A Vintage Battle -- Farmworkers' Long Struggle With Ste. Michelle Winery Has A Twist: Management Wants A Law That Gives Farmworkers The Right To Bargain

Olivia Herrera Montejano walks wearily into her kitchen, stirs a giant pot of pozole, a thick Mexican soup, on the narrow stove and pokes at the dirty dishes in the sink.

It's 8:30 p.m. Montejano has just come home from another 10-hour workday picking grapes in the fields near Grandview in Eastern Washington.

She will earn about $62 for her labor.

Nearly nine months pregnant with her fifth child, she will share her small bedroom tonight with her husband and two daughters.

Three teenage boys, including her two sons, will sleep in an even smaller room across the hall.

"You see how we live," she says in Spanish to a visitor. "We are very poor."

About 150 miles to the west, Allen Shoup stands at the top of the sweeping stairs leading to his plush Woodinville office.

Surrounded by the trappings of elegance that go with the wine industry - antiques, fine wood paneling and lush carpeting the color of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes - the president of Stimson Lane Ltd., owner of Chateau Ste. Michelle, is perhaps the top winemaker in the state.

At a time when many wineries are struggling, "our company has done well," says Shoup.

The situation is all too familiar: Farmworkers, many of whom are recent immigrants from Mexico, squeezed into cramped housing, working long hours for low pay; bosses in richly appointed offices located far from the fields.

On one side is the union. On the other are the managers. There's even the traditional labor maneuver of a consumer boycott against the company.

But there's also a twist.

In this labor battle, the managers of the largest winery in Washington say they want the union to have the opportunity to organize.

As the annual harvest of wine grapes winds down in Eastern Washington, Chateau Ste. Michelle finds itself caught between an increasingly hostile group of workers who want a union, and a Legislature that has so far failed to guarantee farmworkers the right to a union contract - a right guaranteed to almost every other category of workers.

It is a right won by farmworkers in California in bloody battles in the 1960s and '70s.

And in six other states, including Oregon and Idaho, farmworkers have the same guarantee.

Farmworkers - the 51,000 people who pick the fruits and vegetables and tend the fields of Eastern Washington - comprise one of the few labor groups not protected by one of the nation's key pieces of labor legislation, the National Labor Relations Act.

This law, passed in 1935, guarantees mandatory collective bargaining for groups like autoworkers, steelworkers and Boeing's 46,000 machinists.

According to University of Washington Law Professor Cornelius Peck, Washington farmworkers "right now are in pretty much the same position that all working people were in before the National Labor Relations Act was adopted."

Soon after the Nov. 3 general election, a new attempt - the third in as many years - is expected to be made at passing a state law that would bring that protection to farmworkers as well.

The bill, expected to be introduced in the new legislative session by Rep. Michael Heavey, D-Seattle, would give farmworkers the power to demand collective bargaining from their employers.

Under current Washington law, they have the right to join a union and organize workers. But no law requires employers to recognize farmworkers and bargain with them.

The fact that Shoup - and his company - support passage of such a law may seem less of an apparent contradiction in the context of Shoup's own past.

A civil-rights marcher and anti-war activist in the 1960s, Shoup says he still holds to those principles. "If we hadn't had the labor movement at the turn of the century," he says, "I'd be in the lower class rather than the upper class."

Shoup, who grew up in Detroit, said his father was raised on a poor farm in Michigan and was a member of the United Autoworkers union.

"Living in Detroit almost forces you to become a student of the labor movement," Shoup said.

About five years ago, he said, he read from one of the handbooks of '60s activism, Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." "It prepared me to be put in this position," he said.

About union organizers in his own company, Shoup said: "Probably, if I had their job, that's what I would do, too."

The pro-labor Heavey, chairman of the House Commerce and Labor Committee, acknowledges Shoup's role.

The Chateau Ste. Michelle boss, Heavey said, "has stepped out and said we need a collective-bargaining bill for farmworkers. No other farmer or grower in Eastern Washington has made that statement."

But the union seeking to organize Chateau Ste. Michelle's field workers, the United Farmworkers of Washington State, UFWWS, deeply distrusts Shoup.

And others, as well, question Shoup's motives. Heavey, for instance, said that if Shoup so adamantly favored a union, he would simply recognize the UFWWS, law or no law.

Shoup himself knows he has to wrestle with an internal contradiction.

As an advocate for the right of Washington farmworkers to gain the legal guarantee of a labor contract, he stands apart from the rest of Eastern Washington's grape growers as well as the bulk of the state's agriculture industry.

But Stimson Lane tills only about 3,000 acres of grapes, which produce a small percentage of what it needs.

It still must buy two-thirds of its grapes from other Washington growers - growers who are deathly afraid that a union-led strike could cause devastating crop losses.

As a boss, Shoup has to be sure Stimson Lane makes money. He knows the bulk of the company's 125 full-time farmworkers favor a union.

He needs to keep Chateau Ste. Michelle's wine flowing. Hence, he says his support of a farm bill is the only position he can take.

That doesn't mean the position is a comfortable one. "We're caught in the crosshairs of history," said Shoup. "But we want out of this middle."

NATIONAL BOYCOTT

If Chateau Ste. Michelle is the only grower to support farmworker legislation, it is also the only one targeted for a national boycott - by the UFWWS, led by Tomas Villanueva, a native of Monterrey, Mexico, who tried to organize Eastern Washington farmworkers during the California unionization fights.

The boycott has been endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church in Washington and Connecticut, the home state of Stimson Lane's parent company, UST Inc.

The UFWWS's goal is to unionize all the state's farmworkers, just as the AFL-CIO-affiliated United Farmworkers successfully did in California. The UFWWS is not affiliated with the national labor federation.

Last month, the UFWWS mediated a walkout by 200 farmworkers at an apple orchard near Mattawa in Eastern Washington, one of its first actions beyond Chateau Ste. Michelle. And Villanueva says the UFWWS would intervene for workers in other crops if the workers asked for its help. However, the union's focus remains the Woodinville winery.

Although the bulk of Washington's farmworkers are in the apple industry, UFWWS picked Chateau Ste. Michelle because workers in the vineyards receive the lowest average wage of any agricultural industry - $5.94 an hour. (On average in 1991, Chateau Ste. Michelle paid about $1 an hour more than that).

What's more, Chateau Ste. Michelle's small farmworker work force is considered a more easily targeted group than apple pickers, according to Villanueva. And, adds the labor leader, the Woodinville winery produces a highly visible product distributed nationally, opening the door to a nationwide boycott.

The boycott has been slow to get off the ground. The union started it five years ago, and recently held rallies in four cities around the U.S., including Seattle, to try to boost the boycott's visibility.

Shoup said his company has been unable to measure the impact of the boycott. But he pointed out Stimson Lane's sales have grown, while wine sales in general have remained flat nationwide for the past five years. "The question is, would we have done even better?" he asked.

UST's wine sales, principally through Stimson Lane, amounted to $63.9 million in 1991. Stimson Lane's pre-tax earnings last year were about $5 million, Shoup said.

Chateau Ste. Michelle, some of whose mid-priced red and white wines are highly acclaimed, was one of the first Washington wineries to sell its wines nationwide, with its biggest push coming in 1983.

The move helped Washington wineries gain the respect of wine connoisseurs across the country and separate their image from that of the larger, well-established California wine industry. In many East Coast wine circles, Washington's wines are still best known by Chateau Ste. Michelle's products.

Its main production facilities and headquarters are in Woodinville rather than Eastern Washington because many of the state's marketing and distribution companies are located around Seattle.

And it picked Woodinville because when the headquarters site was chosen in the 1970s, the area was still largely rural, an environment Chateau Ste. Michelle felt was more appropriate for a winery than an urban setting.

In early September, 31 workers settled a suit with Chateau Ste. Michelle that claimed the workers had been discriminated against for union organizing.

The winery has denied the charges, but agreed to pay the workers a total of $120,000 to settle the suit. It also agreed to reinstate four workers who contended they had been laid off for union activities.

UNDESERVED FLAK

Heavey believes Chateau Ste. Michelle doesn't deserve all of the flak it has gotten from the workers. "Shoup has been given nothing but hell from the farmworker community for supporting the farmworkers," said Heavey.

But at the same time, Heavey points out that, if it really wanted a union, Chateau Ste. Michelle could simply enter its own labor agreement with its workers under the supervision of an independent arbitrator, a position supported by the UFWWS.

Stimson Lane, however, stands behind the effort to write a new law. It insists that a "legal framework" is crucial for negotiations to be successful.

The situation has created tremendous tensions within Chateau Ste. Michelle's work force, which is split on the issue of union representation at Chateau Ste. Michelle and remembers the sister union's struggles in California.

Even workers who side with the company estimate support for the union could be as high as 80 percent of the work force.

Although Shoup said most of the farmworkers currently favor a union, the company maintains that if a "fair and reasonable" election were held in which the positions of both sides could be aired freely, it would win over the bulk of the workers.

Its bottom line is that workers should have a free choice among the company, the UFWWS or any other union that sought to organize workers, said Chateau Ste. Michelle spokesman Mark Jennings.

SNAGS IN THE SENATE

Previous farm-labor bills have passed the state House of Representatives, but been defeated in the state Senate in large part by pro-grower senators from Eastern Washington.

Eastern Washington's growers are not ignorant of the plight of their workers, says Mike Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League, the farm bloc's main lobbying arm in Olympia.

But, he adds, many of them oppose a farm-labor act because they fear growers would have to shoulder the costs of enforcing the law.

In addition, they say, previous versions of the law have opened the door to a strike, which could be particularly devastating to a grape grower.

If workers walk off the fields when the crops are ready to be picked, growers would not be allowed to hire replacement workers, which "would allow a perishable crop to be held hostage," Gempler said.

Chateau Ste. Michelle spokesman Jennings echoed Gempler's concerns about perishable crops.

"It's not like General Motors. At GM, the cars don't rot on the vine" during a strike, Jennings said.

Heavey sees room for compromise on the replacement-worker issue in the next legislative session.

Shoup believes a farm-labor act is "inevitable."

And, in a letter sent late last year to UFWWS education director Kurt Petersen, the president of UST, Vincent Gierer, predicted a law would be put in place "within the next two years."

The union called that forecast "extraordinarily optimistic," adding, "The workers do not want to wait."

Once the dispute is settled, Stimson Lane knows there will be a lot more work to do.

"There are wonderful people in the community who think of us negatively because of this issue," Shoup said.

"We're going to have to climb back up the ladder of self-respect for many people."