Industrial Workers of the World - Agricultural Workers Industrial Union 110

Gunkist Oranges

x344543 — Sun, 13 Sep 2015 17:35:38 +0000

By Gustavo Arellano - Orange County Weekly, June 8, 2006

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

BITE ON

Seventy years ago this week, Orange County’s most brutally suppressed strike began with a bite.

On June 15, 1936, at the break of dawn, about 200 Mexican women gathered in Anaheim to preach the gospel of huelga—strike. Four days earlier, about 2,500 Mexican naranjeros representing more than half of Orange County’s crucial citrus-picking force dropped their clippers, bags and ladders to demand higher wages, better working conditions and the right to unionize.

The women spread across the groves of Anaheim, the heart of citrus country, urging workers to let the fruit hang. Twenty Anaheim police officers confronted the women; they refused to disperse. At some point there was an altercation, and 29-year-old Placentia resident Virginia Torres bit the arm of Anaheim police officer Roger Sherman. Police arrested Torres, along with 30-year-old Epifania Marquez, who tried to yank a strikebreaker—a scab—from a truck by grabbing onto his suspenders.

Little else is known about the Fort Sumter of Orange County—newspaper accounts say only that Torres and Marquez received jail sentences of 60 and 30 days, respectively. But Orange County responded with an organized wrath years in the planning. Growers enlisted the local chapters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion to guard fields. They evicted families of strikers from their company-owned houses. The English-language press became a bulletin board for the growers—The Santa Ana Register, for instance, described the 200 Mexican women in Anaheim as “Amazons with fire of battle in their eyes.”

Orange County Sheriff Logan Jackson deputized citrus orchard guards and provided them with steel helmets, shotguns and ax handles. The newly minted cops began arresting strikers en masse, more than 250 by strike’s end. When that didn’t stop the strike, they reported workers to federal immigration authorities. When that didn’t work, out came the guns and clubs. Tear gas blossomed in the groves. Mobs of citrus farmers and their supporters attacked under cover of darkness.

What county residents tried to dismiss as a fruitless strike quickly escalated into a full-fledged civil war in which race and class were inseparable. The Mexicans of Orange County, the county’s historical source of cheap labor, were finally asking for better working conditions; their gabacho overlords wouldn’t hear it. And so both sides fought for a month until the lords of Orange County won.

Wonder why Orange County trembles whenever its Mexicans protest? Welcome to the Citrus War of 1936, the most important event in Orange County history you’ve never heard of.

With Fewer Migrant Workers, Farmers Turn to Prison Labor

x344543 — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 17:32:00 +0000

Disclaimer - The opinions of the author do not necessarily match those of the IWW. This article is reposted in accordance to Fair Use guidelines.

By Nicole Hill, Christian Science Monitor. Posted August 22, 2007.

Weren't employers who lose access to cheap foreign labor supposed to start paying Americans fair wages?

Picacho, Ariz. -- Near this dusty town in southeastern Arizona, Manuel Reyna pitches watermelons into the back of a trailer hitched to a tractor. His father was a migrant farm worker, but growing up, Mr. Reyna never saw himself following his father's footsteps. Now, as an inmate at the Picacho Prison Unit here, Reyna works under the blazing desert sun alongside Mexican farmers the way his father did.

Nyeri coffee farmers rage at Starbucks officials

x344543 — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 00:58:00 +0000

By Moses Njagih and agencies - The Standard, December 2, 2006.

Angry farmers from a coffee factory in Nyeri District have blasted officials of the Starbucks Coffee Company for refusing to respond to their questions on a project the multinational is undertaking in the area.

The American coffee retailer is involved in the Kenya Heartland Coffee project, to help farmers to improve the quality of their crop.

But during a visit by Starbuck officials, irate farmers of Kihuyo Coffee Factory accused Mr James Donald, the company’s president, of using them to rake in billions in profits. The American official had tough meetings with Ethiopian coffee growers earlier in the week.

Kihuyo and Kiamariga factories in Mathira division are involved in the Heartland project.

"Starbucks interests are only in making profits from our coffee, and yet they are not even mindful about our welfare," asked Mr John Kabira, a farmer.

Immokalee Workers Take Down Taco Bell

x344543 — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 20:19:00 +0000

Disclaimer - The following article is reposted here because it is an issue with some relevance to the IWW. The views of the author do not necessarily agree with those of the IWW and vice versa.

By Elly Leary - Monthly Review, October 2005

On March 8, 2005, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Immokalee, Florida won a significant victory. In a precedent-setting move, fast-food giant Yum! Brands Inc., the world’s largest restaurant corporation, agreed to all the farm workers’ demands (and more!) if the CIW would end the four-year-old boycott of its subsidiary Taco Bell. (Yum!, a spin off from Pepsi, includes Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, A&W, Long John Silver’s, and Pizza Hut franchises.) As United Farm Workers (UFW) president Arturo Rodriguez commented at the victory celebration, “It is the most significant victory since the successful grape boycott led by the UFW in the 1960s in the fields of California.”

El Acuerdo/The Agreement