Tucson Weekly: Dutch Treat (January 8

The Latest Dispatch From Cochise County's Tomato War.
By Jeff Smith
WAYNE AND PHILO may have picked the wrong decade to be champions of union labor. For sure they picked the wrong state to take up the cause.
Actually, there hasn't been much encouragement for these guys from any quarter. They seem like men caught in a time warp, philosophically out of synch with a world in which it's all about the Benjamins.
Smith Wayne Bryant and Philo Nichols are plumbers and/or steamfitters. At least I believe that's how they started out, and how they got into this dust-up with a mob of Dutch tomato barons. Wayne and Philo are members of local 741 of the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union, where Wayne is the union marketing rep and Philo is sort of a tribal elder who remembers when labor unions had juice, kicked ass and got their members jobs with decent wages and perks. You can just look at Wayne in his VanDyke beard and mustache, and hear Philo's first name to appreciate that these are not your typical, trendy, '90s kind of boys. Their zealotry, and the cause to which they apply it, hearken to another era--say the '30s--and place, like the steel towns of Pennsylvania.
Here in a right-to-work state like Arizona, and at a time when people are fighting for minimum-wage jobs flipping burgers, or being targets for crack-head armed robbers at all-night 7-Elevens, things just ain't happening for our lads. Especially when they run up against these bullet-headed Dutchmen with money to spend, influential friends in high places, and a couple of rural counties in their fan club, almost to a man.
I wrote a long exegesis about this almost three years ago, but the situation has persisted, worsened even, and bears re-capping:
Dalsem-Kassenbouw, a Dutch firm specializing in building hi-tech greenhouses to grow beefsteak tomatoes, started a 10-acre project near Bonita, north of Willcox, in 1994. They built the initial phases with their own Dutch workers, trained in the Tichelman system, which is fairly specific to the sort of structures D-K uses. For the next construction phase they responded to some heat from the authorities and advertised in Tucson for construction workers. But the qualifications were highly specific, restrictive and, according to union members who applied for the jobs and were turned away, designed to keep American workers out while keeping the in-house Dutch guys on the job. I did a bunch of nosing around at the time and found the story Wayne and Philo told me to be true: The Dutch management and labor are very old-world, with a labor guild system, and an attitude that brooked no opposition, and a determination to do things their own way regardless of legal hassles along the way. It clearly was simpler and cheaper for the Dutch to press ahead with their own crews, despite the occasional raid by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or the Labor Department. Their boys would be in and out of custody, out and back in the country, off and back on the construction site quicker and more cheaply if they ignored the law than if they tried complying with both letter and spirit.
This was borne out by the Labor Department's refusal, a year later when the Dutch were ready to build another 20 acres of greenhouses, to grant temporary work permits and visas to the Dutch construction workers. Of course, by this time the Dutch had established a pattern of scofflaw behavior, and had not convinced the Americans that there was no local work-force that could perform the job at hand.
So at this point you might think the U.S. government has backed up the American union worker. And yet Dalsem-Kassenbouw and Bonita Nurseries, the Dutch-operated local greenhouse grower, successfully expanded to 40 acres of tomatoes under glass, and have plans for 140 acres of greenhouses, eventually.
Meanwhile Bonita employs about 120 folks in the Willcox area, at jobs in the 15 grand per annum range, and this has won the hearts and minds of the locals and their elected officials to the Dutch side. Wayne and Philo and local 741 are not wildly popular in Willcox. They are fighting for the principle of labor unionism with a living wage and long-term security, while the folks around Willcox, whose alternative is unemployment or farm and ranch work for chump change, are resentful of anyone who threatens this new major employer in their limited economic base. They don't care if he wears wooden shoes, hates Winnie Mandela and bends the immigration and labor laws.
So Dalsem-Kassenbouw keeps building greenhouses with Dutch labor, and Wayne and Philo and local 741 keep pleading with everyone reachable in local political and legal circles to do the right thing about it. They were successful in encouraging and investigation by the INS, and much sleuthing apparently was done. In May of 1996, a year after the major flurry of publicity, the INS staged another raid on the Bonita greenhouses and arrested 11 Dutch workers. They were transported to Tucson and released that evening. A lone Mexican who got caught in the same net was "voluntarily" deported. It would appear you've got your wetbacks, and then again you've got your wetbacks.
Wayne and Philo told me that the INS investigator who did most of the detective work on this episode and the situation in general was initially quite encouraging to their quest for justice. However, when he bucked his report up to Janet Napolitano, U.S. attorney for Arizona, who then sent it back down to the Tucson office, progress came to a halt.
"Janet Reno says she'll follow any investigation no matter where it leads," Philo sneers. "But she won't follow this one. The investigator told us he had a terrific case. Then he turns it in and it goes into file 13. Suddenly he's taking a lot of heat from higher up."
It's all too easy to see conspiracy whenever you begin following the money trail, and the folks who brought us the Boer War and apartheid in South Africa make wonderful targets, but it is not difficult to imagine that political pressure from the people and politicians of Cochise and Greenlee counties looms larger than the philosophical outrage of a couple old-time unionists.
Especially at a time when America's Democratic president is pushing NAFTA and Fast Track and every other global trade pact that exports labor and further undercuts American union workers.
Still, Philo and Wayne persist, and I have to admire their principles.
If the Dutch, and every other major employer both foreign and domestic, were made to play the game by the rules, they wouldn't be threatening to take their jobs and paychecks elsewhere, and the underemployed folks of rural Cochise and Greenlee counties might have a more cordial view of our champions of the working man.

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