CHAPTER 3: Pickers on The Picket Line

The new union got off to a promising start. In tough bargaining, a contract was hammered out at the Dreidiger Farm in Langley. But after the agreement was reached, the grower refused to sign with the union, signing instead with a contractor. George Dreidiger, a former president of the ruling Social Credit Party, claimed a union contract would lower his property value and that as a "free-enterpriser" he shouldn’t have to deal with unions. Dreidiger also threatened to switch to growing crops that could be harvested by machine if the union continued organizing. "When we’re finished picking this year," he blustered, "we’re just going to mechanize the crops and to hell with them (the workers). They won’t have jobs next year - that’s what it boils down to."

The 1982 documentary film A Time to Rise captured Dreidiger’s son Murray (who was later president of the B.C. Strawberry Growers' Association) explaining the grower’s position:

"There’s no reason the union has to get militant or anything like that. We’re all willing to improve conditions. But at the same time, we’re not willing to lose that freedom by having a union on the farm and having one man dictate to you and having one man control all your labour. The way it works right now is a free-enterprise system where the farmers can hire whichever contractor they feel like or the contractor can go to whichever farm he wants and the people can work for any contractor they want. It’s a very happy-go-lucky thing and if you’re being mistreated some place, you can go to another one."

The CFU responded with a demonstration at the farm in June 1980 and 200 supporters marched around the property chanting "Farmworkers' Union Zindabad!" and "Dreidger Keep Your Promise."

In July the CFU took to the fields in Clearbrook for a show of strength. With about 300 union members and supporters, the union called to workers to "join the struggle." Farmworkers actually left the fields and joined the march, some with their buckets of berries still in hand. The union went on to win two certifications that month at the Jensen Mushroom Farm in Langley and Country Natural Foods in Richmond. Jensen, one of the largest mushroom suppliers to the Fraser Valley Mushroom Growers’ Co-op, had fought the certification arguing that the CFU wasn’t a bona fide union and didn’t represent the majority of employees, but the B.C. Labour Relations Board ruled in favor of the certification. Both farms were served notice by the union for bargaining to start in the fall, but the growers fought the union every step of the way. The CFU reported workers being verbally harassed, intimidated, threatened with physical violence and suspended and laid off for union activities.

Talks stalled and in April 1981 CFU Local 1 went on strike against Country Farms and served strike notice on Jensen Farms. Although the CFU executive was convinced that seasonal workers were the most vulnerable and mistreated and therefore must be the priority for organizing, it also decided that it needed some year-round contracts to create a solid base for the union. The CFU choose the large and relatively stable mushroom farm industry in the Fraser Valley as its target.

The strike at Jensen Mushroom Farms was to last 15 months. While the farm was a year-round operation, workers would sometimes be called in only to work for an hour and sometimes they would be expected to work for 16 hours straight. There was no overtime pay and no job security. Workers said any complaints to the employer were met with a take-it-or-leave attitude. The employer tried to create a split between the mainly male white inside workers and the mainly female Indo-Canadian pickers. Once the dispute began, Jensen quickly turned things over to his lawyers, forcing the CFU to tie up its volunteer legal staff.

At the start of the strike, pickers (who hadn’t had a pay increase since 1978) were making $3.50 for a tub of mushrooms, which often took more than one hour to fill. The employer had offered to cut that rate by 12 per cent if the union wanted paid coffee breaks and statutory holidays. Jensen shut down the farm, but after 15 months of grueling ‘round-the-clock, 7-day-a-week picketing, the strike ended with a first contract on July 30, 1982. The one-year deal gave union workers a $2/hour raise to $7, full medical and dental benefits and $3.85 per tub for pickers. The tub price was now one of the highest in B.C.

One of the most important clauses in the contract, Chouhan said, was the establishment of a statutory holiday on April 6 to be known as Farmworkers' Day.

The Farmworker newspaper reported that "There were times when the strike became quite heated - telephone wires at the union’s picket trailer were cut a number of times, rocks were thrown and an attempt was made to burn down the trailer with picketers inside. But all this did not scare union members."

Following the strike, the farm started operating again, but this time with fewer than half the pro-union workers. The employer launched a concerted decertification drive with petitions, rumors of bankruptcy and job loss and continued his attempts to drive a racial wedge between the white workers and the Indo-Canadians.

The union was decertified in a close vote in November 1983. While the union called it "a mild setback," it was a foretaste of what was to happen at other farms. The growers still had lots of tools at their disposal to fight any changes.

At a seminar on farm business management held in Vancouver in 1981, one grower described his success in keeping a union from certifying at his farm in the mid 1970s. He "removed important work responsibilities from union-supportive employees," he explained, "hired only anti-union workers, provided production bonuses to non-union workers and so on." He added that he "was careful to put my new employees in the better jobs. Meanwhile, my union-supporting workers were assigned root and rock-picking duties, menial cleanup duties and hand-labour jobs such as unloading 25-tonne truck loads of barbed wire, salt or feed." (The Farmworker, April 1981)

In November 1980, the CFU had signed its first collective agreement with Bell Farms in Richmond, a contract that eliminated the contract labour system at the farm. The agreement was about as close as unions ever get to a "model contract." The deal included wage hikes, Health and Welfare and Workers' Compensation benefits, a 40-hour week with overtime provisions and the formation of a safety committee to monitor and improve conditions on the farm. But the silver lining had a cloud. Farm owner Jack Bell sold off most of his acreage in February 1983, which effectively decimated the power of the bargaining unit.

That left the union to wrangle with the new owners over successor status on the newly-created farms. The union first applied to the Labour Relations Board to represent workers on the sold-off portions of the farm but the application was turned down. On appeal, the CFU eventually won successorship status at two of the new farms, but was not able to get certifications.

At Country Farms Natural Foods, the strike spread to the owner’s well-known Vancouver restaurant the Naam. The high-profile dispute kept the CFU in the media spotlight raised the CFU profile with workers in the city, but the owner vowed not to negotiate and ended up selling his restaurant and shutting down his alfalfa farm rather than sign a contract.