Two farmworkers, who have left their jobs to work as organizers for the United Farm Workers, hold a meeting at lunchtime in a crew of strawberry pickers. They ask the workers what wage they think is fair for the work they do, and write the answers on a big sheet of butcher paper. This was part of the process of formulating the demands of the workers for the UFW organizing drive in the strawberry industry. 1997
OAKLAND, CA. Most of the media coverage of the recent Supreme Court decision about the farmworker access rule took for granted the way growers, and the court, defined this regulation. Jess Bravin in the Wall Street Journal called it «a regulation giving union organizers the right to visit farmworkers.» The first line of the rightwing majority’s opinion called it «A California regulation [which] grants labor organizations a ‘right to take access’ to an agricultural employer’s property.»
The court, and the growers, deliberately confuse the mechanism of the rule with rights, calling it a right of organizers or organizations. It is not. The right the rule implements is simple. When workers are protesting and organizing a union in the fields, they have a right to talk to union representatives at work. It’s a right of workers, rather than a right of union representatives. Rolling back this right, and the ability of farmworkers to organize against their endemic poverty, is the main target of the Supreme Court’s attack.
At Cedar Point Nursery, the grower that filed the case heard by the court, the stakes were clear. Cedar Point is a nursery growing rootstock for commercial strawberry growers in Dorris, a remote town in northern California near the Oregon border. Hundreds of workers migrate here from their homes in central and southern California every year to harvest, trim and pack the plants.
The Nation, 7/2/21
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/cedar-point-organizing-labor/
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2021/07/whos-taking-from-whom.html
