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.

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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Just how much is Donald Trump worth?

“I’m really rich,” Trump declared during his presidential announcement Tuesday in New York at Trump Tower, one of the many buildings around the world donning his name.

But just how rich has always been a question. It was one before the real-estate mogul declared for president and, well, it remains a big question afterward, too, despite Trump holding up a one-page form declaring he is worth roughly $9 billion.

Trump has never liked to get specific about his wealth, but presidents and presidential candidates have no choice. Federal ethics law requires them to file annual disclosure reports, including a financial disclosure form 30 days after officially announcing.

“A lot of pundits on television said he’ll never run,” Trump boasted. “He’s too private, and he’s probably not as successful as everybody thinks.”

And with that, he brandished his answer: a one-page “Summary of Net Worth,” which he said was produced­ by his accounts and a “big accounting firm, one of the most highly respected.”

The summary puts Trump’s assets at $9.24 billion and his liabilities at just $503 million, giving him a net worth of just over $8.7 billion.

That’s more than double an estimate from the Forbes list of billionaires, which pegged it at $4.1 billion. But, particularly at this level of personal wealth, the numbers released hardly tell the whole story. The one-page summary makes it difficult to unravel how the math is calculated. Specific buildings, real estate and holdings are not itemized, like they are required to be in a more detailed candidate financial disclosure.

The properties Trump owns can be assessed at book value — roughly speaking, the initial cost minus depreciation — or they can be assessed at fair-market value. The real-estate market can be volatile, and sometimes there are big gaps, especially if the real estate is Trump Tower and the Grand Hyatt hotel in midtown Manhattan.

Trump appears to be leaving millions of dollars on the table, a real-estate investment adviser said, by paying off his mortgage debt rather than using low-interest loans to leverage the real estate for reinvestment.

Another questioned whether the real-estate values might be overstated. Both advisers asked to speak on the condition on anonymity.

“There’s not enough information to really understand it,” said Frederick Chinn, an advisor at the Atalon Group in Henderson, Nev. “There are a lot of questions I would have just looking at the statement.”

Then there’s the value of the Trump brand. Trump’s statement judges his “real estate licensing deals, brand and branded developments” to be worth $3.3 billion.

But to Forbes, the brand is worth less than $300 million, said Anand Chokkavelu, managing editor of the Motley Fool investing website Fool.com.

“I side with Forbes,” Chokkavelu said. “I don’t see any reason to take his self-reported net worth at face value.”

Trump has a July 16 deadline for filing the official disclosure. He said he would do it on time.

“Everything will be filed eventually with the government,” Trump declared at his announcement, “and we don’t [need] extensions or anything. We’ll be filing it right on time. We don’t need anything.”

There are legal liabilities for misreporting. Although the feds can grant deadline extensions, Fox News might not. It has a Republican debate scheduled Aug. 6, and candidates must file if they want to participate.

But even when a candidate files a more detailed disclosure, accuracy is hard to nearly impossible to enforce, watchdogs warn. Newt Gingrich in 2011, for example, filed a disclosure that did not list his paid speeches or television analyst contract. They were lumped in with income from Gingrich Productions, obscuring the details.

“Once you throw your hat in that ring, there’s a bunch of laws that are supposed to apply to you, not all of them are enforced with the same level of rigor,” Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, told NPR’s Joel Rose. “And the financial disclosure is one of those areas where candidates have a lot of leeway to fudge the numbers.”

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