[A closer look] Union may boycott winery

SONOMA “”mdash; Escaping the sweltering Sonoma County sun during
his 30-minute Friday lunch break, 60-year-old Domingo Garcia
stopped eating his meal of oranges, strawberries, a large cucumber
and burrito to explain why students should know about the recent
struggle between the United Farm Workers and E.&J. Gallo
Winery. “It’d be good if they got an idea where the
fruits and vegetables they eat come from,” Garcia said,
speaking through a translator and pointing to his lunch. Garcia has
worked for Gallo for about 24 years, doing various jobs at the
nation’s largest winery. He said he makes $10.30 an hour and
joined the UFW more than 10 years ago. Garcia and other unionized
UFW workers at Gallo’s vineyards in Sonoma have been without
a contract for more than 19 months after the original agreement
expired in November 2003. The UFW and Gallo have since fought a
series of battles over decertification of the union and
negotiations for a contract. And as the UFW gears up for a national
boycott of the winery in the coming months, some UCLA students are
helping the union prepare for action. Fourth-year sociology student
Michelle Senchez drives to the downtown County Federation of Labor
offices each Friday to call labor unions and organizations to join
in the potential boycott. Most of the groups she contacts are in
San Francisco because if announced, that’s where the boycott
will be. “(Gallo workers) need to get a contract; they need
to get paid more,” Senchez said. The road to a contract Gallo
of Sonoma, a newer, more upscale segment of the E.&J. Gallo
Winery, first signed a contract with UFW workers in 2000. But in
less than three years, that contract would be gone, and the farm
workers would again be without formal union representation. Eight
months before the contract expired in November 2003, workers voted
to decertify the union, formally removing the UFW as their
representation to Gallo management. But Gallo and the UFW disagree
on why workers chose to leave the union. While Gallo said its
workers no longer wanted union representation, the UFW says the
company illegally influenced workers to decertify the union before
the contract’s end. “The workers have voted to
decertify because they felt they weren’t getting the union
representation that they voted for,” said Gallo spokesman
John Segale. But the UFW said the decertification vote had been
rigged and Gallo used illegal intimidation practices to coax
workers into signing petitions necessary for decertification.
Eriverto Ramirez Andrade, a 29-year-old farm worker from Campeche,
Mexico, said he first began working for Gallo of Sonoma in 1997,
and that before the UFW’s contract with Gallo expired in 2003
a foreman presented him with a petition to decertify the union.
Speaking through a translator, Andrade said he signed the petition
without having knowledge of the matter at hand. Ruling that Gallo
of Sonoma violated the law by illegally trying to decertify the
union, a California judge overturned the UFW’s
decertification in December 2003 after the testimony of Andrade and
others. “The basic abuse is that they are trying to destroy
the union,” said Irv Hershenbaum, first vice president of the
UFW. Hershenbaum said the UCLA community should be embarrassed that
Matt Gallo, Gallo of Sonoma’s vice president of coastal
operations, was a Bruin. “He’s an alumnus. …
He’s guilty of union busting and using the vast resources of
the Gallo family to fight against the most exploited
workers,” Hershenbaum said. Matt Gallo declined an interview
for this article. Segale said the UFW walked out of negotiation
talks on Aug. 31, 2004, and since then the two parties
haven’t come back to bargaining. “We’re the
largest unionized winery in the United States. And we have a long
history of effectively negotiating contracts with a variety of
unions over the years,” Segale said. “We want to sit
down and negotiate; it’s the union that is clogging the
process up.”

Union concerns, company abuses The majority of Gallo’s
workers are hired through farm labor contractors, Hershenbaum said,
a tactic Gallo uses to try and escape the responsibility of
providing proper health care, a system of advancement, and living
wages to workers. Hershenbaum said using contractors also keeps
workers in poverty and leads to poor living conditions. Twenty-nine
men hired by a subcontractor and working for Gallo of Sonoma were
found by authorities in April in Windsor, a nearby town, cramped
into a small house. Steve Pantazes, Windsor building official, said
the house was uninhabitable and residents had each been paying rent
to a landlord. “It was substandard in almost every
way,” Pantazes said. “There was exposed wiring, the
plumbing wasn’t connected to the septic system. … There was
no heat; there was mold on the wall. Every room, including the
garage and the room attached to the garage, were being
occupied.” Hershenbaum says Gallo hires three-fourths of its
Sonoma County workforce through labor contractors, abusing that
system. Antonio Campa, a 51-year-old farm worker from Xalisco,
Mexico, said he has worked for Gallo for 26 years and joined the
UFW in 1993 because he was being treated poorly and wanted
representation. “Not only the foreman but also the
supervisors treated us bad,” Campa said, speaking through a
translator. “My wife goes to the hospital one to two times
each month, and it gets expensive.”

A reputation of innovation Segale said the union’s charges
against Gallo of poor mistreatment of workers is misdirected and
that Gallo has always been worker and union friendly. Other wine
growers said Gallo has a good reputation as an industry innovator.
Duff Bevill, president of the Sonoma County Grape Growers
Association, said Gallo helped innovate the way wine was fermented.
“Back in the early 1950’s, (Gallo) did some pretty
remarkable in-house research,” Bevill said. Some of the
research included stainless-steel refrigerated fermentation, which
Bevill says has now became standard throughout the industry. Bevill
added that he thought unions were hampering both growers and
workers. “From what I’ve seen, I don’t think
there’s been any value (to unions), at least not locally.
It’s been my observation that there’s been little value
to the employees,” he said. Karen Ross, president of the
California Wine Growers Association, said Gallo was a brilliant
marketer and is becoming a pioneer in the global wine industry and
now has several foreign wine imports. Gallo uses about half of all
of the grapes in California each year, estimated between 1 million
and 1.5 million tons, Ross said, and because it is so large, the
company is being singled out by unions. “I think it’s
unfortunate that when you’re large it makes you an easy
target,” Ross said. But the UFW says Gallo’s 2003
annual sales were around $2 billion and that Gallo is the largest
U.S. owned winery in the world. Because the company is so large,
the UFW says change in its policies could have an effect on the
entire market. In a May 2005 letter to Gallo President Joseph E.
Gallo, Service Employees International Union President Andrew Stern
said his union’s 1.8 million members support the UFW.
“As a leader, your actions can set the tone for tens of
thousands of farm workers. Your company has an image that is very
well known and it would be a mistake to damage it by union-busting
activity,” Stern wrote.

A possible boycott Howard Rosenberg, cooperative extension
specialist at UC Berkeley, said the situation between the UFW and
Gallo is hardly unusual. “There’s often tension of
interests between employees and employers in any industry,”
Rosenberg said. “The classic tension is how do you share the
surplus. The total production system makes money. How much does
management get and how much does labor get?” If negotiations
are not reached in the near future, the UFW says it will use a
national boycott to pressure Gallo ““ a tactic the company
says only hurts the workers. “If people stop buying Gallo
products, then it’s the Gallo workers that will feel the
impact of that in terms of lost jobs, lost income, fewer hours.
(Boycotts are) not effective. They truly impact the worker and not
the company, and that impact is negative,” Segale said. UFW
organizers in Sonoma have already been performing small
demonstrations, often marching and chanting in front of the Gallo
of Sonoma tasting room in Healdsburg. Kim Hutchinson traveled from
Edgewater, Colo., to tour wine country in both Sonoma and Napa, and
was in the tasting room during one of the union’s
demonstrations. She said she usually drinks wine each day, and she
and her friends were visiting the vineyards. Hutchinson said she
hadn’t known much about the conflict between Gallo and the
UFW but said she would likely support the union and refuse to buy
Gallo wines if a boycott was called. Casimiro Alvarez, the
UFW’s lead organizer of the Gallo Unfair campaign in Sonoma
County, said their current strategy is to educate people about the
struggle. “A lot of communities don’t know how this
company exploits its workers,” Alvarez said.