The Bardacke - Watsonville Canneries Strike files are divided into nine series: Teamsters Local 912, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Community Support for Strike, Media Coverage, Status Reports & Chronology, Legal, Watsonville Canning, Rally Operations Order, and Frank Bardacke. The first four series contain the bulk of the collection. The collection was put together by a labor activist who was active in strike support and is therefore not the official record of Teamsters Local 912. It is largely comprised of newspaper clippings, leaflets, and newsletters. The extensive clippings, mainly from the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian, have been copied onto acid-free paper. Some of the material is in Spanish. A detailed series list is attached.

Watsonville, a town of nearly 30,000 located in the heart of the agricultural Salinas Valley, is home to numerous canneries that process the majority of frozen food products sold in the United States (Unity 10/85, in Media Coverage series). In September 1985, nearly half of the town's 4,000 cannery workers went out on strike to protest wage cutbacks. In February 1986, R. Shaw Frozen Foods reached a settlement with their 900 employees that included a 17% pay cut. It wasn't until a year later that workers at Watsonville Canning returned to work. The bitter 18-month strike can serve as a case study of the remarkable challenges facing agribusiness workers, whose livelihoods are affected as much by local politics as by the international economy. The following is a summary of key events taken from an article that appeared in the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian (4 March 1987) and other material from the Status Reports & Chronology series folder.

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