“This is one of the only places to get work so people keep their heads down,” said another. “If you make waves they say they’ll call Ice or that you’ll get e-verified, which means you lose your job,” said one worker. To workers in Tracy who lack documents to work legally, it strikes dread. It seems set for gradual expansion, though critics call it inaccurate and intrusive. In most states, including California, it is voluntary for employers. One way managers keep restive employees in line, according to current and former workers, is by threatening to introduce E-Verify.Į-Verify is a hiring database designed to check whether job applicants are legally eligible to work in the US. Some have worked full-time for more than a decade but are still classified as temporary. They earn at least 50 cents less per hour than Salinas colleagues and have fewer benefits. In Tracy, a two-hour drive north, 600 of the 900 workers are “temporary”. They earn above minimum wage and have health insurance, paid holidays and other benefits.
A plant at its headquarters in Salinas, which was home to The Grapes of Wrath author John Steinbeck, employs 2,500 Teamster members. Taylor Farms has two categories of worker in California. If Ice were to raid the facilities, both sides would lose. And there is a shared reluctance to highlight the presence of undocumented workers. The work takes place not in fields but in nondescript processing plants. These guys were out of control.”Ĭompared to the dramatic marches, boycotts and hunger strikes of the 1960s and 1970s, when Taylor’s father and grandfather battled lettuce and grape pickers, this contest is less visible. Kim Keller, a Teamster organiser, accused Taylor Farms of hiring thuggish union-busters. “The Teamsters have made amazingly dishonest allegations,” he said. Photograph: Stephen McLaren/for the GuardianĪllegations of company abuse, Taylor told the Guardian, were an attempt to smear the company and railroad workers into joining the union against their will. Salad for sale in a supermarket near Tracy, California. Earlier this year its general president, Jim Hoffa, led a rally in Tracy with chants of “Si se puede” (yes we can) and “Teamster power”.Įach side accuses the other of bullying and lying. The Teamsters wants to unionise the plants, to set an example for other agricultural sectors. On the other, the Teamsters, a heavyweight labour union, and its political allies.
Its chief executive, Bruce Taylor, is also chairman of Western Growers, a trade association, and scion of an agribusiness dynasty which in previous decades clashed with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union. On one side, Taylor Farms, which earned $1.8bn in revenue in 2012. The plants, which employ 900 workers, have become a battleground for two powerful forces, with repercussions beyond Tracy. The company cited other reasons, including a safety violation. They said they’d start deporting people to Mexico,” said Julian Camacho, a former loader who said he lost his job for trying to organise a union. “The managers said we didn’t have any rights to form a union because there were illegals there. “If you don’t have papers, that scares you.”Ī half-dozen current and former workers interviewed by the Guardian alleged the company took advantage of undocumented migrants from Mexico and central America to keep workers on “temporary” status year after year, leaving them vulnerable to low pay, dangerous conditions, intimidation and summary firings. “If you complain they threaten to call ‘la migra’,” said Rosie Guadaloupe, a former supervisor, using a Latino term for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a Department of Homeland Security agency also known as Ice. Some workers, however, say that those inside the processing plants face only noxious choices: exploitation, unemployment, deportation. Taylor Farms has become a billion-dollar success story by selling organic kale, lettuce, tomatoes and other “healthy, wholesome” choices. Here Taylor Farms, the world’s largest supplier of cut vegetables and salad, packages produce which ends up at Safeway, Walmart and Costco, as well as McDonald’s, Chipotle, Subway and Starbucks. A lot of America’s healthy eating options pass through two cream-coloured, windowless buildings in a scruffy California town called Tracy.