For decades, the United Farm Workers – a powerhouse under American labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez in the 1970s – has declined in size and prominence, its membership falling from 60,000 to around 6,000. Now, after years of scant success in organizing, the UFW has something big to boast about: it has unionized 500 workers at five farms in New York state.
It’s the union’s biggest organizing success in years, and the first time the California-based union has organized in the north-east. The New York victories will increase the union’s membership by 8%, with some labor experts saying these successes show new promise and energy in the long-languishing UFW.
“It’s extraordinary,” said William B Gould IV, a labor law professor at Stanford and former chairman of the California Agricultural Relations Board. “It’s a sharp contrast with everything we’ve seen. There was considerable lethargy with the UFW. This is a significant departure. It’s very surprising and welcome.”
In New York state, the UFW has won union drives at four orchards and one vegetable farm. The vast majority of those unionized are workers from Jamaica or Mexico with H-2A visas to do seasonal work.
Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers, told the Guardian that the victories were made possible by a four-year-old New York law – the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act – which gives farm workers a state-protected right to unionize and prohibits retaliation against farm workers seeking to organize. To ease unionization, the law requires farms to recognize a union once a majority of workers sign pro-union cards.
“It’s amazing. When the laws change, workers really can win,” Romero said.
Explaining why the workers unionized, she said: “Dignity and respect is one reason. In many cases, the housing for farm workers is deplorable.”
Junior Johnson, a Jamaican worker at Wafler Farms, an apple grower, said one reason he backed unionization was the immense pressure to work fast. “We have no say. We have no rights,” Johnson said. “If we go to the morning meeting and a worker wants to complain, the boss says, ‘I don’t want to hear it.’ We have no one beside the union to stand up for us. We have to keep our mouths closed.” Some workers say that if workers speak up, they are told to stay home that day and thus not get paid.
Some growers have pressed workers not to sign union cards, telling them they could avoid paying 3% of their pay toward union dues. But Johnson said: “Because of what we go through daily, I’d be happy to pay more than 3% just to have someone to stand up for us.”
Owen Salmon, a fellow Wafler worker from Jamaica, said: “If a worker speaks up, you can lose your job” – meaning a seasonal worker is not brought back the following year. “If you don’t speak up, you keep your job.”
Santos Mendoza Escamilla, a Mexican worker at Lynn-Ette & Sons, said: “Sometimes we are pushed to work so hard, it doesn’t feel doable. It was always the boss’s word. Now with a union, we feel we have someone pushing back.”
The UFW says it has unionized four apple farms – Wafler Farms, Cahoon Farms, Porpiglia and A&J Kirby – and a vegetable grower, Lynn-Ette. The three biggest unionized farms, Wafler, Cahoon and Lynn-Ette, did not respond to questions from the Guardian.
Two other unions have also been organizing farm workers in New York: the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) and the United Food and Commercial Workers. They have organized two vineyards, a dairy farm and several other farms, around 125 workers in all.
“It was impossible to unionize farm workers before the new law,” said Jessica Garcia, assistant to the president of the Retail Wholesale union. “The new law, it’s made it possible.”
Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens, was the main sponsor of the farm worker legislation. “This is something that people thought couldn’t be done,” she said, noting that progressive lawmakers had struggled for over a decade to enact the legislation. She said the law passed because in 2018, Democrats won control of the state senate for the first time in a decade, giving the party trifecta control.
“We wanted to unapologetically create this environment where the UFW, the RWDSU and other organizations could organize,” Ramos said. “We wanted farmworkers to have a life with dignity.”
The National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935, gave most private-sector workers a federally protected right to unionize. That law did not cover farm workers largely because southern senators wanted to exclude the region’s farm laborers, most of them Black, from coverage.
Kerry Kennedy, head of RFK Human Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group, lobbied hard to enact the New York law. Her father, Bobby Kennedy, was a strong supporter of the UFW and Chavez. Kennedy even lobbied in Albany alongside Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the UFW with Chavez.
“We became involved with farm workers in New York because they had no right to form a union,” Kennedy said.
“They could be fired for attempting to form a union, and they were systematically threatened with deportation if they complained to their employer about working conditions. They had no right to a day off each week. No overtime pay. No unemployment insurance. We worked for about a decade to pass the farm worker Fair Labor Practices Act, and that remedied nearly all those issues.”
Romero said she hoped the UFW would create partnerships with unionized farms to help both workers and growers.
Steve Ammerman, communications director for the New York Farm Bureau, a growers association which lobbied against the unionization law, said only a handful of farms are going through contract negotiation. He said: “It must be a fair process on both sides of the equation, as there have been concerns raised over questionable tactics and false promises used to encourage farmworkers to sign union authorization cards.”
UFW officials denied making any false promises.
Ammerman added that higher wages make it more difficult “for farms in particular, to be able to compete in the marketplace”.
The UFW is seeking to organize more New York farms to add to its five victories – quite a contrast to California, where there have been just six union elections for farm workers since 2016. Labor experts say it has been hard to unionize farm workers in California because the UFW could not use card check – although a new California law now enables that – and because many farms are large operations and fiercely anti-union. Moreover, newly unionized growers sometimes refused to ever agree to a first contract, a bitter frustration for workers.
With California’s new card check law, Antonio De Loera-Brust, the UFW’s communications director, said the successes in New York are “a good preview of what we hope to achieve in California in the next couple of years”.
UFW president Romero said that only three states – New York, California and Hawaii – have laws “where farm workers can organize.” UFW officials point to a conflict in Washington state, where a majority of workers at a large mushroom farm voted to unionize, but the company refused to recognize or bargain with the UFW. That state’s law does not require farms to do so.
“When you’re able to change the law and make it easier and safer for workers to organize, it is always good,” Romero said.
