Article and photo by David Bacon

Students and parents have come out en masse to join the marches and picket lines of the ongoing teachers strike in Oakland, California. All say that they are trying to save the city’s public school system.

“This is a strike to save our district,” said Heath Madom, who’s taught 10th grade English for three years at Oakland Technical High School, which is referred to as “Tech” by educators and pupils. “Our Tech community is committed to saving public education. Twenty-four schools are on the chopping block. We could become like New Orleans, with no public schools and all charters, if this keeps going.”

Like other teacher strikes around the country, the Oakland conflict is fueled both by a determination to protect the public school system itself and by the crisis in funding that has led to huge classes and deteriorating conditions in the schools themselves. According to Madom and the Oakland Education Association, only 5 percent of the district’s 37,000 students have passed through their schools’ doors over the last three days – evidence of vehement parent and community support.

Parents, students and teachers all condemn the rise in class sizes. “My class is a catch-all, because all students have to take it, so class size is a huge issue,” said Rho Seidelman, who’s taught ethnic studies at Tech for three years. “There’s no tracking, which is great, because we have students from all backgrounds and previous schools. But it’s hard to build community among the students when there are so many. The contract says 32 is the limit, and I routinely have at least 33. Research shows that the best learning environment is in a class of 18, where students can really learn and build community. When students are absent and my class size goes down to 28 or 26, I’m really happy.”

Madom says most classes at Tech have 35-40 students, and the school, built for 1,800, has a student body of 2,000. “We only have two part-time nurses for 2,000 students, and they don’t have the time or resources to deal with all their medical problems. We have a beautiful library, but haven’t had a librarian for years. Our counselors have a caseload of 500 students apiece. If they saw every student, they would only be able to spend a few minutes with each,” Madom said. The hiring of more nurses, librarians and counselors is part of the strike demands of the union, the Oakland Education Association, which is affiliated with the National Education Association (NEA).

Teachers’ pay is also part of the strike demands. The union wants a 12 percent raise over 3 years, and the district is stuck at 7 percent with a bonus. “The only reason I can live in Oakland is because I live with a partner who has a good income,” Seidelman said. “What I make is not enough to live here. I’m still paying off my school loans, and rent takes up almost half my income. My job would clearly be improved if we won the demands of our strike, and I, and other teachers too, would be more likely to stay.”

“People here are struggling,” Madom added. “Some teachers are commuting long distances to get here. We had seven excellent teachers leave this year, including two English teachers with more than five years [of] experience.”

Prior to the strike, a state fact-finder’s report found that the teacher retention crisis in Oakland is worse than most other districts in the state, which the state attributes to substandard pay, the lowest among the Bay Area’s districts. The fact-finder also mandated reducing class sizes, especially for special education classes, and concluded that school privatization was hurting students.

Slating 24 schools for closure is part of the privatization regime, Madom argued, adding that the closures are hitting communities that have been historically underserved the hardest. “At the same time, the district has allowed charter schools to proliferate, which is a direct reason why enrollment has declined in public schools they now want to close,” Madom added. “Yet there’s no discussion of closing any of the charters.” Those charter schools already enroll 13,000 students in Oakland.

Seidelman said these priorities are part of a culture in Oakland that favors development to benefit the affluent. “If it was up to a popular vote, our community would support the strike’s demands overwhelmingly. But our community is not in control of the basic decisions in the city. The strike has exposed the political corruption in Oakland city politics. The terrible condition of our schools is a consequence of the policies imposed by business interests. The resources of the city go to gentrification, which benefits them, but not our communities. It’s true all over the country, which is why there are strikes now in so many places. It’s not just a problem of Oakland.”

But the national teachers’ strike wave is challenging those priorities. “It’s shifting the narrative on public education,” Madom said. “The charter industry has claimed that poor students don’t get the education they deserve because of poor teachers. Public school teachers haven’t been heard until now. We do need great teachers, but the problems of our schools aren’t due to individual teachers. The district for years hasn’t funded classrooms adequately, but the state also has grossly underfunded education. California has a massive amount of wealth. I can’t believe we’re living in one of the richest states in the country, and yet there’s no money for education. We’re tired of putting up with austerity. The strike wave is happening because teachers are standing up, and saying ‘enough is enough’.”

After talks broke down on February 24, sending the strike into its third day, Keith Brown, president of the Oakland Education Association, told reporters that the district had “returned to the table without a proposal that would begin to meet our core bargaining demands [which include an obligation to] fully fund our schools and provide a living wage to keep teachers in Oakland.”

Novelist Alice Walker was among many celebrities and political figures to rally behind the teachers. “You should be given, really, anything you ask for,” she said in a letter. “It is criminal that you are not. Especially when we see it is the war effort, more often than not, that is supported lavishly. An effort that often cuts short the very lives you have lovingly prepared to live with understanding and intelligence in this world. Know that you have sisters and brothers who stand with you, heart to heart.”

The majority of the following photographs were taken on the strike’s first day, February 21, when teachers, parents and students rallied in front of the Oakland City Hall, and then marched through downtown streets to the offices of the Oakland Unified School District.

by David Bacon

California growers have complained of a tight labor market for years, as a militarized border and a decade of mass deportations restrict the flow of migrants into the fields. Some growers, like Salinas’ D’Arrigo Brothers Co., have signed union contracts and provided better wages and benefits in order to attract a stable workforce. Others, however, are actively seeking to hold wages down. This recipe for confrontation has produced an escalating legal battle in Washington DC, and a walkout by hundreds of tangerine pickers in the Central Valley.

Growers have increasingly turned to H-2A visas for guest workers, with the decade ending in 2018 seeing a more than 370 percent increase, with no decline in sight. In Washington DC, the National Council of Agricultural Employers, a national lobbying organization for U.S. growers, filed suit in January against the U.S. Department of Labor to freeze the wages of H-2A guest workers at a level barely above the minimum wage.

H-2A workers are recruited by growers every year in other countries, mainly Mexico. They’re given visas for less than a year, which require them to work for the employer that contracts them. They must leave the country when their work is done. Growers have to advertise for local workers first, and can only bring in guest workers if none are available.

Companies using the H-2A program must apply to the U.S. Department of Labor, specifying the work, and the living conditions and wages workers will receive. Each year the Federal government sets state-by-state an Adverse Effect Wage Rate – the wage growers must pay H-2A workers. It is set at a level that supposedly won’t undermine the wages of local workers, but it’s usually just slightly above the minimum wage. In 2019 the AEWR wage in California is set to increase from $13.18/hour to $13.92. California’s minimum wage, for employers with more than 25 workers, will go to $12.00.

On Jan. 8, the day before the new H-2A wages were to go into effect, the NCAE was denied a temporary injunction to halt the increases. The organization then filed suit to roll back AEWR wages to 2018 levels. Michael Marsh, NCAE president and CEO, said the increases were “unsustainable,” and would cost growers “hundreds of millions of dollars.” Agribusiness is being “hammered by unfair retaliatory tariffs,” he charged, in a dig directed against Trump’s trade war with China.

The increases directly affect a sizeable chunk of the farm labor workforce. According to the Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey, the best analysis of farm worker demographics for over two decades, there are about 2.5 million farm workers in the U.S., about three quarters of whom were born outside the U.S., and half of whom are undocumented. Last year growers were certified to bring in 242,762 H-2A workers – a tenth of the total workforce and a number that is rising rapidly. Holding down their wages would save growers a lot of money.

But halting the increase would also impact farm workers as a whole. Farmworker Justice, a Washington DC farm worker advocacy coalition, says the average family’s yearly income is $17,500-$19,999. A quarter of all farm worker families earned below the federal poverty line of $19,790.

Farmworker Justice and the United Farm Workers both requested to intervene in the NCAE suit on the side of the Department of Labor, upholding the wage increases. “The growers’ suit will affect farm workers across the country,” said UFW President Teresa Romero. “If H-2A wages are frozen, fewer farm workers already living here will want to work for them. Growers will have an excuse to bring in more H-2A workers. It’s becoming more like the bracero program.

Growers have challenged the formula used by DoL to calculate the yearly wage increase. Under President George W. Bush they knocked it out, but President Barack Obama reinstated it. Now the AEWR increase formula is being challenged again, under another grower-friendly administration. Last May 24 the secretaries of Agriculture, Homeland Security, State and Labor issued a “H-2A Agricultural Worker Visa Modernization Joint Cabinet Statement” promising to change the program rules “in a way that is responsive to stakeholder concerns and that deepens our confidence in the program as a source of legal and verified labor for agriculture.

While the suit would have a national impact, it is closely connected to California growers. President Tom Nassif of the California-based Western Growers Association belongs to President Trump’s agricultural advisory board, and prominent WGA member Dennis Nuxoll sits on the NCEA executive committee. NCEA President Michael Marsh was CEO of Western United Dairymen and an officer of the Almond Board of California, both headquartered in Modesto.

Farm worker advocates worry that the Trump administration’s Labor Department may not vigorously defend the wage increase against the growers’ legal challenge. “We would intervene in the NCEA suit no matter what,” said Bruce Goldstein, director of Farmworker Justice. “But we are clearly concerned about what position DoL will take in defending against it, in light of the President’s other anti-worker and anti-regulatory actions.”

The suit is one of a number of moves made by growers in the past two years to roll back H-2A wages and protections. At the instigation of the Washington [State] Farm Labor Association (WAFLA), one of the U.S.’s largest H-2A labor contractors, Washington State’s Employment Security Department and the U.S. Department of Labor effectively slashed the legal minimum for farm worker wages by up to $6 per hour. ESD and the Department of Labor agreed with WAFLA to remove an AEWR piece-rate minimum for picking apples, the state’s largest harvest, effectively lowering the harvest wage by as much as a third.

The assault on farm worker wages has also surfaced in Congress as Republicans in the House and Senate introduced bills in the last two years to also end protections for H-2A workers and expand their recruitment. Republicans representing California’s San Joaquin Valley in the House supported these bills, which failed, but two of those representatives were turned out of office in the midterm elections. What attitude their freshman Democratic replacements will take has yet to be seen. Some California Democrats, however, especially Senator Diane Feinstein, have a record of supporting growers’ use of the H-2A program
Senator Feinstein and Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren, however, have reintroduced a bill, the Agricultural Worker Program Act of 2019, which would allow undocumented farm workers to gain legal status by working a minimum number of days, pass security checks, and meet other requirements. “The bill would minimize the need for employers’ use of the H-2A guest worker program by providing a meaningful opportunity for immigration status for the hard-working undocumented farmworkers who put food on our table,” said a statement from Farmworker Justice.

Grower efforts to cut wages have affected workers who are not H-2A visa holders as well. Low wages for farm workers even provoked a strike after New Years, at one of California’s largest agribusiness corporations, the Wonderful Company. On January 11 hundreds of field hands refused to go to work harvesting tangerines in Kern County orchards, after the piece rate they were being paid was lowered from $53 to $48 per bin.

Striking pickers told the media that a fast worker could harvest two bins a day. Assuming an 8-hour day, they would earn about $12 per hour. Some told UFW organizers that they often made less than the $12/hour legal minimum, a violation of state law.

“They’re also told to report to work at a given time, but the work sometimes doesn’t start for a few hours, and they’re not paid for waiting,” said UFW President Teresa Romero. She estimated that there were about 1800 workers on strike on January 11. “They tried to talk with the company, but the company refused to talk with them. We don’t know yet if the management will come to the table. The workers want to work, but they also want to be respected.”

A statement by Mark T. Carmel, director of corporate communications, said Wonderful was “disappointed that some of our third-party labor contractors decided to protest at one of our fields.” A month ago, however, the company said it was raising its wages to a $15/hour minimum in all its subsidiaries, including Wonderful Citrus, Wonderful Pistachios & Almonds, Wonderful Orchards, Wonderful Nurseries, POM Wonderful, JUSTIN Wines and Landmark Wines.

Wonderful’s billionaire owner, Los Angeles investor Stewart Resnick, called his workers “dedicated and hard-working employees … our greatest asset, and the reason for our tremendous success as a company.” Co-owner Lynda Resnick added “this substantial investment in our workers will have an immediate and meaningful impact on their lives.”

The Wonderful Company was known as Paramount Farms until it changed its name in 2015. Its parent corporation, Los Angeles-based Roll Global, also operates the FIJI Water and Teleflora companies. In a 2016 Mother Jones article, writer Josh Harkinson said the Resnicks “are now thought to consume more of the state’s water than any other family, farm, or company. They control more of it in some years than what’s used by the residents of Los Angeles and the entire San Francisco Bay Area combined.”

Paramount Farms had a long history of labor conflict. In 1999 it broke an effort by a thousand workers to join the Laborers Union, in its huge packing plant near Lost Hills on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. At the time the company issued a press release saying that “employees are doing well and do not need a union,” and that its pay and benefits “are superior to most employers in the area.” In 2002, however, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that it had illegally threatened workers with firing, and had illegally fired Margarita Aviso and Leticia Ortiz for supporting the union.

Romero said that workers, meeting at the UFW’s historic “40 Acres” headquarters in Delano, on January 14 discussed the possibility of organizing a union, filing a petition for an election at Wonderful, and bargaining a contract. During the day the company offered to reinstate the $53/bin wage, and the pickers decided to go back into the orchards the following morning. A statement by Wonderful’s Mark Carmel said, “We’ve resolved the main concern raised by our third-party labor contractors and are currently paying the same bin rate for picking mandarins that we previously paid for clementines. Our workers are back on the job and operations have returned to normal.”

UFW Vice-President Armando Elenes felt they’d taken a big step. “They came out of the strike with real leaders and a good organization,” he said. The strikers are mostly indigenous Mixteco migrants from Oaxaca. Two years ago workers from the same indigenous farm worker community struck the Gourmet Trading Company’s grape vinyards, also over a cut in wages. They then voted for the UFW in a union election, and the company agreed to a union contract covering over 500 employees.

“Our main focus nowadays is trying to talk with the company to avoid conflict,” Romero explained. “But some growers take longer to understand than others that this is a better way. Stewart Resnick is a powerful man. But is he willing to get beyond this and recognize what workers want?”