Farmworkers to march in Healdsburg to demand disaster pay, higher wages

Just over a month after many of them had to return to work with smoke from the Point Fire still hanging in the air, Sonoma County farmworkers will march Sunday in downtown Healdsburg to call attention to a — by now — familiar list of demands.

Hundreds of workers and their supporters are expected to gather at Healdsburg Plaza on Sunday at 4 p.m.

They will push for hazard pay for work done during dangerous conditions, compensation for wages lost during disasters, and higher wages in general for their work in Sonoma County’s $1.2 billion wine industry, organizers said.

Those demands are taking on greater urgency as climate change produces more extreme weather events through the year, said Davida Sotelo Escobedo, communications and research coordinator with North Bay Jobs with Justice, a Santa Rosa-based labor rights coalition that helped organize the march.

“It's heat. It’s smoke. It's floods. It's a yearlong crisis right now,” said Escobedo in a Saturday interview. “The only way to bring attention to it is through a big march, and the only way to solve it is by giving people what they deserve.”

With more than 500 marchers expected, Sunday’s labor action is the largest in North Bay Jobs with Justice’s three-year farmworker-organizing campaign.

The effort has recorded successes: a $2 million Sonoma County disaster relief fund for lower-income residents, including undocumented people and workers in low-wage sectors such as agriculture and tourism; a $328,000 settlement with a vineyard manager over illegal labor practices; and the adoption of hazard pay guarantees at several companies, including Boeschen Vineyards in Napa.

But with disasters so much more frequent, farm laborers say they regularly face the difficult choice of whether to risk working in dangerous conditions or go without a paycheck.

“When it's 100 degrees, you can’t work in those conditions. But when you can’t work, you don’t have enough money to make rent — to pay the bills, to get food on the table,” Anabel Garcia, a farmworker who helped organize Sunday’s march, said in a statement. “It’s not fair, because we know how much money the growers are making during the harvest — and they don’t pass that along to the workers.”

The marchers will also be calling for wages of $25 an hour, or $250 for each ton of picked grapes.

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @jeremyhay