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Sulma Hernandez stands with other students in a mile-long human billboard in March to protest E.&

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SONOMA — Escaping the sweltering Sonoma County sun during his 30-minute Friday lunch break, 60-year-old Domingo Garcia stopped eating his meal of oranges, strawberries, a large cucumber and burrito to explain why students should know about the recent struggle between the United Farm Workers and E.&J. Gallo Winery. “It’d be good if they got an idea where the fruits and vegetables they eat come from,” Garcia said, speaking through a translator and pointing to his lunch. Garcia has worked for Gallo for about 24 years, doing various jobs at the nation’s largest winery. He said he makes $10.30 an hour and joined the UFW more than 10 years ago. Garcia and other unionized UFW workers at Gallo’s vineyards in Sonoma have been without a contract for more than 19 months after the original agreement expired in November 2003. The UFW and Gallo have since fought a series of battles over decertification of the union and negotiations for a contract. And as the UFW gears up for a national boycott of the winery in the coming months, some UCLA students are helping the union prepare for action. Fourth-year sociology student Michelle Senchez drives to the downtown County Federation of Labor offices each Friday to call labor unions and organizations to join in the potential boycott. Most of the groups she contacts are in San Francisco because if announced, that’s where the boycott will be. “(Gallo workers) need to get a contract; they need to get paid more,” Senchez said. The road to a contract Gallo of Sonoma, a newer, more upscale segment of the E.&J. Gallo Winery, first signed a contract with UFW workers in 2000. But in less than three years, that contract would be gone, and the farm workers would again be without formal union representation. Eight months before the contract expired in November 2003, workers voted to decertify the union, formally removing the UFW as their representation to Gallo management. But Gallo and the UFW disagree on why workers chose to leave the union. While Gallo said its workers no longer wanted union representation, the UFW says the company illegally influenced workers to decertify the union before the contract’s end. “The workers have voted to decertify because they felt they weren’t getting the union representation that they voted for,” said Gallo spokesman John Segale. But the UFW said the decertification vote had been rigged and Gallo used illegal intimidation practices to coax workers into signing petitions necessary for decertification. Eriverto Ramirez Andrade, a 29-year-old farm worker from Campeche, Mexico, said he first began working for Gallo of Sonoma in 1997, and that before the UFW’s contract with Gallo expired in 2003 a foreman presented him with a petition to decertify the union. Speaking through a translator, Andrade said he signed the petition without having knowledge of the matter at hand. Ruling that Gallo of Sonoma violated the law by illegally trying to decertify the union, a California judge overturned the UFW’s decertification in December 2003 after the testimony of Andrade and others. “The basic abuse is that they are trying to destroy the union,” said Irv Hershenbaum, first vice president of the UFW. Hershenbaum said the UCLA community should be embarrassed that Matt Gallo, Gallo of Sonoma’s vice president of coastal operations, was a Bruin. “He’s an alumnus. ... He’s guilty of union busting and using the vast resources of the Gallo family to fight against the most exploited workers,” Hershenbaum said. Matt Gallo declined an interview for this article. Segale said the UFW walked out of negotiation talks on Aug. 31, 2004, and since then the two parties haven’t come back to bargaining. “We’re the largest unionized winery in the United States. And we have a long history of effectively negotiating contracts with a variety of unions over the years,” Segale said. “We want to sit down and negotiate; it’s the union that is clogging the process up.”

Union concerns, company abuses The majority of Gallo’s workers are hired through farm labor contractors, Hershenbaum said, a tactic Gallo uses to try and escape the responsibility of providing proper health care, a system of advancement, and living wages to workers. Hershenbaum said using contractors also keeps workers in poverty and leads to poor living conditions. Twenty-nine men hired by a subcontractor and working for Gallo of Sonoma were found by authorities in April in Windsor, a nearby town, cramped into a small house. Steve Pantazes, Windsor building official, said the house was uninhabitable and residents had each been paying rent to a landlord. “It was substandard in almost every way,” Pantazes said. “There was exposed wiring, the plumbing wasn’t connected to the septic system. ... There was no heat; there was mold on the wall. Every room, including the garage and the room attached to the garage, were being occupied.” Hershenbaum says Gallo hires three-fourths of its Sonoma County workforce through labor contractors, abusing that system. Antonio Campa, a 51-year-old farm worker from Xalisco, Mexico, said he has worked for Gallo for 26 years and joined the UFW in 1993 because he was being treated poorly and wanted representation. “Not only the foreman but also the supervisors treated us bad,” Campa said, speaking through a translator. “My wife goes to the hospital one to two times each month, and it gets expensive.”

A reputation of innovation Segale said the union’s charges against Gallo of poor mistreatment of workers is misdirected and that Gallo has always been worker and union friendly. Other wine growers said Gallo has a good reputation as an industry innovator. Duff Bevill, president of the Sonoma County Grape Growers Association, said Gallo helped innovate the way wine was fermented. “Back in the early 1950’s, (Gallo) did some pretty remarkable in-house research,” Bevill said. Some of the research included stainless-steel refrigerated fermentation, which Bevill says has now became standard throughout the industry. Bevill added that he thought unions were hampering both growers and workers. “From what I’ve seen, I don’t think there’s been any value (to unions), at least not locally. It’s been my observation that there’s been little value to the employees,” he said. Karen Ross, president of the California Wine Growers Association, said Gallo was a brilliant marketer and is becoming a pioneer in the global wine industry and now has several foreign wine imports. Gallo uses about half of all of the grapes in California each year, estimated between 1 million and 1.5 million tons, Ross said, and because it is so large, the company is being singled out by unions. “I think it’s unfortunate that when you’re large it makes you an easy target,” Ross said. But the UFW says Gallo’s 2003 annual sales were around $2 billion and that Gallo is the largest U.S. owned winery in the world. Because the company is so large, the UFW says change in its policies could have an effect on the entire market. In a May 2005 letter to Gallo President Joseph E. Gallo, Service Employees International Union President Andrew Stern said his union’s 1.8 million members support the UFW. “As a leader, your actions can set the tone for tens of thousands of farm workers. Your company has an image that is very well known and it would be a mistake to damage it by union-busting activity,” Stern wrote.

A possible boycott Howard Rosenberg, cooperative extension specialist at UC Berkeley, said the situation between the UFW and Gallo is hardly unusual. “There’s often tension of interests between employees and employers in any industry,” Rosenberg said. “The classic tension is how do you share the surplus. The total production system makes money. How much does management get and how much does labor get?” If negotiations are not reached in the near future, the UFW says it will use a national boycott to pressure Gallo – a tactic the company says only hurts the workers. “If people stop buying Gallo products, then it’s the Gallo workers that will feel the impact of that in terms of lost jobs, lost income, fewer hours. (Boycotts are) not effective. They truly impact the worker and not the company, and that impact is negative,” Segale said. UFW organizers in Sonoma have already been performing small demonstrations, often marching and chanting in front of the Gallo of Sonoma tasting room in Healdsburg. Kim Hutchinson traveled from Edgewater, Colo., to tour wine country in both Sonoma and Napa, and was in the tasting room during one of the union’s demonstrations. She said she usually drinks wine each day, and she and her friends were visiting the vineyards. Hutchinson said she hadn’t known much about the conflict between Gallo and the UFW but said she would likely support the union and refuse to buy Gallo wines if a boycott was called. Casimiro Alvarez, the UFW’s lead organizer of the Gallo Unfair campaign in Sonoma County, said their current strategy is to educate people about the struggle. “A lot of communities don’t know how this company exploits its workers,” Alvarez said.