign published a declaration of demands that Walmart

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respect freedoms of association and speech, increase pay and benefits “to ensure that no Associate has to rely on government assistance,” end ondemand scheduling, and set and implement policies to respect pregnant workers (Greenhouse 2011; Oswalt 2016). OUR Walmart then organized the first reported strikes in Walmart’s then 50-year history (Logan 2014). The campaign coordinated strikes and protests at Walmart stores in 46 states on “black Friday,” the day after the US Thanksgiving holiday that the retailer’s marketing had helped turn into the largest shopping day of the year. An estimated 400–500 Walmart employees participated alongside some 30,000 activists (Berfield 2012b; Eidelson 2013). OUR Walmart repeated the actions the following year, again with hundreds of Walmart workers joined by thousands of activists. In between, the organization led smaller actions, including “flash mobs” in Walmart stores, projections of protest images onto store exteriors, demonstrations in the retailer’s parking lots, and a two-week bus tour in which 100 Walmart workers led protests across the country (Wood 2015). Once again, however, Walmart applied favorable US labor policy, and the national unions retreated. The retailer fired dozens of workers who participated in strikes, disciplined others, temporarily shut down the store where the first strike occurred, and obtained seven statewide injunctions barring activists from its property.33 The company also charged OUR Walmart and the UFCW with violating an NLRB ruling that had been interpreted as prohibiting intermittent strikes. While the legality of banning intermittent strikes remains questionable,34 had the NLRB ruled for the company, the fine charged may have imperiled the UFCW’s ability to fulfill its legal and strategic duty to represent its members, including negotiating contracts and filing grievances. Two months after the “black Friday” strike of 2012, the UFCW wrote to the NLRB that OUR Walmart “has no intent to have Wal-Mart recognize or bargain with it as the representative of Wal-Mart employees” (quoted in Greenhouse 2013). The union filed more ULPs, charging Walmart with retaliation against workers for concerted activity, but stopped funding OUR Walmart. Worker participation declined, and the wave of direct actions passed. While OUR Walmart reemerged as a nonprofit labor advocacy organization, Walmart appeared unmoved. The organization replaced union funding with grants from private foundations, changed its name to United for Respect (UFR) to expand beyond Walmart,35 and attempted new tactics. UFR lobbied for regulation of scheduling, contributing to “fair workweek” laws enacted in multiple jurisdictions,36 and its campaigning contributed to Walmart implementing better accommodations for pregnant workers and family leave. It also led a class action lawsuit that resulted in some severance pay to workers laid off when private equity investors led the toy retailer Toys ‘R Us through bankruptcy.37 The reorganization into UFR as an NGO funded by foundations has also influenced its activities. For the same reason that workers funding their union

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with dues contributes to union leaders’ attention to their representational duties to the workers, organizational reliance on foundation funding creates a dynamic in which the funders influence the organizations’ activities. Unsurprisingly, staff at UFR with worker organizing responsibilities have reported pressure to prioritize activities designed to sustain funding from foundations, such as media events, over engaging and organizing workers. A UFR staff organizer expressed the tension bluntly, writing: Organizers are given no time to focus on building relationships with their workers … It is irresponsible to ask workers to strike without any support from their co-workers … even worse to then demobilize them after, where they will likely face retaliation from the boss and have no support from us because we are now forced to work on the next big press event. (Leo 2020) As the UFR organizer alludes to, disconnects between an organization’s leadership and the workers it aims to support diminish labor’s bargaining power now and into the future by eroding perception of collective action as an effective means of social change. Such disconnects may also reflect decline in union density, which risks loss of knowledge on how to build and use bargaining power. For example, after establishing union collective bargaining through direct action at Sakuma Brothers, the new union Familias Unidas por la Justicia was called by long-established unions in its area for strategic strike advice, for their current members had never participated in one. “We’re running on fumes” is how a retail industry organizer described the epistemic risk.

Insufficient processes of dignity within labor initiatives targeting Walmart The dignity-based model of bargaining power helps to understand why labor efforts to establish decent terms and conditions of employment at Walmart have not succeeded. Clearly, a part of the explanation lies in Walmart’s business model based on extraction of value from labor. The negation of workers’ dignity primarily reflects the company’s applied business model of extraction of value from labor. Secondarily, indicated by the brief history of labor initiatives focused on Walmart, it reflects insufficient associational power building by the labor movement in its home country. Figure 5.1 synthesizes the low level of capacity to act as a collective developed among workers at Walmart in the United States and its weakening effects on overall bargaining power with the company. As modeled in Figure 5.1, precarious terms and conditions of employment have remained since the Walmart’s founding in part due to low levels of associational power among workers at the company. The poor employment relations include the company’s rejection of workers’ rights to

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Precarious Employment

Capacity to Act as Collective

Coalition

Capacity to Disrupt

Enforceable Laws & Contracts

Decent Work

Human dignity - FOA & collective bargaining (CB) rejected by Walmart - Poverty wages - Gender-based discrimination - On-demand work scheduling - Lack of health-care access

+ Workers seek union1970s-2000s + Walmart Workers Association + 1.5 worker participants in gender discrimination lawsuit + OUR Walmart union & worker center tactics - Low & late investment in organizing - OUR Walmart membership