Labor Day Dispatch

Apple Workers May be Near Victory in a Struggle that Began Nearly 70 Years Ago


Stemilt warehouse workers Robert Guerrero (left), Juan Manuel Granados and Manuel Pineda outside Stemilt's Columbia Street warehouse in Wenatchee.
Dec 31, 1969 -- Apple workers in Wenatchee, who started a union organizing drive with the Teamsters in 1996, have been negotiating with their employers for nearly a year over a first contract.

But members of the negotiating committee and other workers report that very little progress has been made. "The company is offering five-cent raises and we are asking for 5 percent," said Roberto Guerrero, a Stemilt worker.






Jennie Velsek, Congdon Orchards Strike, Yakima, Washington, 1933.
Guerrero said the workers turned down a company proposal with a 98 percent no vote in a meeting at Wenatchee's convention center in early August. "They basically offered what we've already got," Guerrero said.

The long and bitter organizing struggle was marked with firings, spying and intimidation by the employers, discrimination against Spanish-speaking workers, threatened deportations and many other violations of U.S. labor law.

Management at Stemilt and Washington Fruit in Yakima created such an atmosphere of fear and coercion that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) threw out the results of representation elections held in January of 1998. The NLRB ordered the company to start contract negotiations with the union after a simple card check procedure proved that the workers wanted to have a union, saying a free and fair election was impossible in such a poisoned atmosphere.

Strikers were arrested and forced to run a gauntlet of clubs and iron pipes before being jailed and shipped out of town in railroad cars in Yakima in 1933.
Negotiations started in Wenatchee in October, 1999. Bargaining has not yet begun in Yakima.

It was the first victory for the workers in a battle that started nearly 70 years ago when the Industrial Workers of the World struck several orchards and packing sheds.

Ever since the federal government built dams and irrigation systems in Eastern Washington in the 1930s, turning the high desert into bountiful orchard land, the owners of the land and the people who work on the land have been at war.

Since its early days, the apple growing areas in the Wenatchee and Yakima valleys have depended on temporary, migratory workers to harvest their bounty. In the '30s it was dust bowl refugees and workers from farther east displaced by failing farms and shuttered factories. In the '70s and '80s it's been millions of Mexican immigrants, many of them nomadically following the harvest from California through Oregon and Washington up to Canada. Thousands more have put down roots in Yakima, Wenatchee, Sunnyside and dozens of other communities east of the Cascades.

Gennaro Morales was fired twice by Stemilt during the organizing campaign and reinstated by NLRB order. He is now a member of the bargaining committee.
In the late '70s, refrigeration technology developed to the point that apples could be stored for up to a year in a refrigerated controlled atmosphere year, and shipped whenever stores wanted them. This meant a year-round apple warehouse and shipping industry. This meant year-round jobs for many of the workers who had previously been harvest nomads.

Guererro, who was once smuggled across the border sandwiched among sheets of plywood on a lumber truck, is now a legal immigrant with a home and family in Wenatchee and many years of service at Stemilt. He said a majority of Stemilt workers have placed a high priority on some basic issues in the contract negotiations including job seniority, overtime pay after eight hours and improvements in health insurance.

© Seattle Press on Line,  Journalmaker Inc, and/or the author(s). All rights reserved.
You may print one copy of this article for your personal use.
Republishing by any means without specific written permission is prohibited.
JournalMaker article 8698 reprinted Feb 08, 2010 by 38.107.191.116 from Seattle Press on Line