In the summer of 2008 Andres Cruz got a call from a crew of Triqui workers picking peas near Greenfield, a farmworker town in California’s Salinas Valley. They told him they were on strike, and because he’s a leader in their community, they asked him for help. Twenty-five pickers had been fired, they said.
“They told me the labor contractor fired them because they were working on a piece rate and weren’t picking fast enough,” recalls Cruz, who himself works as a broccoli cutter. Pickers have to use their thumbnails to cut the pod from the vine. “Their nails were tearing off because of this. They tried to wrap up their hands and keep working, but they couldn’t work as fast, and the foreman wouldn’t listen to them.”
