Rally participants marched to the nearby Mt. Olive Pickle plant. Members and officials from a wide range of unions in North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia participated. Students from North Carolina State and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) also took part, along with some 50 farm workers from the Mt. Olive area.

FLOC president Baldemar Velasquez told the rally that the company cannot claim that it does not have responsibility for the workers who pick its cucumbers. Mt. Olive belongs to the North Carolina Growers Association, which "recruits" these workers and brings them to the fields, he said. Most of these farm workers are immigrants from Mexico and other countries in Latin America.

A Spanish-language flyer distributed to promote the event was headlined, "No to the exploitation of immigrants." It stated, "We are demanding a contract for better working conditions and pay."

The farm workers who turned up pick strawberries, blueberries, watermelon, cucumbers, tobacco, and sweet potatoes, depending on which farms are hiring. Some stay in North Carolina year-round and try to find construction or other work in the off-season. Others spend six months in Florida for the tomato, chili, and orange harvests, and then another six months in North Carolina as another round of crops ripens. As the harvest rolls in, some find work at the pickling factories.

One 30-year-old worker from Chiapas, Mexico, said he is currently earning about $6 an hour picking strawberries. When that work runs out he will move on to the cucumber and tobacco harvests. "We want the working day to be limited to eight hours," he said. "Often we’re forced to work 10 hours or more in grueling heat."

"There’s no drinking water in the fields, so you have to bring your own in a thermos," said Maribel Sánchez, 28. "The contractors treat us like animals," she said. "The buses they use to take us to work often don’t have seat belts or even any seats."

The wretched quality and high cost of living is also a long-standing grievance. Many workers rent their own trailers from contractors and others. "They’ll charge $350 a month for a foul-smelling trailer, with holes where cockroaches, rats, and snakes get in," Sánchez said.

"If you take a bathroom break," she said, "they take it out of your wages. Some places don’t even allow a lunch break." She explained that in the blueberry fields workers are paid only $5 a bushel, an amount that can take an hour and a half to pick.

Sánchez and her sister, Bertila, 25, argued strongly for a higher wage. "We earn so little. We’re not asking for $8 or $9 an hour. We want to earn $7 an hour," she said. "If immigrants all went on strike the bosses would have to listen."

Mt. Olive Pickle Company is the largest privately owned pickle company in the United States. Its factories pack more than 70 million jars of processed and fresh pickles, peppers, and relishes each year, using 100 million pounds of cucumbers and peppers. According to the company, about one-third of its cucumbers are grown in North Carolina. Mt. Olive does not own most of the farms that supply its processing plants with produce.

FLOC wants a three-way contract modeled after the deals it has won in Ohio and Michigan with Heinz, Vlasic, Dean Foods, and Campbell’s Soup Company. Those companies have agreed to pay more to farmers, who in turn have agreed to increase the wages and benefits they pay to farm workers.

"FLOC is demanding that Mt. Olive bring farmers to the bargaining table to negotiate and participate in bargaining discussions with farmers," Mt. Olive Pickle spokeswoman Lynn Williams complained to the Raleigh News & Observer. "We think that is an inappropriate role to play."

FLOC launched a boycott of Mt. Olive pickles in 1999 to pressure the company to agree to these demands.

Agriculture is the largest sector of the North Carolina economy with more than $59 billion in sales every year. At peak harvest tens of thousands of migrant farm workers, most of them Spanish-speaking immigrants, labor in the fields.

Among the speakers at the April 13 rally were James Andrews, president of the North Carolina AFL-CIO; Naeema Muhammad, of Black Workers for Justice; and Ken Riley, a leader of the International Longshoremen’s Association in Charleston, South Carolina, and currently a national official of the union.

Also attending were organizers from the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW). The UFCW has reinitiated the drive to organize workers at the Smithfield pork processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, and recently opened an office for that purpose in Red Springs. The Tar Heel plant is one of the largest pork-kill facilities in the country.

Seth Galinsky is member of UNITE Local 1506 at Pillowtex in Concord, N.C.  
 
 
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