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NEWS & LETTERS, NOVEMBER 2003Hawaii farm strikeKilauea, Hawaii--We are striking against Kilauea Agronomics (Guava Kai) over wages and benefits. Our ILWU Longshore Local 142 contract ended Jan. 1. Our bargaining unit covers harvesters, truck drivers, pruners, plant workers, and clerical workers. Ever since the company got into the guava business in 1975, it has been profitable, but always had a reason not to afford a wage increase or benefits. The best we’ve ever done is 2%-2%-3% on a three-year contract. The cost of living in Hawaii is higher than the mainland, but wages are a lot less. Even for Hawaii, the $7.14 an hour that the seasonal worker gets is way below what the average full-time worker gets--$9.00. The company wants to change to an HMO and outside that we would pay the difference plus 20% of the primary plan. The 1% wage increase they offered doesn’t even cover the increase in the medical. Covered seasonals don’t get family medical coverage. There are people who have been seasonals for up to ten years. There’s no mechanism to move them to full-time, yet regular workers become seasonals and lose benefits if they don’t get 1,500 hours in a year. We work in the rain, we work in the heat. When we retire, we get nothing. We have workers past 70. There was a labor shortage, and they hired a lot of older people. Then they approached the union to try to get rid of the older workers! That’s age discrimination, and it wasn’t going to fly. This is the mentality they have. In the past when there was no pruning work, pruners were offered harvesting work paid at the lower harvester wage. If you didn’t want to harvest, you collected unemployment. Now they report that we refused work so we can’t get unemployment. But our contract language is plain: if you want pruners to harvest, you pay the higher of the two rates. In Hawaii we call them high makamaka, which means they think they’re better than us because they make more. People should look at how we work. We are poor, and they want to get rich off of us. --Striking guava workers |
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