By Fred Glass
Shortly after the Delano strike erupted, Chavez, in tactic suggested by young labor attorney Stewart Weinberg, called upon the public to refrain from buying grapes without a union label. Union volunteers were sent out to big cities, where they established boycott centers that organized friendly groups—unions, churches, community organizations—to not buy grapes, and in turn to join in publicizing the boycott.
The strikers’ cause was boosted by other events in the nation at the same time. The Civil Rights movement had increased public awareness of the effects of racism, including lowered standards of living for the victims of prejudice in housing, employment, schools, voting, and other areas of daily life. The Civil Rights movement focused attention on the treatment of Blacks in the south. But the situation in the fields of California proved similar enough that the largely Chicano and Filipino farmworkers benefited by the new public understanding of racism. As a result, millions of consumers stopped buying table grapes.
The bigger they are . . .
The two biggest growers in the Delano area, Schenley and DiGiorgio, were the most vulnerable to the boycott. Both companies were owned by corporate entities with headquarters far from Delano. For each company grape growing was a relatively minor part of a larger economic empire. Schenley and DiGiorgio had union contracts with workers in many other parts of their business. The boycott had the potential to hurt sales in other product areas, and to harm labor relations with their other workers.
Schenley was the first to crack. Soon after the strike began Schenley had sprayed striking workers with agricultural poisons. In protest the NFWA organized a march to Sacramento. Seventy strikers left Delano on foot on March 17, 1966, led by Chavez. They walked nearly 340 miles in 25 days. Along the way they picked up hundreds of friends and rallied with thousands of people. A Chicano theater group, El Teatro Campesino, staged skits about the struggle from the back of a flatbed truck every night. The march attracted media attention and public support.
Arriving in Sacramento on Easter morning, Chavez announced to a cheering demonstration of 10,000 supporters in front of the Capitol building that Schenley had bowed before the pressure and signed an agreement with the NFWA.
Within weeks, DiGiorgio agreed to hold a representation election. But before the election could be held, a complication arose. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, ignoring the questions of social justice at the core of the farmworkers’ campaign for union recognition, offered itself to DiGiorgio as a conservative alternative to the NFWA/AWOC. The grower eagerly assented. Chavez and the NFWA, infuriated at this betrayal by another union, called for the workers to boycott the election. Heeding the call of the union, more than half the 800 workers at DiGiorgio’s huge Sierra Vista ranch refused to vote.
Governor Pat Brown appointed an arbitrator, who ordered another election. This time the NFWA beat the Teamsters decisively. The two largest growers in Delano were employers of union labor.
La Huelga continues
However, the strike dragged on at dozens of grape farms throughout the Delano area. In the past a farmworkers’ union would have been unable to survive such a long conflict. But now there was strength in worker solidarity. The National Farm Workers Association and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee merged during the summer, just before the DiGiorgio election. On August 22, the two organizations became the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO (UFWOC). The new union received organizing funds from the AFL-CIO, as well as strike support from other unions consisting of food, cash, and office equipment.
Despite continuing Teamster collusion with the growers, the UFWOC organized steadily in the fields, and the grape boycott gathered steam in the cities. By 1970 the UFW got grape growers to accept union contracts and effectively organized most of that industry, claiming 50,000 dues paying members – the most ever represented by a union in California agriculture. Gains included a union-run hiring hall, a health clinic and health plan, credit union, community center and cooperative gas station, as well as higher wages. The hiring hall meant an end to discrimination and favoritism by labor contractors.
In cities around the country UFW support became stronger. UFWOC, as Chavez had envisioned, had become both a union and a civil rights movement, and this was the key to its success. The dual character of the farmworkers organization gave it a depth of moral pressure and sense of mission felt by members and supporters alike. It seemed as if the farmworkers of California had finally created a union that would last.
Since then
And it has. But conditions changed in the next decade. After helping Jerry Brown to get elected governor after Ronald Reagan, the union asked and Brown granted their request to create an agricultural labor relations board, modeled on the New Deal’s NLRB. Initially helpful in adjudicating disputes, once Republican Governor George Deukmejian came into office after Brown the agency was stripped of funding and staff. It has never had the resources to do its job properly.
Mirroring the conservative turn of the 1980s in politics, the UFW’s fabled militancy dissolved. Chavez and Huerta purged the union of leftists and other dissidents, and steered the union’s boycott tactics into direct mail fundraising without the crucial collective action in the fields that had rooted the earlier boycotts in worker power. Membership fell steadily. Today no more than five thousand workers are under contract.
If the UFW ultimately could not live up to the expectations created by its early successes, that doesn’t mean it was a failure. In a country where labor history is mostly a history of defeats, and in an industry with such an imbalance of power between workers and owners, the UFW meant something much more.
The UFW’s singular achievement was that it was the first farmworker union that lasted. It provided a central point of reference for the emergence of Chicano identity and culture, not only in California but the USA. The red and black Aztec Thunderbird logo cast a long shadow over Chicano graphic design and visual arts, as did marching farmworkers, grapes, and the iconic faces of Chavez and Huerta. The union made a classroom for consumers out of its struggle, educating millions of people, who, living in urban centers, had lost the ancient basic human connection with growing the food they ate.
Through the strikes, boycotts and astute publicity efforts, the UFW taught the public about the exploitation of the people who produced what appeared, somewhat mysteriously, in supermarkets and on their tables. They learned about the health problems, for workers and consumers alike, that might be associated with a heavy reliance on pesticides in agriculture. And with the union’s struggles, people found that, even against great odds, sometimes these wrongs could be righted. Si se puede.
For more on California’s labor history, you can buy Fred Glass’s From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (University of California Press) here.
Fred Glass is the author of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (UC Press, 2016), a retired City College of San Francisco Labor Studies instructor, and a former member of the State Committee of California DSA.