She stopped in Carmel at the home of Lincoln Steffans, where Langston Hughes and Ellen Winter celebrated the victory by writing a pageant.

[7] A series of strikes in 1933 against growers of cherries, pears, peaches, and sugar beets had mixed success, but by August "[s]trikes led or influenced by the union resulted in wage increases of as much as 100 percent for thousands of agricultural workers.

Decker led a rally in Fresno on September 11 where “…four thousand thronged the speaker’s platform to hear this petite blonde, barely twenty-one”.

[8] One CAWIU organizer, Patrick Chaffee, remembers her "…fiery eloquence",[5] and within a month, "Comrade Decker had led six thousand off the job, the largest single agricultural strike to that point in the history of California".

Field workers demanded one dollar per hundred pounds; growers offered sixty cents, at which rate "even a strong, steadily working man could make no more than $1.20 a day.

[6] Despite the drama of the testimony, the action of the government through NRA regional director George Creel ultimately ended the strike.

Creel brought in relief supplies for striking workers, and got the Federal Intermediate Credit Bank to help finance the cotton growers so they could give a wage of 75 cents an hour.

Creel's goals were to persuade growers and strikers to accept that rate, and to deny National Labor Board recognition to the CAWIU because of its communist leadership.

Eventually the Central Strike Committee agreed to the terms and workers returned to work without an officially recognized union.

[8] In June 1934, Decker traveled to Contra Costa County to organize apricot pickers, working alongside members of the AFL-affiliated Cannery Workers Union.

[6] Meanwhile, a group was formed representing growers and funded by railroads, utilities, banks, and others who hoped to defeat agricultural unionism: the Associated Farmers of California.

On July 20, the police, acting on information from the Associated Farmers, rounded up seventeen of the union's leaders, including Decker,[6] and charged them with "criminal syndicalism, a felony".