by David Bacon

VERNON, WA – Tulips and daffodils symbolize the arrival of spring, but the fields are bitterly cold when workers’ labors begin. Snow still covers the ground when workers go into the tulip rows to plant bulbs in northwest Washington state, near the Canadian border.

Once harvesting starts, so do other problems. When a worker cuts a daffodil, for instance, she or he has to avoid the liquid that oozes from the stem-a source of painful skin rashes.

Yes, the fields of flowers are so beautiful they can take your breath away, but the conditions under which they’re cultivated and harvested can be just as bad as they are for any other crop. “Tulips have always been a hard job, but it’s a job during a time of the year when work is hard to find,” says farmworker Tomás Ramón. “This year we just stopped enduring the problems. We decided things had to change.”

On Monday, March 21, their dissatisfaction reached a head. Three crews of pickers at Washington Bulb accused the company of shorting the bonuses paid on top of their hourly wage, Washington’s minimum of $14.69. Workers get that extra pay if they exceed a target quota set by the company for picking flowers.

The parent company of RoozenGaarde Flowers and Bulbs is Washington Bulb, the nation’s largest tulip grower.

“We’ve had these problems for a long time,” explains Ramon, who has cut tulips for Washington Bulb for seven years. “And the company has always invented reasons not to talk with us.”

Workers stopped work that Monday and waited from eight in the morning to see how the owners would respond. The general supervisor was sick, they were told. Someone from the company would talk with them, but only as individuals. “We didn’t want that,” Ramon says. “We’re members of the union, and the union represents us.”

Union Wherever They Go

Over two-thirds of the 150 pickers for Washington Bulb work at the state’s largest berry grower, Sakuma Farms, later in the season-where they bargain as members of Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), an independent union. Starting in 2013, farmworkers there struck and boycotted, and finally won a contract after four years. They formed Familias Unidas. At Washington Bulb there is no union contract, yet. But to Ramon and his workmates, they are members of FUJ wherever they go.

When the company wouldn’t talk on that Monday, 70 workers voted to strike the following day. Another 20 joined them the next morning, when they again demanded to talk with the company. This time one of the owners told them he wouldn’t talk if the president of Familias Unidas, Ramon Torres, was present.

“So we said, ‘If you won’t talk with our representative, we won’t talk without him,'” Tomas Ramon remembers. “‘We have a union and you have to make an agreement with him.’ So the owner got angry and left.”

That Wednesday the flowers were just waving in the breeze, waiting for someone to pick them. The day after, the company lawyer was on the phone to union attorney Kathy Barnard. With a commitment to begin negotiations, workers agreed to go back into the rows after the weekend, and talks got started.

“By the first day of the strike the workers had already met, elected a committee, and put their demands in writing,” said FUJ’s political director Edgar Franks. “After the four years of fighting for the contract at Sakuma Farms, they knew how to organize themselves quickly. They had community supporters on their picket lines after the first day. They had their list of demands, and finally forced the company to accept it.”

Rubber Band Time

When the workers committee and Torres met with Washington Bulb president Leo Roosens on Friday, they went point by point over their 16 demands. Roosens made an oral commitment to resolve all except the demand over wage increases.

by Manuela Tobias

CalMatters

A new study says that California has sent rent relief to only 16 percent of applicants, who are waiting months. The state disputes the analysis, but according to its figures, only 41 percent of applicants have been paid.

Only 16 percent of nearly half a million renters who applied for rent relief from the state of California have been paid, according to a new analysis released today. And the clock is ticking: Under state law, landlords will be able to evict tenants who failed to pay rent by April 1.

Of more than 488,000 households who applied for assistance since the program launched in March 2021, about 180,000 were approved. Four percent were denied, and more than half of applicants are still awaiting a response, according to the study, produced by the National Equity Atlas, Housing Now and the Western Center on Law & Poverty using state data.

But even most renters whose applications were approved are still waiting for a check, according to the analysis. Of the 180,000 households whose applications were approved, just more than 75,000 households were paid. And they still need more help: 90 percent of those households have reapplied for more money.

The number of people paid, according to the study, is significantly lower than what is shown on the state’s public dashboard — 191,000 households “served” and $2.2 billion paid.

Monica Hernández, a spokesperson with the California Department of Housing and Community Development, disputed the report’s findings and said that the state’s dashboard has “the most current and accurate numbers.”

Of 467,000 complete applications to date, 191,000 payments, or 41 percent, have been made, she said, and each week more than $80 million is going out to more than 8,000 households.

The study’s authors said they stood behind their analysis, which shows that $900 million has been paid (“application complete, paid” in the state’s data), while another $1.15 billion has only been approved (“application complete, payment pending”).

“It doesn’t matter if you have a piece of paper that says you’re approved, you need the money,” said Madeline Howard, a senior staff attorney at the Western Center and co-author of the report. “It doesn’t reflect the experience of the tenants who are living this day to day.”

The study also found that applicants waited a median of more than three months to get an approval, and another month to get paid — 135 days total. The wait times have been getting shorter, however: Households who applied for aid last March waited about six months to get paid, while those who applied in October faced a wait time of just less than four months.

In her emailed response, Hernández said that the wait time measure “does not account for the different rules that different applications applied under at different times” or “for incomplete, duplicate, or potentially fraudulent applications that we are just now clearing out of the data.”

California received about $5.2 billion from the federal government to help renters stay housed and keep landlords paid. The state is in charge of administering about half of that, while 25 cities and counties are administering the rest. The new study focuses on the state program, which covers nearly two-thirds of Californians.

In January, the state received $62 million in additional federal aid, or only 3 percent of the nearly $2 billion it requested in November. On March 15, the department announced it had received an additional $136 million. Still, California received one third of the funds reallocated by the U.S. Treasury, which Hernandez said spoke to federal officials’ “confidence in our ability to distribute funds to households in need in a timely fashion.”

According to Hernández, a budget bill the Legislature passed in February that allocates General Fund dollars to state and local rent relief programs “means that every eligible applicant seeking assistance for eligible costs submitted and incurred on or before March 31, 2022, will be assisted.” The state law allows the state to pay people quicker as they wait on Treasury, but it also means that if the federal government doesn’t foot the bill, California will.

That also means March 31 is the new deadline to apply for rent relief, according to an email from HCD spokesperson Alex Traverso on March 9.

The new study is the most complete look yet at how rent relief is going in California.

The full data set was not released to the Western Center through the state Public Records Act until after the center announced its intent to sue the Department of Housing and Community Development, which administers the program with the help of a private contractor. Repeated Public Records Act requests for the full data set had previously been denied. These groups have been tracking California’s eviction and rent relief efforts from the beginning.

CalMatters has requested similar data from the state through several Public Records Act requests and had been repeatedly told the data did not exist.

“We don’t track data and create a report on dates that folks applied and then they received a response. What we do is we’re able to look at the age of applications within the system and make sure that all applications are assigned by a certain date,” Geoffrey Ross, deputy director for the Division of Federal Financial Assistance at the housing department, told CalMatters on Oct. 11.

Hernández said that statement was accurate at the time.

A state ban on evictions for non-payment of rent went into effect at the start of the pandemic and was extended several times. That protection ended last October — with one condition. Through March 31, landlords would be blocked from evicting tenants over non-payment of rent through Sept. 30, 2021, if they had applied for rent relief from the state. That additional layer of protection disappears on April 1.

“I’m really confused as to why we haven’t heard anything to extend the eviction protections,” Howard said. “People are waiting. They don’t have their money.”

The state rent relief program continues to face other challenges that have persisted from its inception, according to another recent survey of 58 tenant organizations across the state by Tenants Together, an advocacy group. Ninety percent of survey respondents reported difficulties accessing the application and 82 percent reported difficulty getting information about their applications.

The survey found that California’s most vulnerable tenants — including non-English speakers, seniors, and people with informal leases — continue to face the greatest hurdles to getting rent relief.

“There’s I think a lack of understanding in the Legislature that people become homeless after they’re evicted from their homes,” said Shanti Singh, legislative and communications director for the group that conducted the survey.

Manuela is the housing reporter for CalMatters. Her stories focus on the political dynamics and economic and racial inequities that have contributed to the housing crisis in California and its potential.