CESAR CHAVEZ AND THE FARM WORKERS MOVEMENT
By David Bacon
Working In These Times, 4/1/11
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/7142/cesar_chavez_and_the_state_of_the_farm_workers_movement/
The U.S. media tends to view social movements as the creation
of strong leaders, especially on those rare occasions when it looks
at unions. Nowhere is this more evident than in its view of Cesar
Chavez and the United Farm Workers.
After Chavez died in 1993, a plethora of coverage speculated
that the UFW wouldn't survive his death. Stories since have
continued in the same personal vein. Was Chavez a hero or a villain?
Did he make terrible mistakes that cost the life of the union he led,
or was he single-handedly responsible for its greatest victories?
The questions don't enlighten us because the United Farm
Workers was and is the product of a social movement, and Cesar would
have been the first to say so. He was not the single author of the
boycotts or the strategic ideas the union used in fighting for its
survival. No one person could have been, because they evolved as the
responses of thousands of people to the age-old problems faced by
farm worker unions for a century, of strikebreaking, geographic
isolation, poverty and grower violence.
The conditions that ignited the burning desire to organize in
the 1960a are still out there in the nation's fields today. In fact,
they've gotten worse. At the height of the union's power in the late
1970s the base farm labor wage was twice the minimum wage. Today
that would be $16 an hour - more if the minimum wage had actually
risen with inflation. Today the minimum wage is the wage for most
farm workers, and many earn less, law or no.
Growers tore down most labor camps in California in the era
of the great strikes. Today thousands of migrant field laborers
sleep under trees, in cars, or in the fields themselves as they
travel with the harvest. Most workers have toilets and drinking
water, and where they know their rights, they don't have to use the
short-handled hoe. But labor contractors, who were once replaced by
union hiring halls, have retaken control of the fields. And as
contractors compete to sell the labor of farm workers to the growers,
they cut wages even further.
Medical insurance, once guaranteed by UFW contracts, has
again become a dream for most workers. In the meantime, the lack of
safe working conditions was dramatized by the death in 2008 of
17-year-old Maria Isavel Vasquez Jimenez, who was denied shade and
water and collapsed in 100-degree heat. The low value put on her
life and that of workers like her was also dramatized - by the
sentence of community service given by the state court to the labor
contractor responsible. West Coast Farms, the grower, wasn't
penalized at all, because it claimed the contractor was responsible
for conditions in its grape field.
The response that led to the creation of the UFW is still the
answer farm workers themselves give to those conditions - to
organize, strike and boycott. The year before Cesar died, five
thousand workers struck in the grape fields in Coachella, winning the
first wage increase they'd had in a decade. Every year spontaneous
work stoppages like it, although perhaps not on that scale, take
place in U.S. fields.
And in the years since the first grape strike in 1965, farm
worker unions have grown to over a dozen, in Washington, Oregon,
Arizona, Texas, Ohio, Connecticut, Florida, New Mexico and
Pennsylvania, in addition to California. To one degree or another,
all draw inspiration from the movement that started in Coachella and
Delano. Chavez was that movement's leader, but not the only one.
Others also had a part - women like Dolores Huerta and Jessica Govea,
Filipino labor leaders Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz, African
American Mack Lyons and many white organizers from the civil rights
and student movements of the day.
Of all the achievements of that movement, its most powerful
and longest enduring was the boycott. It leveled the playing field
in the fight with the growers over the right to form a union, and led
to the most powerful and important alliance between unions and
communities in modern labor history.
Farm worker strikes have traditionally been broken by
strikebreakers and, all too often, drowned in blood. No country has
done more than the U.S. to enshrine the right of employers to break
strikes. From their first picket lines in Delano, UFW members
watched in anger as growers brought in crews of strikebreakers to
take their jobs. Often the Border Patrol opened the border, as they
did during the lemon strike in Yuma in 1974, when trucks hauling
strikebreakers roared up through the Sonora desert every night.
Local police and sheriffs provided armed protection.
Chavez saw that as akin to the bracero program, which he and
other Chicano civil rights activists forced Congress to end in 1964,
the year before the grape strike began. The program allowed growers
to bring contract workers to the U.S. under conditions of virtual
servitude, and deport them if they struck against it.
Chavez did call for turning in undocumented workers to the
Border Patrol, for which he was criticized strongly by union members
and other community and labor activists like Bert Corona. But he did
this because growers and the Border Patrol colluded to bring in
undocumented people as strikebreakers. Chavez was against
strikebreaking, and believed that all workers have the right to
organize.
Undocumented workers have always made up most of the members
of the UFW, because they make up a majority of the farm labor
workforce. Chavez and the UFW organized all farm workers, people
with visas and the undocumented alike. Many of the union's most
active members and leaders have been undocumented, and the union
fought to make sure that California's Agricultural Labor Relations
Act didn't deny workers their organizing rights based on their
immigration status. It fought against immigration raids, especially
during strikes and organizing drives.
Non-violence became a basic principle of the UFW because
violence in the fields had such a long history. Armed grower
militias killed strikers in Pixley and El Centro in the 30s. Nagi
Daifullah and Juan de la Cruz lost their lives in the grapes in the
1973 strike. Rufino Contreras was shot as he picketed a lettuce
field in the Imperial Valley in 1979.
The boycott couldn't end that violence, but after farm
workers crossed the enormous gulf between the fields and the big
cities, they didn't have to fight by themselves. Their reinvention
of the boycott provided a breath of new energy for the rest of the
union movement, and since then it has become a powerful tool for
community-based union organizing. Today, the idea of alliances
between unions and communities is the bedrock of progressive tactics
among union activists across the country. The UFW strikes and
boycotts helped develop that strategy, and gave the union its
character as a social movement.
The passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975
was a tribute to that strategy's power. The law, which set up a
legal process for farm workers to gain union recognition, was not a
gift or a private deal between Cesar Chavez and (the now returned)
Governor Jerry Brown. Even as legislators debated it, the capitol in
Sacramento was surrounded by a strike of thousands of tomato pickers.
After ten years of class war in fields and supermarkets, growers and
legislators decided to recognize (and to try to control) what already
existed on the ground.
Farm workers then discovered what other unions have known
since the bitter 1950s and the legal evisceration of federal labor
rights - the law is a very weak protection. Although tens of
thousands of farm workers voted for the union in hundreds of
elections, the ALRA had no teeth to force the negotiation of
contracts. And after accepting huge contributions from agricultural
interests, a succession of Republican governors put growers in charge
of enforcing it.
Since then, the UFW has sought to cure some of the law's
weaknesses by passing other legislation mandating the arbitration of
a limited number of first-time contracts. Today a card-check bill
for farm workers is also on the agenda in Sacramento, and Jerry Brown
may repeat his star performance from 1975 and sign it. But even a
better law is no cure-all.
The boycotts had a high price, leaving the union fewer
resources to organize activity in the fields. Today the pressure is
on the union from workers who are tired of moving backwards. With
tens of thousands of new immigrants pouring into the fields of
California and Arizona every year, few workers remain who went
through the titanic struggles which swept through California and
Arizona valleys four decades ago.
If the union doesn't lead and organize that anger it becomes
irrelevant to workers. Survival in any union depends on its ability
to organize new members, and the survival question for the UFW is
whether it can take their existing need and again transform it into a
powerful economic weapon. With limited resources, it confronts hard
decisions on where and how this work should be done.
The UFW's present leadership will not have any easier time
solving these dilemmas than the union did under Chavez. But if
there's inspiration to be drawn from his example, it is that it can
be done. The social movement Chavez and the UFW sparked almost half
a century ago is still capable of transforming life for farm workers,
and in the process, much of the rest of our world as well.
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and
Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border
(University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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