The women’s walkout: Lessons from the 1980s Watsonville cannery strike

We’re not used to hearing about great labor stories coming out of the 1980s. There’s something incongruous about picket lines, street-corner chants and proletariat anthems sung on beat-up guitars in the age of MTV, boomboxes and Mr. T.

But in Watsonville, the most significant event of the ’80s— well, before Oct. 17, 1989, anyway — might have been the Watsonville cannery strike, which included more than 1,500 workers in two frozen-food factories, and lasted more than a year and a half. It gained the attention of not only the national news media, but progressive political icons of the day Jesse Jackson and Cesar Chavez, and it ended in the spring of 1987 with many of the wage and benefit cuts that caused the strike, restored.

To commemorate the strike’s 40th anniversary, the Watsonville Film Festival will present a program that features filmmaker Jon Silver’s 1989 documentary on the strike, “Watsonville On Strike,” as well as Silver’s more contemporary follow-up, 2024’s “Daughters of the Strike.” Both will be screened as part of the WFF on March 8 at the Green Valley Cinema in Watsonville. A week later, on March 15, the Watsonville Public Library will host a commemoration of the strike featuring Silver and others involved in the strike.

A different city

Forty years ago, Watsonville was a significantly different city in ways vividly illustrated in the story of the cannery strike. At that time, Watsonville was commonly referred to as “the frozen-food capital of the world,” with eight vegetable processing plants in town at one point, from locally owned companies like Richard A. Shaw Frozen Foods Co. to nationally known companies like Birds Eye and Green Giant. In the post-NAFTA period the decade after the strikes, many of those companies closed their local factories to move to cheaper-labor countries. When the strike occurred, Watsonville’s near-majority Latino population was not well represented in city governance, and the story of the strike reveals a pronounced Latino/Anglo divide, with workers on one side and the police department and city council on the other.

In September 1985, close to 1,700 line workers went on strike against two of those companies, Shaw and Watsonville Canning & Frozen Food Co. At issue were big wage cuts proposed by the two canneries of up to 30%. After six months, the workers at Shaw, weary of the stresses and hardships of the strike, settled with the company on a concession contract that included smaller wage reductions and benefit cuts. Watsonville Canning, however, refused to negotiate with strikers, and that part of the strike continued into March 1987, when the company was pushed into foreclosure and new owners granted strikers wage parity in the industry and a return of benefits. Despite 19 months of strife and division in the community, the strike was declared a success for the workers.

In the middle of it all was Santa Cruz filmmaker Jon Silver, who was on hand for many of the most dramatic moments of the strike and was indeed himself arrested while bearing witness with his camera at the picket lines. Two years after the strike was settled, Silver released his documentary “Watsonville On Strike,” which charted the journey of the strikers over the long months of the strike and featured comments by Chavez and Jackson, the latter of whom compared Watsonville in its historical importance to Selma, Alabama.

“I remember in the summer of ’85,” said Silver, who moved to Watsonville during the strike, “the press was reporting that negotiations [between the companies and the Teamsters Local 912, which was representing the cannery workers] might be failing and a strike might be coming. And I said to my friend Joe Dees, who did the sound for most of the film, ‘Hey, this sounds like an important thing. We should get out there and do some filming.’”

Silver said that many of the strikers he met when first appearing on the scene expected the strike to last no more than one or two weeks. But when it lingered into one month, then two and three months, Silver stuck with it, documenting not only the picket line, but also union meetings, solidarity marches and appearances by Chavez and Jackson. “It just took on a life of its own,” he said.

As the strike deepened, rifts within the strikers and particularly in the union leadership began to take shape. “Watsonville on Strike” opens, in fact, with the local Teamsters president confronting the strikers and demanding that Silver and his crew turn their cameras off. The Teamsters leader can’t speak Spanish and, thus, can’t communicate with his own rank and file. It’s Silver himself, behind his camera, who provides translation to the increasingly irate crowd.

“Watsonville on Strike”

The film documents the split between the more conservative Teamsters leadership and a breakaway group called Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) that took on a more militant stance in defense of the workers. Silver made no pretense that he was a neutral outside party. Indeed, as one of the “Watsonville 19” — a group of strikers and protesters arrested for defying a court order limiting the number of people who were able to gather at the plant’s gates — he and his camera were part of the story.

“I was intimately involved with the Watsonville strike support committee,” he said. “Because I had the trust of a lot of the strikers, I was able to get to the strikers’ meetings and even where probably the rest of the media wasn’t really invited, or weren’t there.”

One of those union strikers was Paula Hernandez, worked at the Shaw cannery for 36 years before it closed in 2006, even working as an occupational safety officer for a while. When they weren’t working, strikers were allotted $55 a week and whatever food they could take from union-sponsored weekly food giveaways. Hernandez, now 76, volunteered in the food drive to help her fellow strikers.

“The first part was exciting,” she said. “At least, I thought it was. We were all rallying together for the good of everyone. We were getting the food bank to help us, many of the stores in the community, other unions were pitching in. I thought, ‘Wow, this is great.’ But then, it dragged on.”

The vast majority of the strikers were Mexican or Mexican American. But as much as it was a Latino strike, it was also very much a women’s strike. Some estimates claimed that three-quarters of the strikers were women, many of them middle-aged women with children. 

Hernandez said that, among the rifts that began to form as the strike went on for months, was a divide between those women whose husbands had jobs and were thus able to maintain at least some of their family income and those who were sole breadwinners, or those whose husbands were also striking. 

Among Hernandez’s own children is Santa Cruz County Fourth District Supervisor Felipe Hernandez. She said that she had always been grateful to the Shaw cannery for providing a living for her and her children. But the strike opened her eyes about what it meant for her children’s future.

“There’s a good thing about this, in that had the cannery and the strike and it eventually closing had not been what it was,” Paula Hernandez said, “my kids would probably be working in the canneries. But I pushed them to college and university. I didn’t want them working for something that was just going to close down. I used to tell the other ladies, because we used to get together sometimes, ‘No, the best thing you can do is sacrifice yourself but keep your kids in school, and go to college.’”

As the strike moved into its second year, the focus of the strikers moved to Watsonville Canning’s primary creditor, Wells Fargo. In early 1987, drowning in debt and unable to meet its production standards, Watsonville Canning faced foreclosure and Wells Fargo negotiated a sale with a grower named Norcal. The new contract offer to the union included cuts in benefits that many strikers found unacceptable. With pressure growing on the strikers to settle — the Santa Cruz Sentinel’s front-page headline said: “Watsonville strike all but over” — a vote was called on the new owner’s offer. In defiance of Teamsters leadership, the strikers rejected the deal. The “wildcat” continuation of the strike gave the strikers new energy, and the new owner could not get the factory open again. 

On March 10, 1987, strikers, almost all of them women, staged a dramatic march across town on their knees. Norcal revised the contract and reinstated the workers’ benefits. The next day, the rank and file overwhelmingly accepted the new contract.

Besides providing a blow-by-blow narrative of the strike as it unfolded, Silver’s film uncovered much about the dignity borne from the struggles of the strikers and exposed a tragic sense of fatalism. 

“Our condition will always be the same,” said one striker as she was forced to vacate her home because she couldn’t pay the rent. “We were born poor, and we will die poor. At least we have learned that it’s not money or being rich that’s important, but that all workers are united to fight for our ideals.”

Despite the restoration of benefits, the strikers returned to work at a lower rate of pay than when they first went on strike 19 months earlier. Still, the fact that the strikers outlasted the original owners of Watsonville Canning prompted the news media, the union and many in the rank and file to call it a victory. 

“It’s complicated,” said Silver. “I think it was a victory, but it was a limited victory. About three weeks after the strike ends, the last scene in the film is a barbecue, and I asked many of the strikers if it was a victory. And many of them said yes — we got a contract, we got our benefits, no one crossed the picket lines. But others were more tepid. They went on strike for a year and a half and they come back to a pay cut. And in reality, the industry was already falling to free trade and globalization. And, then, several years later, all those jobs were gone.”

“Daughters of the Strike”

Silver’s second film in the WFF program is a five-minute short titled “Daughters of the Strike (Hijas de la Huelga)” and visits striker Sylvia Baltazar almost four decades after the strike, and her two adult daughters, educator Wendy Baltazar and Blanca Baltazar-Sabbah, now vice president of student services at Cabrillo College. 

There are several threads to pull on looking for lessons in the story of the Watsonville cannery strike, in labor/capital relations, and in international trade. But perhaps the fact that the vast majority of workers in the strike were women puts a tighter focus on the struggles of the individual striker. 

Sylvia Baltazar said that the strike was called just two weeks after she had returned to work from having a baby. Paula Hernandez talked movingly of the pain of urging other women to stand fast with the strike when they clearly weren’t as well off as she was.

At one meeting before the strike was settled, Hernandez remembered talking to many other women — one had to sell her wedding ring, another the family’s only car, one whose home went into foreclosure. 

“They told me,” she remembered, “‘Just because you have a husband who’s working and a family that helps you, it’s not like that for all of us. Paula, we’re suffering. You want us to keep going. But you’re not the one who is suffering.’

“We had that meeting out at the Pajaro Dunes, and I went out walking along the beach, and I was just crying. It was true. It shouldn’t be about what I feel. I should look at it through their eyes.”

The Watsonville Film Festival opens March 6 at Green Valley Cinemas in Watsonville. Jon Silver’s “Watsonville on Strike” and “Daughters of the Strike” will be screened March 8, as part of the festival.

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