Op-Ed By Drew Gamboa

At the Husky Union Building (HUB), hundreds of students pass through Arely Morales’s masterwork portraiture of Juan José everyday. Juan José displays an agricultural worker, their back carrying the weight of what brings sustenance to the people across this region– a bridge to recognize the type of sacrifices agricultural workers endure to feed and nurture the pacific northwest. While Juan José  does the work of creating the possibility of agricultural workers’ presence and belonging at the HUB, the painting shields a problem that the university and the pacific northwest outright leaves unaddressed. Why display the backbreaking work of the agricultural laborer if people are unaware of why this art greets each and every occupant to the union building, if a passerby cannot feel a sense of obligation to connect with the acts of the agricultural worker, and if the university cannot learn from its past wrongdoings?

Another demonstration took place at the University of Washington to surface its culpability of injustices occurring in the broader Pacific Northwest community. The United Farm Workers Support Group at University of Washington, Students for Farm Workers Support Group organized a demonstration and march last month on Friday, March 31, 2023 standing in solidarity with Washington-based agricultural workers at Greenwood Mushrooms Sunnyside– formally known as Ostrom Mushroom Farms. These mushroom workers are in an active campaign to unionize their workplace after experiences of gender discrimination (currently under investigation by the Washington State Attorney General), threats and retaliation, workplace injury, and unjust firings at the hands of management. The demonstration was accompanied by over one hundred farm workers, students, university employees, and community activists. 

Demonstrations are almost always organized by the uncompensated labor, care and activism of students and recurrently adapted by the university’s painting of itself as a forerunner in efforts towards social justice. Demonstrations to advocate for agricultural workers’ well-being have occurred on this campus since people of agricultural labor backgrounds have arrived at the ivory gates. Since the 1960s, when the fortunate few children from farm working backgrounds were recruited by the Black Student Union in efforts to apply for federal funding, active campaigns such as the one occurring now to stand in solidarity with agricultural workers have occurred far too often. How could the UW grape boycotts of the first cohorts of students from farm working backgrounds be forgotten? Likewise with the 1970s struggles that pushed the university to revise its lettuce policies? The Chateau St. Michelle winery campaign of the 1990s, the Fair Trade Apple campaign of the early 2000s, or the recent episode of Sakuma berries boycotts of the last decade? What these historical examples illuminate is a problem that the university has yet to resolve. 

The University of Washington must act in support of the well-being of agricultural workers past, present, and future and reflect this support in its relationships with the people who bring these institutional faults to the forefront. If the university truly practices what it proclaims to value and “hold [itself] to the highest standards of ethics,” then the institution advocating in support of mushroom workers is not enough. UW needs to create structures that throughout the institution abolishes these occurrences from repeatedly happening. This goes across the board.

As long as agricultural workers continue to face labor disputes and injustices to the detriment of their well-being in the Pacific Northwest, continual support must be practiced by the university to a student-led support group or a student-led organization with close ties to agricultural labor experiences, support networks, community collectives and organizations, and unions like the United Farm Workers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste. This student group will sustain itself to ensure an active awareness in the university environment of its own sourcing methods and that of the Puget Sound region as relating to and centering agricultural workers’ well-being in and transcending the Pacific Northwest. 

Above all, the university must use their position to demand of their retailers like Charlie’s Produce to cease business with companies that profit from wage theft, hiring discrimination, and neglect of agricultural workers— specifically today's Mushroom Workers. As the Greenwood ordeal and mushroom workers continue for union recognition and fight for their well-being, the March demonstration marked an impasse of what this university offers to its students and to people that call Washington home. Only action from the university will surface how it holds itself accountable and engages in active efforts to support the well-being of agricultural workers.

Published: 4/21/2023