Larry Newsome

Blue Diamond Growers, Sacramento, Calif.

Larry Newsome

Larry Newsome works as a vacuum sealer operator for Blue Diamond Growers. He fills 25- and 50-pound boxes of almonds, making sure that each has the right amount of nitrogen and oxygen to keep them fresh. He has worked for Blue Diamond for 20 years.

Blue Diamond Growers’ Sacramento facility is the largest almond processing plant in the world. It employs more than 600 people and handles roughly one-third of California’s billion-dollar almond crop. In 1996, the company received a $21 million assistance package from the city and local agencies in return for its promise not to relocate. Blue Diamond is a co-operative and boasts of four straight years of record returns to its grower-members.

Newsome and his co-workers on the Blue Diamond Organizing Committee have been working for more than two years to join International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 17. They’re fed up with watching their wages sag while health costs shoot up and they fall farther and farther behind the cost of living. They’re tired of daily disrespect and rudeness and of working as at will employees—at a plant that has a temp agency on site.

Blue Diamond responded with a nasty campaign to fight the workers’ choice on having a union. An administrative law judge of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found the company guilty of numerous labor law violations, including firing two union supporters, threatening to close the plant, threatening that workers will lose wages, pensions and benefits if they are unionized, coercively interrogating workers about their union activities, unlawfully disciplining workers in retaliation for their union support and soliciting workers' grievances and promising to make changes.

The Blue Diamond workers want the company to agree to a majority sign-up process with the ILWU. They know the company won’t easily agree to that, so they have been weaving a web of support that stretches from Sacramento to clear around the world.

Newsome is not only a committed activist but an artist as well. He graduated from the California State University-Sacramento with a degree in commercial and graphic arts and has worked for seven years as a freelance photographer. He names a diverse group of people as influences on his life, including the Native American Cochise, Martin Luther, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Teresa.