What’s at stake?
With up to 10,000 jobs on the line after Prima Wawona’s collapse, some worry whether California’s social safety net is prepared to catch everyone – especially the most vulnerable workers.
The downfall of Prima Wawona, the Central Valley’s now-bankrupt stone fruit farming and packing giant, is one of largest collapses in recent memory – and some say initial estimates of the number of affected workers are off by thousands.
More than 5,400 workers received notice of impending mass layoffs from Prima Wawona in January in compliance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, Act, which requires companies give workers at least 60 days’ notice before mass layoffs.
Over 3,743 of these notices went out to seasonal employees, according to documents from California’s Employment Development Department.
This catastrophic scale of job loss has no precedent in California’s agricultural industry in recent years, experts told Fresnoland.
But that might only be the half of it.
The 5,400 figure “reflects the direct hires” only, according to Lupe Larios, the Labor Education Program director with the UC Merced Community and Labor Center.
The harvest season in the summer and fall brings in up to 5,000 additional workers who aren’t hired by Wawona directly, she said, but through farm labor contractors. The contractors are state-licensed agricultural staffing agencies that hire workers to provide the labor to growers.
These contracted farmworkers will also lose months of work and pay they once depended on – and compound the number of jobs on the line to as much as 10,000.
“It’s going to be devastating,” Larios said. “It’s going to trickle down. The impacts are going to be felt throughout these areas.”
Some public and nonprofit agencies are now scrambling to absorb this shock to the Central Valley’s workforce.
Among them is La Cooperativa Campesina de California, an association of five organizations across the state that receive funding from the federal government to help farmworkers.
La Cooperativa’s Executive Director Marco César Lizárraga said that much of a two-year, $7 million dislocated worker grant the association received from California’s EDD late last month will be channeled toward training for Fresno-area workers in light of the Prima Wawona layoffs.
“This is a grant we’ve been getting since 1998 to address the issue of the dislocation of farmworkers in agriculture,” he said in an interview. “This time … it was crucial that we get the funding quickly to be able to respond to what’s happening in the Fresno area.”
But some question whether California’s safety net can catch roughly 10,000 workers, especially the most vulnerable among them.
“There is a social safety net in California … Workers often experience barriers in accessing it – language barriers, barriers of citizenship status,” said Antonio de Loera, a United Farm Workers spokesperson. The union once represented workers of a pre-merger Prima Wawona before a controversial union decertification vote.
On top of that, he said, it raises questions about who’s truly responsible for the economic disaster as public agencies and nonprofits step in.
“From the point of view of the union, even that’s unfair,” he said. “Because what you’re asking is either the taxpayer or the nonprofit sector basically bear the true cost of the agricultural industry.”
What is Prima Wawona?
Prima Wawona was the product of a 2019 merger between Gerawan Farming and Wawona Packing. Paine Scwartz, a private equity firm, partnered with both companies to facilitate the merger.
Wawona Frozen Foods, a frozen fruit company headquartered in Clovis, isn’t affiliated with Prima Wawona.
Prima Wawona filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, according to court documents.
Prima Wawona and the company’s legal team didn’t respond to Fresnoland’s requests for comment.
Compared with other agricultural companies, Prima Wawona paid its direct hires higher wages and offered benefits that not all farmworkers enjoy, like health insurance, Larios said.
Workers will likely struggle to find anything comparable in the immediate aftermath, she added.
Wawona is now preparing to sell off its immense acreage, which Larios expects will still be used for farming. But its next owners likely won’t offer as competitive of wages or benefits.
“They’re going to have to start all over,” she said. “Most of these workers are probably going to have to be employed through farm labor contractors. So that means whatever benefits, bonuses, they were used to, the higher wages – that’s not going to be available to them anymore.”
Larios said some migrant workers will have to travel further north to the likes of Napa and Sonoma for work. Some may leave California entirely for Oregon and Washington.
“It’s going to be very disruptive,” she said.
A history with the UFW
Prima Wawona workers don’t have a union representing them in the wake of the mass layoffs – but that wasn’t always the case.
Workers for Gerawan, which later merged with Wawona packing to form Prima Wawona, chose the UFW as their collective bargaining representative in the ’90s.
But a decades-long struggle between the union and Gerawan management followed, during which the union accused Gerawan of illegally refusing to bargain for a contract despite the union’s certification as well as an intimidation campaign to get rid of the union, among other charges.
The battle culminated in 2018, when the results of a de-certification vote were tallied and a majority of workers who participated opted to decertify the UFW.
“The UFW lost, not for lack of trying,” De Loera said.
“That’s a really bitter thing to admit because we knew then what that defeat would mean for these workers, that these workers were not going to have the benefits of a union contract. Now it turns out, these workers aren’t going to have a job at all.”
De Loera said the lack of union representation eliminates some of the protections that workers would have enjoyed otherwise.
“We would be negotiating severance pay. We would have our lawyers looking at extracting as much as possible from the company,” he said. “Instead, what you’re having is … these workers really just be discarded.”
Unemployment benefits – but not for everyone
Some of the laid-off Prima Wawona workers will be able to apply for unemployment benefits with the EDD, online, over the phone, or by fax or mail.
These benefits aren’t available to undocumented workers, however.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Office estimates that over half of all farmworkers in California are undocumented. Larios with UC Merced said Prima Wawona likely has a similar ratio.
“I’d be willing to bet dollars to donuts that over half of their workforce is undocumented,” she said, “especially the workers that are working through farm labor contractors.”
Outside of unemployment benefits, La Cooperativa’s member organizations across the state help laid-off farmworkers for Prima Wawona and other companies with training for new job opportunities.
“Training opportunities (are) going to be in truck driving, welding, construction,” and other jobs, Lizárraga said.
In terms of programs open to undocumented workers, Lizárraga pointed to the one-time $600 stipends for farm and food workers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. La Cooperativa is one of the nonprofits chosen by the USDA to administer the funds.
Applicants must “show you’re a farmworker and claim that you were impacted by COVID. Who wasn’t? It’s easy to qualify, and we’ve helped thousands in the Central Valley.”
La Cooperativa has decades of experience helping farmworkers in positions like this, Lizárraga added, as workers get replaced by technology and machines in the fields.
These layoffs may not often be on the same scale as Prima Wawona’s or draw as much attention from the public but impact farmworkers all over the state all the same.
“You see a field that is using a machine now to do … weeding,” he said. “Well, that used to be about 30 farmworkers. In several fields, that would have been hundreds.”
How Prima Wawona workers can access support
Elected officials in Fresno County and beyond told Fresnoland their doors are open to laid-off Prima Wawona workers to assist them with unemployment applications and other needs.
“My office in Fresno stands ready to help in any way we can, as we have when other emergencies have arisen,” said Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula in an emailed statement. “My staff can assist in a number of areas involving state agencies, including unemployment, DMV, and Medi-Cal.”
Arambula’s office is located in downtown Fresno at 2550 Mariposa Mall, Suite 5031.
A spokesperson for state Sen. Anna Caballero’s office said their office can also help with unemployment claims.
The best way to reach the office is via phone call at 559-264-3070, spokesperson Elisa Riversa said in an email. Workers can also email Senator.Caballero@senate.ca.gov.
Farmworker Division Director Dan Ramirez with Proteus, one of La Cooperativa’s member organizations, said their bilingual staff are trained to assist workers with unemployment insurance applications. Their offices also have computers and internet access for those who need it.
They have over a dozen locations across the Central Valley, including in Kerman, Fresno, Sanger, Selma, Dinuba, Hanford, Goshen, Visalia, Porterville, and Delano, according to Proteus’ service area map.
