Salad Strike

The nation's salad bowl is the Salinas Valley, a three-hour motor drive south from San Francisco. In the three normal three-month "deals" or lettuce seasons of the year, growers around Wratsonville and Salinas ship as high as 300 carloads of lettuce per day, raise about 25% of the annual U. S. crop. Two years ago a violent strike tied up the Salinas-Watsonville fields. Settlement came with the signing of a contract between the Fruit & Vegetable Workers' Union and the Growers-Shippers' Association. Fortnight ago the contract came up for renewal. Agreement stalled when the growers objected to a clause giving unionists "preferential hiring," called it the entering wedge of the closed shop, traditionally detested in California.

On the preferential hiring issue, 3,500 packers and trimmers walked out of the lettuce sheds. In the fields some 2,500 nonunionized Mexican and Filipino "stoop laborers" had to suspend operations also. In the autumn 95% of the nation's lettuce comes from Salinas. By last week, with both sides still in disagreement and the crop waiting in fields and sheds for shipment, this $11,000,000 agricultural industry seemed thoroughly paralyzed. A Growers-Shippers' Association official estimated that the strike was losing his friends and their idle employes $75,000 a day.

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