CHAPTER 1: Short shifts, Long Questions

Raj Chouhan’s first experience as a farmworker in Canada was being loaded into a van at 5 o’clock in the morning with about 30 other people - a van that should only have held 12 people. There were no seat belts and it was cramped. When they got to the fields, he says, he hadn't been expecting heaven, but he had expected to be treated with some respect. When he objected to the labour contractor yelling at an elderly woman he was not only fired on the spot, but he had to find his own way home.

Chouhan had arrived in Vancouver from Punjab, India, in 1973 planning to finish his education and look for work. At the time, there were ads in the Punjabi-language papers for farmworkers. The work was not offered by the growers, but by Punjabi-speaking labour contractors who were paid by the growers. The contractors hired and transported the pickers to and from the fields for a 15-40 per cent cut of the worker’s wages.

After his first short shift, Chouhan tried other contractors, but with similar results. "Sometimes the labour contractors even pushed the workers around physically," he says. The majority of the pickers were women, some illiterate even in Punjabi, and many, particularly among the elderly, spoke little English. Workers sometimes had to work 16 hours a day without adequate breaks and without overtime pay. They were sent into fields just sprayed with pesticides and they seldom had access to such basic things as drinking water. The produce they did pick was often weighed on "suspect" scales and a big chunk of their meager wages went straight into the contractor's pocket.

Naively, Chouhan says, he started to ask around for the organizations that represented farmworkers. He didn’t find one. Two years later he was still doing farm work and still asking questions. "I was at a turkey farm in Langley," he says. "Conditions were very bad and I was in a small room with one other worker collecting eggs. I started asking him why there was no organization to represent the farmworkers. Well, it turned out the guy was the farmer’s son, so that ended that job."

Chouhan didn’t get any satisfactory answers until 1974. He was working in a sawmill with Harminder Mahill, an International Woodworkers of America union rep and editor of the union newspaper. "We talked alot about the farmworkers and around that time I read a book on union leader Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in California. I talked to labour leaders here about the farmworkers and while they all supported the struggle in California, they didn’t seem to think same approach would work in B.C. because of the transient, seasonal nature of the work here," Chouhan says. Chavez and the United Farm Workers’ struggle were to remain an inspiration for Chouhan. He was convinced a similar movement could work in Canada.

The agricultural industry was ripe for change during the late 1970s. Immigration to Canada from India had blossomed and the use of East Indian immigrants for farm work around Vancouver had increased from fewer than 500 workers in 1970 to about 5,000 in 1978. Many of the immigrants came from a small region of the Punjab and most were Sikhs, a religion with a long history of fighting for minority rights.

Farmworkers in B.C. were unfairly excluded from virtually all the major laws covering workers. They were not covered by the Annual and General Holidays Act, the Hours of Work Act, the Employment Agencies Act, the Factories Act, the Maternity Protection Act, the Payment of Wages Act, the Truck Act or the Minimum Wage Act. After the New Democratic Party government was elected, it awarded the "right of farmworkers to use the B.C. Labour Relations Board (LRB)" in 1975. In April of that same year the Select Standing Committee on Labour and Justice, which had been commissioned to investigate conditions in the B.C. farm working community, submitted its report and recommendations to the Provincial Legislature. The chairman of the committee stated that there was "no justification for exploitation" of farmworkers and noted that B.C. was at odds with International Labour Organization conventions as well as B.C.’s and Canada’s own human rights codes.

Chouhan, Mahill, and social worker Charan Gill were concerned about discrimination against the Indo-Canadian community at large and the exploitation of farmworkers in particular. Their interest in the role of the labour contractors led them in 1978 to the Labour Advocacy and Research Association (LARA), which was busy processing pickers’ claims against labour contractors.

Because of Section 16 of the Unemployment Insurance Act, farmworkers were required to work for one employer for at least 25 days or earn at least $250 from that employer before being eligible for Unemployment Insurance benefits. At the time, other Canadian workers needed only 15 hours with the same employer to have their earnings insured. With the migrant nature of farm harvesting work - workers moving from field to field and farm to farm - they were forced to stay with the same contractor as their employer in order to qualify for any U.I. benefits. The contractors also usually spoke both Punjabi and English, making them the "vital" link between the mainly English-speaking farmers and the Punjabi-speaking workers.

Not only were wages low, but farmworkers often had difficulties collecting the money they were owed. In the first two years of operation, more than 200 people took complaints to LARA. Most contractors, according to LARA, wouldn’t pay any or all of the worker’s wages until the end of the growing season. The contractors claimed that withholding the wages was necessary to ensure that the workers would stick around until the harvest was finished. As the season wears on, the harvest thins out, so it takes the workers longer and longer to pick the same amount of produce and get the same amount of pay. Without legal restrictions on the contractors, refusing to pay the workers their back wages when the season did end was not uncommon.

In one case, the contractor declared bankruptcy at the end of the season, denying workers about $90,000 in back wages. The only way to get the back pay was to go to small claims or county court. Most of the farmworkers were recent Asian immigrants and lacked adequate English or understanding of the legal system to keep the records necessary to make a claim stick, so claims weren’t filed. Processing the claims was time consuming and frustrating for LARA because it had no Punjabi-speaking staff. Chouhan, Mahill and Gill offered their skills as interpreters and translators, widening the caseload and the speed of claim handling. As well as complaints about pay issues, there were reports of physical and sexual abuse by the contractors. But the system kept the workers tied to the contractors.

As Sadhu Binning explained in his 1982 case study of the CFU, "There are a number of reasons why the workers kept going back to the contractors, even after being abused. For example, U.I.C. regulations compelled workers to stay with one contractor for the entire season. A majority of the farmworkers did not have the resources and time during the season to find other employers. But there is another important aspect which had a serious effect on the workers’ decisions to stay with contractors who mistreated them. That aspect was the strong regional kinship ties which continued from Punjab. The close relatives of a contractor, or people from the same village, were usually treated better, but even if they weren’t, they still preferred to stick with ‘their own.’ The religious and feudal values were also utilized to control and keep workers coming back."

The ties of community were strong. Chouhan says that "cultural sensitivities" kept the incidence of sexual harassment by contractors under wraps. "Although it wasn’t talked about much, women farmworkers are often very mistreated and harassed. We heard a number of stories of women farmworkers being made pregnant by farm contractors, but the women’s families and the community would move in to 'protect' the women. We never managed to get a single name of one of the contractors responsible."

As Chouhan, Mahill and Gill got to know the ins and outs of the contract labour system they came to the conclusion that they would have to set up the organization Chouhan had been searching for. In September, 1978, they held a number of small meetings with farmworkers in the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver, and in February 1979 they formed the Farm Workers’ Organizing Committee (FWOC).

Sarwan Boal had gone to Simon Fraser University and McGill and was working at Simpsons Sears when the organizing started. Sears had sent him to a marketing course as potential management material, but Boal decided that wasn't the future he wanted. "I quit and joined the FWOC and we rented a house in New Westminster. It was $100 a month had no heat and no hot water. We set it up with a phone and went there to organize. Judy Cavanagh started working with us and stayed until the mid '80s. We never said thanks to each other and there was no appreciation of what the other person was doing. But we had no fear either. What we did have was a shared philosophy. We had all kinds of enthusiasm and all kinds of dreams were possible," Boal says..

Encouraged by the interest of farmworkers and coverage by the local media, the FWOC took its first major action. In April 1979 a group of pickers came to the FWOC for help. Grower Mukhtiar Singh had not paid the farmworkers at his Clearbrook farm for nearly six weeks (he owed them about $100,000). The workers also complained that the working conditions were terrible and that the grower was often verbally abusive. In an interview with the Vancouver Express newspaper, Mukhtiar called farmworkers "dumb bastards."

The FWOC promised action and early in the morning on April 16 the FWOC and its supporters set up a picket line at the farm. More than 200 people showed up for the line and no one crossed. Within three hours they were able to get $80,000 in cash from the grower. The committee distributed the money to the workers on the line and extracted a public apology from the grower for his "dumb bastards" remark. The success gave the FWOC credibility and the organizers started getting calls for help from other farms.

After the first public meeting, the FWOC held meetings all over the Lower Mainland around Vancouver. There was no dues structure to join the committee, only a $1 initiation fee, and membership swelled to 1,500 within a few weeks.

The FWOC was also gathering signatures on a petition demanding that farmworkers be covered by the same laws as all other workers in British Columbia.

On Nov. 3, 1979, FWOC supporters marched to the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Vancouver where the Social Credit Party was holding its annual convention. The marchers presented then premier Bill Bennett with 10,000 signatures demanding legal rights for farmworkers. Bennett tried to put the farmworkers off with a request that they put their grievances in writing. The FWOC responded with a 29-page submission. What was required of the government was summed up on the first page: "...to recognize a simple principle: that farmworkers are workers, and should be equal, before the law, to all other workers."