A laborer accuses a foreman of assault, a harvesting company of ignoring complaints.

To keep her job working on a Dynapac Harvesting crew in the fields of the Salinas Valley, the woman says she was required to do things that fell outside the scope of her regular duties.

She was required to have a drink with her foreman whenever he asked. She was required to meet him at a hotel. She was required to acquiesce to his demands for sex.

When she tried to get out from under his thumb, she says she was told by a Dynapac manager that unless she agreed to go back to work for that particular foreman, nobody in her crew would be rehired for the coming season. And when she finally worked up the courage to complain to someone in a position to help her, that foreman allegedly threatened to murder her and her children.

The allegations are laid out in a civil rights lawsuit filed by the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing on behalf of the woman, identified in court records as Jane Doe, against Dynapac and the foreman, Miguel Guzman Salazar.

According to the lawsuit, filed March 1 in Monterey County Superior Court, Jane Doe started working on Salazar’s crew in 2016 as a field laborer. He repeatedly asked her to go drink with him, and eventually told her he “would make sure I was fired unless I went with him,” the suit states. When she went to a hotel in Salinas where he told her to meet him, he allegedly raped her, starting a pattern of future assaults through 2016.

In about April 2017, Doe says she was told by a Dynapac representative they wouldn’t rehire her crew unless she worked under Salazar. A month later, he allegedly assaulted her in a field, warning her there would be consequences if she refused him.

She says she called a Dynapac human resources representative, who investigated. Salazar claimed the alleged assaults were consensual sex; Doe was moved to another crew working in an adjacent field.

When the 2017 season ended, she went to work for Dynapac in Arizona. Upon her return to Salinas in 2018, the company refused to assign her work and she found employment with another company, the suit states. While waiting to start her work day in Greenfield in 2018, she says Salazar found her at her job site and threatened her and her children with death if she didn’t drop the complaint she’d filed with the DFEH.

Steve Tripp, general counsel for Dynapac, says the company is aware of the suit regarding a former employee (Guzman Salazar), but declined to comment on pending litigation.

Police in Greenfield and Salinas could not locate any criminal complaint made against Guzman Salazar.