The Workers

There are about 20,000 strawberry workers in California. For the average worker, things are getting worse. Their pay is about $8,500 a year and most have not received a significant raise in 10 years. There are many reports of workers receiving less than the minimum wage. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the average real wage for a farm worker in California has fallen 25 percent in the last 15 years.

Depending on the company's decision for any given day, the strawberry pickers get paid an hourly wage or an hourly wage combined with payment per large box of berries they pick.

Low pay means most workers must cram into expensive, small apartments, at best. Many live in cars, shacks or even in caves and fields.

The work is hard. Strawberry pickers work as many as 12 hours a day. To pick the fruit, they must bend and stoop, resulting in chronic back injuries. The work is too hard for older pickers. Four out of five are under 30. Chronic back injuries are common. Workers labor in fields treated with pesticides such as methyl bromide, one of the most toxic chemicals in use. Yet, health insurance for the workers is a rarity.

Child labor is not unusual. Women workers face sexual harassment in the fields. Bathrooms are often far from the workers or in disrepair and sometimes there is no clean drinking water. Job security does not exist.

There are outlaw situations in the fields, such as those at B&J Farms, a large grower near Watsonville. The company promised workers and the government to pay $500,000 in back wages seven years ago. To date, B&J still owes workers nearly half that sum despite a court order. The company was cited in April for child labor law violations, allegedly maintains filthy and inadequate portable restrooms and dumps them into the fields. B&J has denied workers drinking water for as long as five hours at a time. Workers have reported that at B&J Farms they are forced to eat green, unripe strawberries that they pick by mistake. More than a dozen workers were recently fired for complaining when their paychecks bounced.

B&J Farms isn't the only outlaw situation that cooler companies turn a blind eye to.

The Corporations

Strawberry workers are at the mercy of a handful of huge cooler corporations that are the real power in the industry. They receive berries from the fields and immediately refrigerate them. Strawberries must be harvested quickly once they are ripe or the crop can be ruined and the plants damaged.

The cooler companies dominate about 270 strawberry growers on California's central coast, where about 65 percent of the state's fresh strawberries are grown. Some of these giants include Driscoll and WellPict.

Although most of them don't directly employ workers, they control the industry by setting prices, marketing and distributing the fruit and loaning money to growers. The cooler companies should be held accountable for the abuses workers suffer and be encouraged to help improve conditions.

Although some growers might make more money in some years than others due to weather or market conditions, the industry is booming. California strawberry workers pick 912 million pints of berries a year, according to a special November 1995 report in Atlantic Monthly. That's triple the amount picked in 1974. U.S. growers make more money from fresh strawberries than any other crop except fresh apples.