Farmworkers looked poised for a long overdue win during the recent session of the Washington State Legislature. 

Workers in the agricultural industry have long been denied the right to bargain collectively with employers, a right that’s been afforded to other workers under federal law for nearly a century. This year, Washington’s farmworker unions partnered with progressive legislators for the first time in a generation on a bill granting such protections under state law.

While Washington farmworkers have won some labor rights through the Legislature over the years, collective bargaining rights remain the grand prize. Unlike nearly all other industries, which are governed by the National Labor Relation Act (NLRA), farmers can ignore employees who organize, with no federal governmental body mandating workplace elections that force employers to bargain with unions. This makes getting farmers to sign union contracts with workers almost impossible, and is a key reason only two farmworker unions have secured employer recognition in Washington history.

Senate Bill 6045 would’ve given Washington state responsibility for enforcing the collective bargaining arbitration process, and provided farmworkers a level playing field. Only California and New York have passed such state-level protections.

Total Republican opposition was a given for a labor bill affecting rural businesses, but the legislature’s Democratic majority saw SB 6045 pass through two Senate committees on party-line votes without much trouble. Once it passed a Senate floor vote it would be off to the Democrat-controlled House, and soon on the governor’s desk.

Backed by emotional testimony from the state’s union farmworkers and the powerful Washington State Labor Council, from the outside, it looked as if the bill was going to pass the Senate with strong Democratic support. And then all of a sudden, it didn’t.

SB 6045 was not introduced for a Senate floor vote by a key bill cutoff deadline, with its primary sponsor, Democratic Sen. Rebecca Saldaña of South Seattle, claiming the bill would have been three votes short of passing.

The bill’s failure was a defeat for Washington farmworkers already reeling from increased federal immigration raids against the predominantly Latino workforce. News soon after that revered United Farm Workers (UFW) leader Caesar Chavez had raped women and children involved in the movement also hit organizers hard.

Politicians and organizers who fought for SB 6045 say the failure comes down to a number of issues. Some are simply logistical, like the difficulty of passing a highly technical bill through a short 60 day legislative session, or the barrier to testifying before legislators that farmworkers face driving across mountain passes in winter from the state’s agricultural heartland east of the Cascades.

Not all Senate Democrats were on board with giving farmworkers collective bargaining rights through SB 6045. Enough of them, at least, to join with Republicans to kill the bill.

Most of all, supporters of the bill tell The Stranger it was the romantic messaging power of Washington’s agricultural lobby that tipped the balance, convincing enough Senate Democrats ignorant of the realities of farm labor over the fence into opposing a bill they believed would hurt an idealized vision of family farmers.

While the Washington State Democratic Party’s trifecta government publicly pledges support for labor, immigrant, and minority rights, there has been little to no public accountability explaining why the party denied Washington’s farmworkers the same rights other workers have enjoyed since the New Deal. 

Unlike in committee votes, not all Senate Democrats were on board with giving farmworkers collective bargaining rights through SB 6045. Enough of them, at least, to join with Republicans to kill the bill. The lack of a Senate floor vote leaves it unclear precisely which lawmakers in the upper house are responsible, though the record points at a handful of Senate Democrats.

There’s no such mystery when it comes to why farmworkers have been denied equal rights in Washington in the past. The local history of farmworker organizing is a tale of vigilante violence by farmers backed by the military, a concentration camp built under the auspices of law enforcement sympathetic to fascism, and political control of state government by farmer-legislators.

FROM THE ORCHARDS TO THE SENATE

Saldaña is the daughter of farmworkers, and spent much of her early career in the farmworker labor movement, making her uniquely suited to quarterback this year’s farmworker labor bill.

In an interview with The Stranger in Rainier Beach, on what used to be Cesar Chavez Day, Saldaña describes a yearslong effort to build bridges between farmworker unions, legislators, and the state labor council, which included bringing lawmakers out to farmworker picket lines. With plans to retire from the state Senate after the 2026 session to run for King County Council, Saldaña found herself asking, “How can I not introduce this?”

After further discussions with farmworkers and the labor council, the group decided to move. Things moved more slowly than anticipated. As the session approached, they still had no draft bill to circulate to legislators. Saldaña also said at a certain point she couldn’t get ahold of her contact at UFW, which in hindsight she suspects was due to the organization’s struggles to address the rape accusations against Chavez that would soon come to light.

“She couldn’t tell me what was going on,” Saldaña said.

Eventually they got the bill introduced, and carried it through committees where Democrats well-versed in labor laws amended language and protections to be more specific. The bill survived without any amendments from the ag industry that would “tie the workers’ hands behind their backs and say they should not be able to strike,” Saldaña said.

But the ag industry messaging was more effective, Saldaña said, when SB 6045 was due for introduction for a full Senate vote. Farm lobbyists over the last three years built momentum to convince legislators that regulations were killing family farms, and Saldaña said the message went out that granting collective bargaining rights to farmworkers “is going to be the thing that kills family farms.”

Few Democratic legislators in Washington represent farm communities. In the ag-focused east side of the state, Democrats represent only urban Spokane in the legislature. The effect, Saldaña said, is that much of the party is divorced from the reality of the agricultural industry and its labor conditions. She said too many imagine a wholesome white farmer, someone who tills his own land, rather than a multi-billion dollar industry of corporate plantations exploiting masses of Latino migrant workers in the absence of the legal redress provided by equal labor rights.

The idea that giving farmworkers equal rights will doom Washington farms is a message one hears time and time again from the agricultural industry when confronted with demands for better working conditions. The response from labor organizers is often the same, and summarized well by the late Washington farmworker organizer Tomás Villanueva in an interview with the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project:

“I feel sympathy for the agricultural growers, but my sympathies do not go so far as to say that farm workers should continue to subsidize the survival of the agricultural industry by cutting their wages and cutting benefits. My sympathy cannot go that far.”

Ahead of the deadline to introduce legislation for a full Senate vote, Saldaña learned from a private caucus tally that SB 6045 didn’t have the votes to pass.

“I can’t say I was not upset and disappointed,” she said.

THE YAKIMA CONCENTRATION CAMP

The early 20th century history of farmworker labor organizing in Washington is a history of violent repression by law enforcement, the military, and vigilante groups organized by farm owners. Much of it centers around the Yakima Valley, where the late US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas—the most progressive and longest serving judge in the court’s history—grew up poor as a migrant farmworker in the 1910s.

“I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos and the I.W.W.’s who I saw being shot at by the police. I saw cruelty and hardness,” he told the New York Times when asked what sparked his interest in the law.

“Having been one, I have an enduring love for migrant workers. They are still looked down upon as we were,” Douglas wrote in his 1974 memoirs.

The 1930s saw another wave of farmworker organizing in Washington, this one crushed more violently than ever before or after. According to the late Yakima historian James Newbill, the end of Prohibition led to record profits for hop farmers that weren’t passed down to farmworkers struggling from the Great Depression. Farmers invested in crops other than hops fared poorly in the Depression, too. In 1933, Yakima Valley farmers organized a vigilante mob that attacked striking farmworkers in what historians call the Battle of Congdon Orchards.

As Newbill wrote, “the bloody melee involved at least two hundred men: farmers wielded tree limbs, baseball bats, ax and pick-ax handles, and even one weapon made of an eighteen-inch chain encased in rubber hose.”

The farmworkers lost the battle. Vigilante farmers herded them down to Yakima’s jail in a procession led by troopers of the Washington State Patrol.

As one sheriff’s deputy put it, “We’re going to stop this agitation if we have to string a barbed wire fence all around the county.”

Then-Washington Governor Clarence Martin, a conservative Democrat and Eastern Washington farm and mill owner, called in the state National Guard to enforce martial law.

“Guardsmen had a .30 cal. machine gun mounted at the main intersection in Selah and two more at Yakima Avenue and Front Street in Yakima. The evening of August 24, they used tear gas and displayed fixed bayonets to clear a large crowd out of the Front Street area,” Newbill wrote.

A countywide roundup caused the jail to overflow, so the county government ordered the construction of a makeshift concentration camp, where dozens of farmworkers were held for months. It stood downtown as a warning to farmworkers for years after the failed strike.

The idea that giving farmworkers equal rights will doom Washington farms is a message one hears time and time again from the agricultural industry.

When the National Labor Relations Act was passed two years later, farmworkers were purposefully excluded from the law’s federal protections to gain support from Jim Crow Democrats, and remain without them to this day. A Seattle field examiner for the newly-established National Labor Relations Board found in 1938 that Yakima’s vigilante farmers were associated with the state’s fascist pro-Nazi Silver Shirts affiliate, of which Yakima police chief Harold Robinson was “one of the leading spirits,” according to Trevor Griffey of the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project.

Suppressed for a generation, farmworker labor organizing picked up again in Washington in the 1960s after local organizers like Tomás Villanueva and Guadalupe Gamboa returned from United Farm Workers organizer training in California. Strikes followed in the 1970s and ’80s, but without collective bargaining rights, farm owners had no legal mandate to recognize farmworker unions, and could play for time. 

Some labor battles lasted years. In the absence of collective bargaining rights under the NLRA to make business owners negotiate, farmworkers alone had to exert pressure to bring management to the table. Chateau Ste. Michelle, Washington’s largest winery, ratified a contract with union farmworkers—the first in the state—in 1995 after an eight year campaign of strikes, pickets, and boycotts.

NEAR-VICTORY IN ’91

Before this year, it was the 1991 legislative session when farmworkers last got closest to winning collective bargaining rights, again through a coalition of labor unions and progressive Democrats. 

The Washington Agricultural Relations Act, sponsored by South Seattle progressive Democratic lawmaker Rep. Jesse Wineberry, passed the Democrat-dominated House 53-45—though not without an amendment pushed through by a young Jay Inslee stripping proposed collective bargaining rights of farm workers at smaller farms, and allowing farm owners to hire scabs to replace striking workers in the fields. The future Democratic governor represented a Central Washington district around Selah in the Yakima Valley at the time, still ground zero for the farm worker labor struggle decades after the Washington National Guard packed up their machineguns. 

Once transmitted to the Republican-dominated Senate, the bill was finished off by another lawmaker elected out of Selah: conservative Republican Sen. Jim Matson, a fruit farmer and at one point chairman of the Washington Apple Commission, a quasi-public agency charged by the Legislature “to speak on behalf of the Washington state government with regard to apples and apple-related issues” in the state that grows the most apples. As chairman of the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee, Matson refused to schedule a vote on the legislation (in the 2026 session, it was Saldaña who chaired that committee).

Then-House Budget chief Rep. Gary Locke, another future moderate Democratic governor, tried to hold a pesticide lab bill wanted by farmers hostage to force Republicans to vote for farmworkers, a tactic that had worked in the past to secure wins for farmworkers. Matson refused to trade bills.

“Mr. Locke can go to Hell,” he told the Tri-City Herald.

Matson retired from the legislature in 1992 due to ill health, dying on his farm in 1993. The family business, Matson Fruit Company, is still around, and still squaring off against farm workers. With the support of farmworker union Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), the company’s workforce went on strike in 2020, after they say management didn’t implement safety measures meant to protect workers from COVID-19. 

In a recent opinion written for The Stranger, FUJ political director Edgar Franks said workers in Yakima’s apple warehouses were threatened by management with deportation if they voted to form a union during the pandemic, highlighting the need for collective bargaining rights through a bill like SB 6045.

How farmworkers were denied collective bargaining rights by Washington’s legislature in 1991 is clear. Republicans controlled the Senate, and the relevant committee chair had an interest in maintaining the status quo. But in the intervening 35 years, Washington Democrats established control of both legislative chambers, and hold strong majorities. If Democrats made farmworker collective bargaining rights a priority as they did in 1991, Republicans couldn’t stop them. Instead, Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. 

WHO CROSSED THE AISLE?

Precisely which Senate Democrats doomed the 2026 farmworker bill is somewhat opaque. With a 30-19 Democratic majority in the Senate, Democrats can afford 5 defections on a party-line vote and still pass a bill. Any more and it dies. Saldaña’s claim that a preliminary vote tally came up 3 short means 8 total Senate Democrats opposed the bill to keep it from being safely introduced for an official floor vote. Without that floor vote we don’t know where every Senate Democrat stands on the issue of farmworker collective bargaining rights.

But there are clues.

SB 6045 passed through two different Senate committees on party-line votes, with 17 Senate Democrats on-record voting in favor of the bill. Five more Senate Democrats—who were not in those committees and had no opportunity to vote on the bill—were signed sponsors. Assuming affirmative committee votes and bill sponsorships indicate support for the bill on a floor vote, this leaves eight Senate Democrats who did not officially weigh in on support or opposition to SB 6045—exactly as many legislators as Saldaña’s unofficial tally suggests.

Those Senate Democrats are: Adrian Cortes of Clark County north of Vancouver, Marko Liias of Lynwood, Jessica Bateman of Olympia, Mike Chapman of Port Angeles, Deborah Krishnadasan of Gig Harbor, Jesse Salomon of Shoreline, Sharon Shewmake of Bellingham, and John Lovick of Mill Creek.

If Democrats made farmworker collective bargaining rights a priority as they did in 1991, Republicans couldn’t stop them. Instead, Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. 

Several of these senators—Liias, Chapman, Krishnadasan, and Shewmake—are the Democratic majority on the Senate Agricultural & Natural Resources Committee alongside Saldaña, who said the committee more than any other is the recipient of lobbying from the state’s agricultural industry.

“That Ag Committee, every day you’re getting hammered by these people,” Saldaña said.

The Stranger reached out to all eight Senate Democrats who did not sponsor SB 6045 or vote on it in committee and gave them the opportunity to clarify their position on the bill.

Only two responded to repeated emails, phone calls, and voicemails.

In an emailed statement, Sen. Cortes said he “didn’t have an opportunity to take a closer look at Senate Bill 6045 during this past legislative session” because the bill didn’t move through any committees he was on. 

“However, as a proud union member, I’m supportive of anyone’s right to collectively bargain. That’s why I sponsored Senate Bill 5944, which clarifies and strengthens collective bargaining rights for language access providers,” Cortes’ email read.

Reached by phone, Sen. Shewmake declined to share where she stood on the bill, saying she was retired and did not want to get involved. 

“I don’t want to out my colleagues. By saying where I was that puts attention on them,” Shewmake said.

Senate Democrats Liias, Bateman, Chapman, Krishnadasan, Salomon, and Lovick did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

Washington State Labor Council Chief of Staff Joe Kendo was point man in the legislature for the state’s largest organized labor coalition to get SB 6045 passed. He said it was an ambitious bill, but not a priority of the Democratic caucus in a short session with a millionaires’ tax on the line. Still, he said, most bills that are big and worth doing take two or three sessions to pass.

A Labor Council post-session report lists farmworker collective bargaining at the topic of a list of legislative goals for the group next year.

Kendo said labor is fighting an uphill battle against the “national mythology” propaganda of the agricultural industry, which creates a zeitgeist that permeates so deeply that otherwise progressive legislators adopt a “romantic notion of the yeoman farmer.”

“Doesn’t take you long to realize that’s bullshit,” he said.