Workers Of The World - 17

The Two Tiers of Workers at Taylor Farms

Taylor Farms, the world’s largest supplier of cut vegetables and salad, packages produce which ends up at Safeway, Walmart and Costco, as well as McDonald’s, Chipotle, Subway and Starbucks.
Taylor Farms has become a billion-dollar success story by selling organic kale, lettuce, tomatoes and other “healthy, wholesome” choices.
Some workers, however, say that those inside the processing plants face only noxious choices: exploitation, unemployment, deportation.

“If you complain they threaten to call ‘la migra’,” said Rosie Guadaloupe, a former supervisor, using a Latino term for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a Department of Homeland Security agency also known as Ice. “If you don’t have papers, that scares you.”

A half-dozen current and former workers interviewed by the Guardian alleged the company took advantage of undocumented migrants from Mexico and central America to keep workers on “temporary” status year after year, leaving them vulnerable to low pay, dangerous conditions, intimidation and summary firings. The plants, which employ 900 workers, have become a battleground for two powerful forces, with repercussions beyond Tracy.

On one side, Taylor Farms, which earned $1.8bn in revenue in 2012. Its chief executive, Bruce Taylor, is also chairman of Western Growers, a trade association, and scion of an agribusiness dynasty which in previous decades clashed with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union.
On the other, the Teamsters, a heavyweight labour union, and its political allies. The Teamsters wants to unionise the plants, to set an example for other agricultural sectors. Earlier this year its general president, Jim Hoffa, led a rally in Tracy with chants of “Si se puede” (yes we can) and “Teamster power”.
Each side accuses the other of bullying and lying.


Allegations of company abuse, Taylor told the Guardian, were an attempt to smear the company and railroad workers into joining the union against their will.Kim Keller, a Teamster organiser, accused Taylor Farms of hiring thuggish union-busters.
Compared to the dramatic marches, boycotts and hunger strikes of the 1960s and 1970s, when Taylor’s father and grandfather battled lettuce and grape pickers, this contest is less visible. The work takes place not in fields but in nondescript processing plants. And there is a shared reluctance to highlight the presence of undocumented workers. If Ice were to raid the facilities, both sides would lose.

Taylor Farms has two categories of worker in California. A plant at its headquarters in Salinas, which was home to The Grapes of Wrath author John Steinbeck, employs 2,500 Teamster members. They earn above minimum wage and have health insurance, paid holidays and other benefits.
In Tracy, a two-hour drive north, 600 of the 900 workers are “temporary”. They earn at least 50 cents less per hour than Salinas colleagues and have fewer benefits. Some have worked full-time for more than a decade but are still classified as temporary.

One way managers keep restive employees in line, according to current and former workers, is by threatening to introduce E-Verify. E-Verify is a hiring database designed to check whether job applicants are legally eligible to work in the US. In most states, including California, it is voluntary for employers.
To workers in Tracy who lack documents to work legally, it strikes dread. “If you make waves they say they’ll call Ice or that you’ll get e-verified, which means you lose your job,” said one worker.

Keller, the Teamster organiser, said managers’ threats to summon Ice or impose E-Verify were bluffs because the business model hinges on cheap, malleable workers.

Technically, the 600 temporary workers are hired not by Taylor Farms but by two employment agencies, SlingShot and Abel Mendoza. Neither responded to interview requests.
The Teamsters accused Taylor Farms of using the agencies as a fig leaf to exploit vulnerable workers.
Taylor acknowledged differences between his plant in Salinas, which uses E-Verify, and those in Tracy, saying Taylor Farms inherited different hiring arrangements when it bought the Tracy plants in 2005.
Asked about SlingShot and Abel Mendoza’s alleged hiring of undocumented workers, he said: “It’s up to them how they do [their] employment practices.”
However, the CEO rejected claims of inequality, saying the Tracy workers were part of the corporate family.
A big reason for that, said Teamster activists, was fear of E-Verify. They argue the company can and should improve conditions, and permit unionisation, without imposing a screening system which is controversial and not mandated by law.

taken from here