“One day, I was driving the [UFW] president to the airport in LA and he said ‘we need to go to St. Louis because the Monsanto headquarters are in St. Louis’, reflected Giev Kshkooli, political and legislative director for the United Farm Workers of America. “They [Monsanto] were a strawberry company and he started telling me we need to demonstrate at the headquarters of Monsanto – he started outlining ‘organized labor, faith, students’ and I said ‘that’s great.’ And he said, ‘you’re driving me to the airport now – how about you go?’ I didn’t know anyone in St. Louis so he said ‘call Virginia Nesmith [former NFWM executive director] when you get there.’ So I get to St. Louis and I call Virginia. I didn’t even have a place to stay and we had to demonstrate in 2 weeks. So she put me up at a convent. I’d had very little exposure to Catholicism, and now here I am staying in a convent. Virginia assured me I’d be well received and taken care of. Over the next two weeks, Virginia, Irv Hershenbaum [UFW] and I organized actions that helped us [UFW] win the first contract in the strawberry industry.”
The National Farm Worker Ministry played a big role in the UFW securing that contract with Monsanto, remembered Irv, 1st Vice President of the UFW. Historically mistreated and underpaid, strawberry workers had been underrepresented for years despite multi-million dollars in profits. In the late 1990s, the UFW launched a campaign to improve conditions for workers through union representation. Irv explained that the first big breakthrough in the years-long campaign resulted from active NFWM support related to Monsanto. “NFWM did work for months – letters, phone calls, they had delegations all over the country. It was a major effort,” he remembered.
Ultimately, Monsanto agreed to the UFW’s first neutrality agreement – a type of agreement in which the company commits not to interfere with the workers rights to organize. “It was the first breakthrough in the strawberry industry,” said Irv. “We then used that pressure on Coastal Berry to improve conditions for thousands of strawberry workers, convincing companies to clean up their abusive practices.”
