Back in the not-so-distant days when Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation, the University of California, the Bank of America, and the Democratic Party successfully fought all attempts to organize their field help to fight for decent wages and working conditions (see Ramparts, Sept. 1965 ) U.S. fruit and vegetable processing giants could make big profits by doing all the cultivation and processing work in the United States and then exporting the finished product. Now, however, victories of the farm labor movement in the United States are causing the Jolly Green Giants of Agribusiness to set up their operations in economically growing (that is, poor -ed.) countries” (Wall Street Journal “Exports of U.S. Fruits, Vegetables Shrink as Food Processors Set Up Plants Abroad,” May 1, 1967).
To the Philippines, to Malaya, and to Taiwan, there the climate is lush and political insurgency has been suppressed, the Libby pineapple people are moving in order to preserve their fat profit margins. In Franco’s sunny Spain Libby has also moved to exploit “inexpensive Spanish labor to produce hand-packed Spanish green olives that are marketed here in competition with less-desirable US. machine-packed olives,” while in Mexico the Heinz Co. of Pittsburgh has begun a crash program to raise and market pineapples.
In short, the corporate tyrants of field and factory are going abroad to retrieve the advantages they lost when the “Bracero Program” (under U.S. Public Law 78) was not renewed in 1965. The “Bracero Program” allowed food processors to bring low-paid Mexican help across the border, thus suppressing the wages and crippling the unionizing efforts of U.S. workers. With their new internationalist approach Libby, et al are now able to exploit workers an the spot, without bringing them over the U.S. border. They can pit the non-unionized workers of Spain, Mexico and the Philippines and else where against their brothers in the United States, who are learning how to defend themselves in the political and economic arena. Or, as The Wall Street Journal puts it “experts believe American-owned plants in foreign countries may operate so efficiently before long that foods processed outside the U.S. will flow back across the borders and compete fiercely with domestic products.” (i.e., products cultivated and processed within the U.S.)
There is every reason to believe that the internationalist trend in agribusiness union-busting will continue. The procurement director of S&W Fine Foods, Inc. (a subsidiary of the San Francisco-based Di Giorgio Corp.) which felt the pinch of farm worker strikes and boycotts in the U.S. recently said, “we’re looking at all corners of the globe at the moment.”
