Watsonville California, tucked into a corner of the California coast between Monterey and Santa Cruz, is usually an almost invisible town. But it is an important center of strawberry production, and on a recent Sunday, some 30,000 people found their way to the town to show support for the first major farmworker organizing drive in many years. PNS associate editor David Bacon writes on immigration and labor issues. The photographs are available from Pacific News Service.

WATSONVILLE, CA -- Watsonville is a town with one foot in Mexico and one in California. A downtown eatery even makes an inside joke about this -- "El Pollero" specializes in chicken, but a "pollero" is also a smuggler of humans, who brings workers without papers north from Mexico across the border to Watsonville's strawberry fields.

A large proportion of the people in this valley are farmworkers with roots across the border. Many are just now arriving for the picking season, which runs from late March to October. Others have lived here for years, and find other work in the late fall and winter months.

Once the season starts, people breathe a sigh of relief at the prospect of a paycheck after a long trip from the south, or a hard winter here without much work. When the strawberries are ready, Watsonville comes alive.

But this year, tension has been so charged it runs like an electric current through the town. The United Farm Workers is making its bid to organize the berry pickers.

Last year, workers from dozens of strawberry-picking crews met in Watsonville's cavernous community center and formed the industry-wide organizing committee.

The union says wages have actually fallen in the last ten years considering inflation, and their main demand is a $7.50 minimum hourly wage and a union-administered medical plan.

Workers also want a guarantee that they will be rehired every season which means the union will again have to confront labor contractors who hand out jobs with little respect for seniority.

The campaign started last weekend with a march in classic UFW style. Watsonville's normal population of 35,000 nearly doubled as people poured in from all over California and beyond. Even with all the out-of-towners, strawberry workers were a visible presence, accounting for about 4,000 of the 30,000 participants claimed by the union. The total strawberry workforce at the peak of the season in the Pajaro Valley is about 15,000.

The day's activities were designed to convince growers of the union's strength not only among the workers but in the supermarkets. Just before the march began organizers announced that over 1000 stores, including the Ralph's chain, had signed the union's "5¢ for Fairness" pledge, a commitment of general support for better wages and conditions for farmworkers. Growers know the union can turn the pledge into a boycott.

That's not unlikely. Already growers have refused to rehire workers like Jose Rojas who were active in organizing union committees. This year, when Rojas went to get his job back at Gargiulo Company, where he has worked for the past six years, he was told he wasn't being rehired because last year he was written up for picking a few unripe berries.

After the march, big-name UFW supporters, including Rev. Jessie Jackson, actor Martin Sheen, feminist Eleanor Smeal and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called on the companies, especially the Monsanto Corp. which owns Gargiulo, to stop blacklisting union supporters.

Cleansing the crews isn't the growers' only tactic. Last season some foremen and higher-paid, permanent workers organized the Pro Workers Committee and marched against the union. In addition, growers have hired a Los Angeles public relations firm, the Dolphin Group, which set up the Strawberry Workers and Farmers Alliance to undermine UFW appeals for public support.

The Watsonville march marked one other historic step in California agriculture. Arturo Rodriguez and Teamsters President Ron Carey marched together after announcing a joint organizing effort in the strawberries. For a decade, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, growers signed contracts with the Teamsters to fight UFW organizing drives,. Memories of that still make some workers uneasy. "Companies have a long history of dividing us against each other," Carey told a cheering rally, "and I pledge to you, that will never happen again."

The UFW is organizing workers in the fields, and the Teamsters, who already represent workers at a couple of strawberry processing coolers, are planning to organize the rest. Both leaders announced their hopes that cooperation here would set a pattern for further joint action in Washington State, where 40,000 workers harvest and process apples.

It was a day when everyone learned a little Spanish. "We are all freseros [strawberry pickers]," AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Rich Trumka (a West Virginia miner's son) told a wildly cheering crowd. Amid the TV cameras, and the banners borne by visitors from as far away as Texas and Wisconsin, strawberry workers, at least for a day, had the sense that the world could really see them.