CHAPTER 8: Money's Makes The World Go 'Round

In May 1984, five Punjabi women farmworkers at the Hoss Farm in the Fraser Valley decided to join the CFU. On Sunday, May 27, just hours before the CFU was to apply to the provincial government to represent the farm’s 16 workers, owner Harbhajan Uppal fired all five women who had signed union cards. The next morning Uppal fired the other six women who supported the certification.

The women were back the next day, this time wearing picket signs and with their children in tow. They were soon joined by other farmworkers, church groups and social organizations, supporters and representatives from the Canadian Labour Congress and B.C. Federation of Labour.

The Hoss Farm supplied mushrooms to the Fraser Valley Mushroom Growers' Co-operative Association, which processes and sells the mushrooms under the well-known brand name Money’s Mushrooms. After three days of picketing at the Hoss Farm, the CFU set up an information picket at the co-op to protest interference in the strike by co-op management. Co-op employees, members of the Retail Wholesale Union, refused to cross the picket line. The plant shut down, and the action spread to retail stores where union workers refused to handle mushrooms that had come from behind a picket line.

What became known as the Money’s Mushroom strike was an important landmark for the CFU. The strike was launched by 11 Punjabi women farmworkers at a farm owned by a Punjabi man from the same community. Striker Jasweer Kaur Brar summed up the feeling among the women on the line: "I feel good about the picket line because we are fighting. If we stand up for our rights, something better will happen in the future - we have to take a stand."

As the strike spread with support from other unionized workers and support from the public, it effectively shut down the sale and distribution of mushrooms in the province.

While morale remained high on the picket line, the legal wrangling was just beginning. The strike took place just as the Socred provincial government was in the process of gutting the B.C. Labour Code. Amendments to the code outlawed secondary picketing and political strikes. Union certification became more difficult, while the decertification process was streamlined. The mushroom growers’ co-op lost no time in applying for a court order to stop the picketing, an order granted by the Labour Relations Board in early June.

The LRB was not so quick to rule on the union’s bid for certification at the Hoss farm or on its unfair labour practices complaint launched when the farmworkers were fired for joining the union. Raj Chouhan summed up the CFU’s frustration: "By its action the LRB has made it clear that profit before people is its guideline."

The pressure exerted by the picket line and by media exposure prompted the grower to eventually hire back seven of the fired workers, but four remained fired and reports of worker harrassment on the job site persisted.

Under fire from the new B.C. Labour Code amendments, and chronically underfunded, the CFU was forced to concentrate on its continuing battles for inclusion in health and safety regulations and better pesticide controls. Ongoing programs such as the CFU legal clinic and the ESL Crusades continued, but organizing became more difficult.