The 1985–1987 Watsonville Cannery strike was a labor strike that involved over 1,000 workers at two food processing facilities in Watsonville, California, United States. The facilities were owned by Watsonville Canning and Richard A. Shaw Inc., two of the largest frozen food processors in the United States, while the workers were all union members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) Local 912. The strike began on September 9, 1985, and completely ended about 18 months later, on March 11, 1987.
The city of Watsonville has historically been a center for the food processing industry in California, and by the mid-1900s, it had branded itself as the "frozen food capital of the world", with eight frozen food processing plants in the city. These plants were in an industry-wide labor contract with IBT Local 912, who represented several thousand employees in the city. By the 1980s, due to an increase in migration from Mexico, a large number of these food processing workers were Latinos. Around that same time, changes in the food processing industry caused the Watsonville plants to become less profitable, and in 1982, Watsonville Canning (the single-largest frozen food processor in the United States) negotiated an hourly wage decrease for their union employees from $7.06 to $6.66. In 1985, their labor contract had expired, and Watsonville Canning began pushing for further wage and employee benefits reductions. Richard A. Shaw Inc., another major food processing company in the city, similarly began requesting wage and benefits reductions, which were opposed by the local union. On September 9, union members from both companies began a strike, with picketing commencing shortly thereafter.
The strike received significant support from the local Latino community, with support coming from Chicano and Hispanic organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Mexican American Political Association. Additionally, civil rights leaders Cesar Chavez and Jesse Jackson were supportive of the strikers, viewing the labor dispute as part of a larger struggle for civil rights for Latinos in the United States. Additional support came from organized labor activists in both northern California and nationwide, and the strike was characterized by its militancy and rank-and-file leadership. The strikers elected their own Strike Committee that managed the overall daily operations of the strike, and the Teamsters for a Democratic Union also contributed to organizing the strike. On February 14, 1986, Shaw and Local 912 agreed to an hourly wage of $5.85, which soon became the industry standard. However, the strike continued against Watsonville Canning through 1986. In August, the company tried to decertify the union in an election, but failed, and subsequently the company (which had taken on a large debt during this time) declared bankruptcy, with the plant being sold. A tentative contract was reached with the new owners in March 1987 that set wages to the industry standard but contained cuts to medical benefits. While the IBT declared the strike over, several workers continued the dispute as a wildcat strike that lasted for about a week before the company agreed to include medical benefits, with the strike finally coming to an end on March 11.
Labor historians note the significance of the strike as one of the few successful strikes in the United States during the 1980s, compared to other strikes of the time such as the Arizona copper mine strike of 1983 and the 1985–1986 Hormel strike, with the Northwest Labor Press calling it "a rare union victory during an era of union-busting". In Watsonville, the strike coincided with increased political activity from the Latino community. Oscar Rios, a union organizer during the strike, was elected as the city's first Latino mayor several years later, stating, "The strikers helped change the politics in our city and county". However, in the years following the strike, most of the major food processors relocated from the city, with only one frozen food plant left in the city by 2000.
Background
Food processing industry in Watsonville
Watsonville is a city located about south of San Francisco, in the Monterey Bay area. Founded in the mid-1800s by Americans from the east coast and European immigrants, the city had become a major food processing center by the early 1900s. Due largely to its location near the agriculturally productive Pajaro Valley and Salinas Valley regions (which by the 1960s were responsible for about 80 percent of vegetable production in the United States), Watsonville was a major canning location for vegetables grown in the area, such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower. By the 1950s, food processors in the city began freezing this food instead of canning, and soon the city was home to eight frozen food plants, earning it the nickname of the "frozen food capital of the world". By 1986, the city, with a population of about 27,000, was processing about 40 percent of the frozen broccoli, Brussels sprouts, green peppers, and spinach produced in the United States.
By the mid-1980s, the city's industry was dominated by two firms in particular: the Watsonville Canning Company and Richard A. Shaw Inc. Together, these two companies accounted for about 80 percent of Watsonville's frozen food output. These two firms were also the largest frozen food processors in the United States. Watsonville Canning, the larger of the two, was the largest frozen food processing company in the United States. It employed about 5,000 people and processed roughly half of the United States's supply of frozen vegetables. The company, which by the 1980s was owned by Watsonville native Mort Console, produced frozen vegetables for Birds Eye and private supermarket brands.
Latinos in the area In 1900, Watsonville had a population of 3,528, of which only 118 were from Mexico. Many of the food processing workers in Watsonville were Portuguese or Slavic. However, as the agricultural industry in the region grew through the 1900s, more Mexican immigrants came to the area to find work through the Bracero program. Starting in the 1960s, the industry began recruiting female workers, primarily Mexican immigrants from South Texas, to work in the Pajaro Valley. Watsonville's food processing industry provided many of these immigrants with more stable employment than that of farmworkers, and the city became a center of a growing Latino population. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the city grew at an annual rate of about 38 percent, due in large part to Latino immigration, and many during this time were able to rise into the middle class. By the 1980s, Latinos made up a majority of the city's population, making it the first California city north of Fresno to hold that distinction. Among frozen food workers in the city, nine out of ten were Latino.
However, despite the change in demographics, white Americans still held most of the economic and political power in the city. Discrimination against Latinos was common in Watsonville, with housing discrimination being a major issue. In 1969, some Latino students at Watsonville High School held a walkout and boycott of classes, demanding that more Latino teachers and employees be hired by the school. By 1985, the mayor, fire chief and police chief were all white, and only one member of the city council was Latino. Additionally, Watsonville Canning was white-owned. Regarding the economic disparities between Latinos and white Americans, scholar Erik Davis once referred to Watsonville as "a poor town with a large, struggling migrant population".
Union activity Through the 1930s and 1940s, labor unions began a concerted effort to unionize food processing workers in the southwestern United States. These efforts primarily targeted Latina workers and involved high-ranking Latina labor leaders, such as Luisa Moreno, Manuela Solis Sager, and Emma Tenayuca. Militant unions such as the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union (CAWIU), the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), and the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers (FTA), were largely responsible for these early efforts and led to large-scale strike actions such as the 1938 San Antonio pecan shellers strike. Both the UCAPAWA and the FTA were affiliate unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which had been founded in the 1930s as an alternative to the more conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL). In the mid-1940s, the AFL-affiliated International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) began to also organize workers in California, often in direct competition to union efforts from the FTA. The IBT's organization efforts were aided by the California Processors and Growers (CPG), an employers' organization representing agricultural businesses in the state, who supported the comparatively conservative IBT over the FTA. In 1950, following the passage of the Taft–Hartley Act, the FTA was expelled from the CIO, leading to the IBT becoming the dominant union in the industry. The IBT worked closely with business interests to create "sweetheart" contracts that were generally favorable to the companies, and in 1949, Edward T. Console, owner of Watsonville Canning, signed the first labor contract between a Watsonville food processing company and the IBT, setting a wage pattern for the city's industry as a whole. Under these industry-wide agreements, the Watsonville canneries would pay the same wages and offer the same benefits. Due in large part to these favorable contracts and conservativeness of the IBT, the food processing industry in California would not see a major industrial dispute for the next three decades.
Local 912 In 1952, with assistance from the owners of Watsonville Canning, IBT Local 912 was organized in Watsonville to represent cannery workers in the city, and by 1986, they represented almost all of the roughly 4,000 food processing workers in Watsonville. By the mid-1990s, roughly one out of every four Watsonville residents were members of Local 912. This local union was closely aligned with the local business interests, leading to some researchers calling it a "company union" that "was controlled by a corrupt leadership". According to activist Frank Bardacke, "the bosses allowed the union officials a good deal of personal power, as long as they refrained from challenging the employer's prerogatives in production or encouraging workers to organize themselves". Some of the union leaders would socialize and play poker with cannery officials, and Richard King, who served as the secretary-treasurer for several years before becoming the local's president in 1967, was the father-in-law of a business partner at Richard A. Shaw. As the head of the local, he was generally uninvolved in union activities, rarely attending union meetings, and some rank and file union members were critical of his accommodationist approach to labor-management relations.