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On a recent morning at Sakuma Brothers Farm, eight Latino workers sat on a bench seat behind a tractor, planting strawberry roots that will bear fruit in a few years. Dust masks and goggles covered their faces.

Sakuma Brothers runs fruit operations in Washington state and in California, selling berries to top brands like Driscoll's, Haagen-Dazs and Yoplait. The four-generation family farm is an institution in this part of the state.

But the farm lately has faced lawsuits, worker strikes and consumer boycotts, which have largely yielded victories for its workers. The disputes have caught the attention of farm owners and labor groups across the county. And a pending Washington State Supreme Court ruling on how Sakuma handles rest breaks could prompt farm workers to bring similar lawsuits against their employers elsewhere.

Some workers at Sakuma Brothers say that what's needed is a union contract. They're asking for a legally binding agreement on wages, and for a flat rate of $15 per hour for all harvesters, instead of the current system that pays workers by the pound for how much they pick — what's called a piece rate.

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Why Picking Your Berries For $8,000 A Year Hurts A Lot

They also want the contract to define a grievance system, medical coverage and payment of transportation costs for seasonal workers who migrate every year from California.

Ramon Torres, president of Familias Unidas Por la Justicia (Families United for Justice), says about 460 current and former Sakuma workers have joined this movement.

"We have families that have worked 10 to 11 years for Sakuma. Season after season, the same families come back to work here," Torres says. Those families want to keep working here – but with a guarantee of fair conditions and wages, he says.

Rosalinda Guillen, a longtime labor organizer, grew up in these fields and has helped Torres's group push for a contract.

The labor unrest flared up a few years back, when, for the first time, Sakuma brought in guest workers through the federal H-2A visa program. Local workers claimed the foreign crew displaced them and was paid better. The company disagreed. But the relationship became fraught, and longtime workers said they wanted to lock in some job security.

Flats of blueberries from Sakuma Brothers Farms are seen at Ballard Market in Seattle in 2013. Liz Jones/KUOW hide caption

itoggle caption Liz Jones/KUOW

"This company has ruined a lot of the trust and the goodwill that they used to have," Guillen said. "In order to build trust with workers again, they have to sign a union contract."

Historically, farm worker contracts are difficult to achieve. Only about 2 percent of farm workers in the county are part of a union. California is the only major farm state that offers a legal framework for this type of union to operate. Which means that Familias Unidas in Washington state is charting an unusual path.

Torres and Guillen say they're hopeful Sakuma will eventually come around.

"They say that they are a good neighbor and have been here as part of the Skagit Valley for five to six generations," Guillen says. "So have we."

Danny Weeden, Sakuma's new CEO, has inherited this labor dispute at Sakuma and says he's heard the workers' message. As the first non-Sakuma ever at the helm, he's one of the biggest changes at the farm this season. He came on to help the company at a turbulent time.

"For the most part we were doing the right things," Weeden says. "We needed to change some things, too. And we've done that. And we've addressed that. And we're going to continue to get better and better and better."

They fired some managers and intensified training workshops. They added new benefits, including a housing stipend for workers who don't live on the farm. They also plan to bring in more mobile health clinics and expand recreational programs. And – here's the big one – they revamped how field workers get paid.

Weeden said Sakuma will still pay based on production, but more than before. Everyone will earn at least $10 an hour; faster berry pickers could make up to $27 an hour. They will also now pay for rest breaks, which is an issue in yet another pending court decision.

"Our most valued resource on our farm are our people and our workers," Weeden says. "So that's why our mantra is caring and compliance. That's what's going to get us for the long-term success of this company."

Legal action prompted some of these changes. A federal class-action lawsuit forced Sakuma to pay out workers who said the farm shorted their wages. That settlement last year cost $850,000 and marked a rare win for farm labor. Familias Unidas has also won legal victories on claims that Sakuma retaliated against them in the company housing and in hiring practices.

As for the union, Weeden appears uninterested in further talks. He said that hit a dead end. And he says he believes the company is headed in a good direction.

Walking through the berry fields, Weeden and other managers say they rely heavily on the bilingual supervisors to help with worker issues. But they aim to get more directly involved, too.

On the walk, Rich Brim, company vice president, pulls out his phone.

"We believe in caring and compliance," he says, parroting a company mantra.

The phone interpreted into Spanish: "Creemos en el cuidado y el cumplimiento."

"I'll practice that one," Brim says. "And that's a guarantee."

Liz Jones is a reporter for NPR member station KUOW in Seattle. A version of this story first appeared on KUOW's website.

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The marijuana industry has a pesticide problem. Many commercial cannabis growers use chemicals to control bugs and mold. But the plant's legal status is unresolved.

The grow room at Medical MJ Supply in Fort Collins, Colo., has all the trappings of a modern marijuana cultivation facility: glowing yellow lights, plastic irrigation tubes, and rows of knee-high cannabis plants.

"We're seeing a crop that's probably in it third or fourth week," says Nick Dice, the owner.

The plants are vibrantly green, happy and healthy. And Dice says that's because the company's taken a hard line on cleanliness.

"We have people who that's their only job is to look for any infections or anything that could cause potential damage to the crop," he says.

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As any farmer will likely say, damage to the crop equals damage to the bottom line. Dice's employees used to spray the crop with mild chemicals. They would switch between multiple pesticides and mildew treatments, treating anywhere from every three to four days.

Dice says he's seen other operations crumble as their cannabis succumbs to mildew or bugs. Pest controls ensure a good yield. And when it comes to cannabis, yields really matter.

Dice estimates the grow room is worth as much as $180,000. Protecting that yield is hard work. That's why many growers in states that have legalized recreational or medical marijuana use chemicals. But it's the federal government that tells farmers which pesticides are safe to use. And so far, the feds wants nothing to do with legalized marijuana. Colorado State University entomologist Whitney Cranshaw says that's left growers to experiment with little oversight.

"In the absence of any direction the subject of pesticide use on the crop has just devolved to just whatever people think is working or they think is appropriate," he says.

Tobacco farmers, for example, have a stable of pesticides the government says are safe to use. But Cranshaw says marijuana growers have none.

"Sometimes they've used some things that are inappropriate, sometimes unsafe," he says.

Brett Eaton is a plant expert with American Cannabis Company, a Denver-based consulting group. He's concerned about what the pesticides are doing to the product as well as the consumer.

"Anybody can get their hands on harmful chemicals, and they can just spray away all the way up until the last day of harvest," he says.

Safety concerns led Denver officials to place a hold on tens of thousands of marijuana plants earlier this year, pending an investigation. Colorado doesn't require growers to test the crop for traces of pesticides before being sold. But state agriculture officials did recently release a list of pesticides deemed appropriate for use on cannabis. Washington state, Nevada and Illinois have similar lists. Eaton says regulators are only playing catch up.

"Other agricultural industries already have policy in place for the safe use of spraying certain pesticides and fungicides," he says. "This being a new industry, it hasn't been addressed yet."

And with more states turning marijuana into a legal commodity crop, it'll take a mix of policy, science and industry self-regulation to figure out what's appropriate, and what's not.

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If the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal isn't revived in the next few days, labor unions will have helped defeat one of President Obama's main foreign policy goals. But what will defeating the TPP, an agreement that covers 12 nations along the Pacific Rim, do for labor?

Thea Lee, deputy chief of staff at the AFL-CIO, has had a front-row seat to the trade negotiations on Capitol Hill.

She opposes many of the provisions in the new trade deal, but she can't tell you exactly which.

"We are sworn to secrecy, so we can't talk about it — not to our colleagues, not to our members, not to the press, and so that's frustrating," she says. "If I talked to you specifically about what I think the shortcomings of the labor chapter are, I could lose my security clearance. I don't know if I'd go to jail, but ..."

So she's left talking in generalities.

"These deals make it easier for multinational corporations to move jobs overseas," Lee says.

She, as well as other union leaders, point first and foremost, to the North American Free Trade Agreement that took effect 21 years ago.

Roland Zullo, a University of Michigan labor and employment policy researcher, says that for organized labor, NAFTA's wounds still linger.

"Labor has enough of a institutional memory to know what happened with NAFTA," he says. "There was a theory behind NAFTA; there was a theory that by integrating Canada, U.S. and Mexico, there would be a sort of overall net economic benefit."

But that didn't happen for U.S. workers in sectors like manufacturing. Michigan auto workers, for example, lost more than 100,000 jobs in the years that followed NAFTA's passage.

But it's not a clear case of cause and effect. This is the period when Japanese automakers were setting up shop in the U.S. and taking market share away from General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

Other industries, and consumers, did benefit from NAFTA.

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Matt Slaughter, associate dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, says he understands labor's concerns about a new trade deal. But, he adds, labor faces a paradox in opposing the TPP.

"A lot of the academic research and policy work shows companies and their workers that are connected to the dynamism in the global economy tend to pay higher wages and create better jobs than do the purely domestic companies," he says.

He says labor should stop trying to kill the new trade pact, and instead push for a more robust 21st century social safety net for dislocated workers.

But that idea was torpedoed last week by House Democrats, who, ironically, support the idea. It was a political maneuver to scuttle the entire bill.

Slaughter also questions what kind of victory labor would gain by torpedoing the TPP. After all, the U.S. already has free-trade agreements with a handful of countries in the TPP talks.

"Even for countries in the TPP negotiations with whom we don't have a free-trade agreement already, we are already relatively open to those countries for bringing in imports of almost all of their goods and services," he says.

Tim Waters, the national political director for the United Steelworkers, strongly disagrees with talk like this.

"For us to just say, 'Oh well, it's inevitable, we shouldn't try to stop it, we shouldn't try to stand up, we should just try to get in there and cut some kind of deal that made it less sickening,' doesn't make any sense," he says.

Waters adds that unions aren't anti-trade; they want fair trade. He says trade deals need to put the concerns of American workers first.

And, he says, this new agreement, yet again, doesn't do that.

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House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, (R-Wis.) says approving a massive trade package sought by President Obama will allow the U.S. to "write the rules" of the global economy. Parts of the package are now in limbo in the House.

Ryan spoke with NPR's Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep about the trade deal and about Trade Promotion Authority, also known as fast-track, which would allow the president to negotiate the trade agreement with Pacific Rim nations known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and then have Congress pass it with an up-or-down vote.

On what the trade package does for the U.S.:

"What we're requiring in these negotiations, as we direct in our trade promotion authority legislation, is that these other countries level the playing field — they treat us like we treat them, they open their markets reciprocally to ours to our exports, and they raise their standards to our standards. Play by our rules with respect to things like intellectual property protection, rule of law, those kinds of things that are very important to make sure that we set the standards for the global economy.

"So if it goes like people like myself hope it goes, then America along with our allies are writing the rules of this global economy at the beginning of this 21st century. If we chose not to engage, if we say America shouldn't bother negotiating trade agreements ... then we're simply saying, 'We forfeit the leadership role in the world to write the rules' and we let other countries such as China write the rules instead of us."

On arguments that deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership will cost American jobs:

"Since ... 2007, there have been 100 trade agreements struck around the world without America. And that means other countries are already doing this, getting better access, getting better market access, and we're not, and that means we lose jobs."

On arguments from some Democrats that the trade deal will allow other nations to effectively lower U.S. wages and standards for financial rules, labor regulations, and the environment:

"There really isn't any justice in that claim, it's really kind of a straw man or what I'd call a red herring argument, because we make it extremely clear in our trade promotion authority that only Congress can change laws. You can't enter into an agreement that Congress doesn't approve that changes our laws.

"We make it very clear that the goal of this is to have other countries raise their standards to our levels and not degrade their standards. That's one of the criticisms from agreements back in the 20th century. So we want modern agreements that raise high standards to get other countries to play by our rules, and we do not allow other countries through any mechanism to require or force changes in U.S. laws."

On whether the treaty would mean foreign trading partners can challenge U.S. policies and regulations that they think adversely affect them:

"No. They can get monetary damage penalties, they can't challenge or change regulations at any level of our government."

On criticism that the treaty is being written in secret:

"It's one of the reasons why we're trying to pass trade promotion authority, so that we can guarantee that the public gets to see any trade agreement that is reached. We do not have trade promotion authority in place right now, and ... as a result of that, the kind of transparency that occurs is whatever the administration wants.

"What we are demanding and insisting on in our trade promotion authority is not only that members of Congress have full access to anything that's classified for the moment, but once an agreement is actually reached between countries, that agreement must be made public ... for 60 days for the public to see before a president can even sign an agreement, and when he signs it he simply sends it to Congress and then Congress spends a minimum of 30 days ... considering the agreement.

"The reasons some things are classified right now is it's in negotiations. You don't want to go into negotiations at any level, whether it's transactions or government-to-government with all your cards face up."

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