PICKING A NEW FIGHT

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/WATSONVILLE

"Show me the suffering of the most miserable So I will know my people's plight...Let the Spirit flourish and grow So that we will never tire of the struggle." --Cesar Chavez

In hushed tones, speaking Spanish, they repeat the prayer: men with rough hands, women with weathered faces, children squirming on their laps. It is a crowded room in an office building in Watsonville, California, strawberry capital of America. On the wall are portraits of Chavez and of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As the prayer ends, Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers of America, points to a map showing the location of 272 nearby berry farms. A grid depicts Mexican-American barrios, each with pickers' homes identified. The talk is of leafleting, lawsuits, pickets and protest marches. "We promise to be here, companeros, as long as it takes," says Rodriguez. "The consumers have no idea what you go through to pick these strawberries."

Another evening, in a squat bungalow in Los Angeles, two dozen college students open a meeting with the same prayer, this time in English. In the U.F.W.'s local office, amid ratty sofas and yellowing posters, Rodriguez plays a six-minute video: farmworkers' dilapidated shacks, a strawberry picker saying she was dismissed for refusing to have sex with a foreman, field hands showing skin rashes from toxic pesticides. "We are up against California's $22 billion agribusiness," Rodriguez tells the students. "We need a committee on every campus. You weren't around for the grape boycott in the '60s, but you're here for the strawberry campaign--and it will be historic."

The suffering that the late Chavez described in his prayer has changed little since he founded the farmworkers union in 1962 and went on to turn grape and lettuce boycotts into nationwide crusades. But by the time La Causa's charismatic champion died three years ago at 66, the rest of America had largely tired of his struggle. Most growers refused to renew their contracts, and successive Republican administrations in California weakened labor-law enforcement. Plagued by internal squabbles, U.F.W. membership fell from a high of 80,000 in 1970 to 21,000 at Chavez's death--a mere sliver of the nation's 2.8 million farmworkers. Chavez, risking his health in protest fasts, stuck with what many considered a worn-out strategy: orchestrating consumer boycotts, rather than organizing field hands. "We did not involve the workers," admits U.F.W. official Efren Barajas. "Now we are learning from our mistakes."

Few predicted that the unassuming Rodriguez, Chavez's son-in-law, would be the architect of a dramatic turnabout. But since he took over in April 1994, the Texas-born son of a sheet-metal worker has transformed the stagnant U.F.W. into the fastest-growing union in the country. The portion of the U.F.W.'s $4.6 million budget devoted to organizing quadrupled, to 41%, and a dozen new contracts have added 5,000 members. Recalling the grape campaign, Rodriguez scrapped the U.F.W.'s recent farm-by-farm approach and switched back to targeting whole crops. Starting modestly with roseworkers--now 50% unionized--and mushroom farmers--now 43% under contract--he has taken a quantum leap by attacking California's $650 million-a-year strawberry industry, in which 20,000 Latinos pick 75% of the nation's strawberries.

John Sweeney, president of the newly militant AFL-CIO, has pledged to pump "millions" into the strawberry campaign, part of a broad effort to recast the federation as a champion of the downtrodden. At a news conference last week, Sweeney launched a National Strawberry Commission for Worker's Rights, with 39 civil rights, environmental and religious groups, and such celebrities as Ethel Kennedy and Linda Rondstadt. "For years, the farmworkers have represented the moral center of the labor movement," says Sweeney. Now Rodriguez, the nation's only Latino union head, has brought "a breath of fresh air to the farmworkers."

A third-generation Mexican American and a devout Roman Catholic, Rodriguez, 47, was drawn to activism through a parish priest and joined the grape boycott while getting a master's in social work at the University of Michigan. In two decades as a U.F.W. staff member, he moved 25 times, with his wife Linda and their three children, following campaigns in California, Texas, Oklahoma and New Jersey. Mushroom grower Shah Kazemi attributes Rodriguez's negotiating success to his being "more practical than Chavez. Artie whips out a calculator and adds up cost per employee." But his colleagues cite tenacity, fanatical attention to detail and dedication as his prime qualities. Adhering to Chavez's creed that one must be poor to serve the poor, Rodriguez earns $6,362 a year. "He is a Gandhiesque figure--more monk than labor leader, " says Richard Bensinger, head of the AFL-CIO's Organizing Institute.

The strawberry campaign, Rodriguez acknowledges, is "a dogfight." In Watsonville, 40 organizers are recruiting farmworkers, lawyers have filed 140 intimidation and harassment charges against growers, and researchers are tracing distribution patterns to inform a massive consumer campaign. "A boycott won't be necessary if food chains threaten to stop ordering their products," Sweeney notes. To pressure groceries to do just that, the AFL-CIO is mobilizing its 600 central labor councils, and the U.F.W. is opening offices in 25 cities to work with civic, church and campus groups.

A hardball consumer campaign will persuade growers to adopt a neutral stance so workers can organize without fear, the U.F.W. contends. Pickers perform stoop labor for up to 10 hours a day; rarely get health insurance, despite chronic back injuries; and earn an average of only $8,500 for a seven-month season. But that doesn't necessarily make them want to join the U.F.W. Growers have stirred anti-union sentiment, dispatching "labor consultants" into the fields. "They told us we would be fired if we joined the union, and the farm would shut down," says Adela Rocha, a picker who marched for the U.F.W. despite the threats. In recent years hundreds of workers lost their jobs when three strawberry farms disked their fields after the U.F.W. won elections. Firing is simple, since work is given out on a day-by-day basis. An estimated 60% of berry pickers are illegal immigrants. With a porous Mexican border, troublemakers are easily replaced.

Last summer a fistfight broke out in the fields between two U.F.W. organizers and antiunion workers. In August, 5,000 workers marched through Watsonville--about the same number as at a pro-U.F.W. rally a few weeks later. "Ninety percent of workers don't want a union," says farmer Miles Reiter. "The U.F.W. is trying to win in the court of public opinion what it can't win in the fields."

To keep up the pressure on growers, the U.F.W. is planning a massive Watsonville demonstration next April. Sweeney has pledged to take the campaign "to the streets" if necessary. And key supermarket chains have already signed up to support the strawberry workers. "We're going to win. It's just a question of when," Rodriguez claims. But just as the grape campaign took decades to succeed, the strawberry crusade could go on for years, as both sides settle in for a furrow-by-furrow fight.