Santa Rosa-based farmworker advocacy group North Bay Jobs With Justice just held the largest demonstration in its near-decade of existence, right here in downtown Healdsburg.
The fast-growing nonprofit—known locally for staging protests during the annual Healdsburg Wine & Food Experience each spring—this time brought together more than 600 farm and vineyard workers, and their supporters, to march through the streets of Healdsburg for two hours Sunday afternoon, halting traffic on the Memorial Bridge and other major thoroughfares.
“Esa es comunidad! (This is community!),” organizer Aura Aguilar shouted into a mic while hundreds gathered on the bridge that afternoon.
With signs, flyers and chants, workers demanded better pay from the local farms and wineries that employ them: $25 per hour, or $250 per ton of grapes picked.
They also called for “disaster pay” benefits, which would ensure that they earn extra for enduring extreme weather like triple-digit summer heat and natural disasters like wildfires—or, if it’s too dangerous to work, that they earn wages for lost hours.
Hot Work
Another of the march’s organizers, farmworker Anabel Garcia, said: “When it’s 100 degrees, you can’t work in those conditions. But when you can’t work, you don’t have enough money to make rent—to pay the bills, to get food on the table. And it’s not fair, because we know how much money the growers are making during the harvest—and they don’t pass that along to the workers.”
A handful of wineries in Sonoma and Napa counties offer disaster pay to their workers, but overall it’s a rarity in the industry, according to North Bay Jobs With Justice leaders. And they say many wineries still pay a standard wage of under $20 per hour.
“Healdsburg is kind of the center of wealth and opulence in Sonoma County,” said Davin Cardenas, director of organizing for the nonprofit. “It’s where many workers live and it’s where many workers work. So we thought it was a strategic moment and space to use.”
Sunday’s demonstration proved as loud and colorful as it was large: Marching from the Healdsburg Plaza to the roundabout to Memorial Bridge and back, driven forward by Latin music from three different bands in the crowd, protesters waved bright red, blue and yellow signs with messages like “Dignified Wages” and “Love Our Land Tenders.” Some signs were shaped like pineapples—a nod to the Flor de Piña dance from Oaxaca, homeland of many local workers. Multiple overhead puppets and hats took the shape of an acorn woodpecker, official symbol of North Bay Jobs With Justice.
Some participants wore neon vests and directed traffic; others handed flyers into car windows. Parents walked with children and carried babies in slings. Overall, they were a joyous bunch—smiling and laughing between impassioned calls for fair pay.
Big Boss Man
Another star of the show, a tall man dressed as an archetypal wine boss, or El Dueño, completed his costume with a jumbo dollar-sign tie and oversized wine glass. L.M. Bogad, a Bay Area performance artist and professor at the University of California, Davis, played the character.
“Satire is part of the political process,” Cardenas said. “It’s a different way for more people to participate, and for us to feel different emotions while we’re in the midst of a political moment.”
By all accounts, Sunday’s march was a peaceful affair, with no reports of pushback from passerby or visible police presence. A few observers also noted a rigorous sense of order.
Cardenas, head of organizing for North Bay Jobs With Justice, said he and fellow org leaders have worked for months to build out an internal hierarchy of dozens of sub-leaders to help recruit protesters and run the show.
“This was our goal since March, to reach this level of attendance and worker participation,” Cardenas said. “So this was the result of at least four or five months of organizing work.”
Now, as summer wears on, Cardenas said North Bay Jobs With Justice will focus on “supporting workers as they go into harvest, as they go into fire season—in an industry where wages are stagnant and the climate crisis is rampant.”
I’ve seen videos online of rice and crawfish growers in the Louisiana Delta paying their Mexican workers $25/hour plus transportation costs to and from Mexico. The rice and crawfish growers also provide housing and deal with the government paperwork for their workers.
But that’s Louisiana. Here in California, perhaps the taxes, regulations, and other costs on the growers from the politicians and bureaucrats in Sonoma County and the state government increase the grower’s overhead to the point that they can’t pay their workers more.
It would be good to hear the grape grower’s point of view on the wage issue.
There are always at least two sides to a story.