In May 2020, workers at Monson Fruit Company in Selah, near Yakima, told their supervisor Armida Rivera that they were planning to walk off the job.
Rivera wasn’t surprised. She had witnessed firsthand the frustrations building among workers. Despite being designated as essential workers under the state’s stay-at-home order early in the COVID-19 pandemic, they lacked sufficient protection from the illness. Masks and hand sanitizer seemed hard to come by, and ambiguous communication from upper management wasn’t helping.
Despite their concerns, workers had continued to show up for their jobs. Peak harvest season — late spring and summer — was approaching, a time many workers depend on for the additional working hours it brings.
“I know how hard they work,” said Rivera. “They are not lazy people.”
When the workers finally did walk out, the ones who worked under Rivera asked whether she would join. She agreed immediately. “I couldn’t say no to my people,” she said.
Rivera was one of hundreds of fruit-packing warehouse workers who took part in a month of walkouts and strikes that spring to express concern about wage fairness and COVID safety at seven different plants in the Yakima Valley.
It was workers’ rights activism on a scale not seen in decades in the Yakima Valley, and it galvanized public goodwill and support. Five years later, it’s still having an effect. More farmworkers now realize how influential their voices can be, said Edgar Franks, political director of Familias Unidas Por La Justicia, a farmworker union based in the Skagit Valley. Franks and his union colleagues assisted Yakima-area workers during the 2020 strikes. “We always understood policy isn’t eno ugh,” he said. “Sometimes you need people on the ground to make things happen.”
For officials in the tree-fruit industry, the strikes reflected a need for managers to improve communication with workers. “That internal communication breakdown at a time when people had a lot of stress prompted a lot of that worker dissatisfaction,” said Jon DeVaney, president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association.
Wins for workers
On May 7, 2020, more than 50 fruit-packing workers walked off the job at Naches-based company Allan Brothers. It would be the first of seven fruit-packing strikes in the Yakima Valley that spring.
Airing concerns about worker safety, poor communication from management, potential COVID exposures and reports of supervisors out of compliance with safety regulations, the walkout soon became a weeks-long strike. That didn’t come as a surprise to agricultural worker advocates and labor unions who had long raised concerns that the state and employers had not taken sufficient measures to protect essential workers, who had continued to work in person under the stay-at-home order Gov. Jay Inslee issued in late March 2020.
Franks, of Familias Unidas Por La Justicia, recalled numerous conversations with state agencies and the governor’s office voicing concerns about enforcing safety regulations. Ultimately, the state did introduce additional guidelines for the agricultural industry, but before those clarifications arrived, the union attempted to fill the gaps. They filmed videos in Spanish explaining the protections needed for essential workers. They even joined the United Farm Workers of America, suing the state in a push for greater oversight.
“We held a unique position of being one of the voices of workers within the [agriculture industry],” said Franks. “We were trying to do our best to hold that space.”
As their advocacy work increased their visibility in the early months of the pandemic, Franks said he and other union officials began to get calls from workers sharing concerns about working during the pandemic. Among those callers were the workers who’d staged the walkout at Allan Brothers.
Franks and several other union officials decided to travel from Western Washington to Naches, because they wanted to support the workers pushing for better working conditions. They had expected to stay for just a few days, which turned into several weeks.
And only a week after that first strike at Allan Brothers., workers throughout the Yakima Valley staged walkouts and strikes at six more tree-fruit companies: Frosty Packing, Roche Fruit, Columbia Reach Pack and Hansen Fruit and Cold Storage Co. in Yakima; and Matson Fruit Co. and Monson Fruit Co. in Selah.
What had begun with a single incident at one facility turned into a unified agricultural worker movement, something farmworker advocates at the time said hadn’t been seen since the 1980s, when Cesar Chavez, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, was staging marches and other organizing actions in the Yakima Valley.
For Franks and his colleagues at Familias Unidas Por La Justicia, the strikes led to growing labor activism on the ground, with training sessions and committees cropping up to better communicate workers’ concerns to employers.
After several weeks, the strikes ended in early June as worker committees came to agreements with their employers. Workers came away with promises of improved enforcement of safety protocols and communication around COVID, plus hazard pay for taking on the added risks of working during the pandemic — major victories for workers, Franks said.
“That was a big win,” he said. “We were seeing it every day: people under stress figuring out and solving problems.”
Rivera, the supervisor, was part of the worker committee involved in negotiations at Monson Fruit. She said her experiences with Franks and Familias Unidas helped her grow as an organizer.
Franks helped her and other workers realize the power they had to advocate for themselves, she said. She still considers Franks a mentor. “We’re working there from sunup to sundown … and we’re, like, so underpaid that we have to work every day, and we live [paycheck to paycheck],” she said. “Edgar [taught] us how to do more than we thought we could.”
The industry response
At the start of the COVID pandemic, tree-fruit growers were handling a barrage of ambiguity. Information about protection against the spread of illness — and how to enforce it — was incomplete, said DeVaney of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association. Employers had to scramble for crucial items like masks and hand sanitizer. “Saying you should have something and having it actually be available was two different things,” he said.
Part of the breakdown in communication between growers and workers came from managers struggling to parse unclear information and not wanting to repeat inaccurate statements. Sometimes that meant saying very little at all, DeVaney said.
When reporting exposures to workers, employers felt uncomfortable disclosing employee health information.
DeVaney said he understands the worker dissatisfaction this limited communication caused. In hindsight, he said, employers should have been more transparent about what they knew and didn’t know. The Tree Fruit Association and others in the agriculture industry have since offered leadership training to ensure supervisors have the skills and tools to navigate tough situations, DeVaney said.
DeVaney also said that he felt that advocates and activists conflated issues regarding safety and communication during the pandemic with wages and benefits, which he said should have been handled separately. “You can’t offset a safety issue with more pay,” he said. “That would be viewed as being callous.”
After the strike
When the strike ended, workers at Allan Brothers tried to unionize. But when the vote to unionize was delayed by several months in late 2020, it was enough to dissuade many workers from participating, Franks said.
Still, the ripple effects of the workers’ actions remain, as expanded worker protections, like 2021’s passage of Senate Bill 5172, which expanded overtime pay protections to agricultural workers, have gone into effect in recent years.
Rivera, the Monson Fruit supervisor, ended up leaving her job at the end of 2020. She now serves as Yakima organizer for the Latino Community Fund, a nonprofit that provides services for Latino residents throughout Washington. She credits the strikes — and the support from Franks and others — with helping her gain the community organizing skills that enabled her to make the career change.
Even now, Rivera said, it remains difficult for many agricultural workers to speak up for themselves. A big part of her job these days is connecting local community members with resources to help them do everything from vote to raise concerns in the workplace — something she learned on the job.
All of this has been further complicated by the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, leaving many undocumented farmworkers concerned about the possibility of being apprehended at work by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Rivera remembers being scared when she participated in the strike five years ago, but she also said she would do it all again. It was important, she said, for the workers to remind everyone of their worth.
“They need to open their eyes, and they need to know they have so much power … and they can use their power to make changes,” she said.
