On Saturdays, a classroom at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Madera became a meeting place for workers whose annual commute ran a thousand miles north. They came to pick blueberries at Sakuma Brothers, Washington’s largest blueberry grower. In the winter of 2013, Sarait Martinez and David Bacon met with them there.
The workers’ story sits at an awkward intersection for berry businesses: a harvest depends on seasonal labor, while workers can be treated as interchangeable when they organize. The Sakuma dispute made that replacement threat tangible—and gave workers a reason to build solidarity across crews.
A strike held together
The account reaches beyond blueberries to a pea-picking crew that got fed up and stopped work. Its blunt assessment: “That saved the strike.” The point is less a tidy labor lesson than a practical one. Work stoppages can expose how much a harvest relies on workers who are often kept apart by the way jobs are organized.
Sakuma’s dispute also became a vivid example of replacement as a labor strategy. The workers in the Madera classroom were not simply a Washington labor story; they were California residents traveling north to do seasonal berry work, and they were making decisions together about the conditions under which they would do it.
A different labor mix
The workforce around Washington agriculture has changed since that fight. Growers brought 6,349 H-2A workers from Mexico in 2013, about 6% of hired farmworkers in the state. By 2025, the number had reached 38,700.
H-2A workers now account for about a quarter of Washington farmworkers in peak summer, and more than half of those employed in winter. Those figures describe Washington, not California. They do show how quickly the labor arrangements around berry production can shift, and why a story that began in a Madera classroom still matters to growers whose crews depend on workers’ willingness to return.
For California’s berry sector, the account offers no state-by-state comparison or recipe for staffing a harvest. It does place worker relationships alongside labor supply: a crew is a source of labor, but also a group capable of deciding whether to keep working together.