Every Worker is an Organizer
Fhotographs by David Bacon
This exhibit in the California State Capitol is organized by Assembly
Member Luis Alejo and his staff, and is part of the celebration of
the 50th anniversary of the United Farm Workers of America.
California State Capitol
Hallway next to the Governor's Office
May 20-26, 2012
Sacramento, California
Open to the public
Farm labor is a key element historically in the photographic
documentation of social reality in the US, and in particular the
documentation of social protest. Dorothea Lange, Hansel Meith, Otto
Hegel, and the generation of the 1930s and 1940s left a body of work
showing the extreme exploitation of farm workers, and documenting the
early farm labor organizing efforts, part of the great labor upsurge
of those decades.
The iconography of social documentary photography was shaped
by images like Lange's mother and children in Nipomo, or those of the
Pixley cotton strikers packed onto the back of a truck under their
banner "Disarm the rich farmer or arm the workers for self-defense!"
or the growers with their rifles waiting in ambush.
The first two decades of the growth of the United Farm
Workers was undoubtedly one of the most-photographed social protests
of the civil rights era. It too had its icons -- the line of
marchers on their way from Delano to Sacramento, silhoutted against
the sky, or Cesar Chavez weakened by his fast, at the side of Robert
Kennedy.
In 1994, a year after the death of Chavez, the union made a
second march from Delano to Sacramento. In 1996, it began an effort
to organize the central California coast strawberry industry,
employing 25,000 workers. That struggle pitted workers and the union
against mass firings, blacklists, company unions, and the use of the
legal structure to subvert workers' efforts. In 1998, workers at the
country's then second-largest vegetable grower, D'Arrigo Brothers
walked out on strike in the Salinas Valley
The photographs in this exhibit document this period in the
union's history, especially the organizing drive in Watsonville and
the strike at D'Arrigo. Some also document working lives of workers
themselves. Strawberry pickers bend over double in the rows, run as
they pick wine grapes or tomatoes, or balance at the top of date
palms without safety lines. They show as well the extreme youth of
farm workers today, where the average age has fallen to 20.
Like all workers, farm laborers take pride in the skill it
takes to do their jobs, their bravery in the face of dangerous
conditions (farm labor has one of the highest occupational injury
rates of all US employment), and the social contribution they make in
providing food for millions of people.
These are not images of passive exploitation, designed to
elicit just a sympathetic response. They are a documentary record
of the efforts workers have made to organize a union in the face of
brutal working conditions and low wages.
The images are a view from below, looking at the work process
and the union from the point of view of workers.
The UFW has had an enormous impact on the US labor movement
over the last 50 years. It helped to inspire a resurgence of
interest in organizing, and trained hundreds of people who went on to
become organizers for unions and community organizations all across
the country.
These photographs are part of a larger exhibition and
documentary project about farm workers and migration tody. This set
of images was exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California, the U.S.
Labor College, Bread and Roses Gallery and the American Labor Museum,
thanks to support from the Northern California Coalition for
Immigrant Rights and the Zellerbach Foundation.
Watsonville
Roberto is a fourteen-year old immigrant from Oaxaca. He came to the
U.S. with other friends in 1996, and began working in the strawberry
fields of Jaime Rocha near Salinas.
Coachella Valley
A palmero steps off his ladder onto the fronds of the palm, walking
around the crown of the tree as he works. Palmeros are paid by the
tree, and have to work quickly in order to make a living. They wear
no safety lines, and practically run as they work. Date palms are
male and female, and must be pollinated by hand, one of the seven
operations done each year at the top of the trees.
Napa Valley
A farmworker picks grapes in the Napa Valley, practically running as he works.
Stockton
Tomato pickers bring their full buckets to the truck to be counted,
in the fields of the Triple-E Tomato Co., one of the world's largest
tomato growers. Many workers complain that they are not credited for
the true number of buckets they pick, or that buckets aren't counted
for frivolous reasons. Workers struck and voted for the United Farm
Workers at this company in 1988, but Triple-E refused to sign a
contract.
Calexico
Juan Jimenez took care of the old UFW hall in El Hoyo, where many of
the largest strikes in California agriculture began. Workers cross
the Mexican border here every morning, and are hired by labor
contractors to go to the fields. Jimenez picked lemons for many
years, and spent a decade as a sewing machine operator in a Los
Angeles sweatshop and in the Huffy bicycle factory in Azusa.
Watsonville
Strawberry pickers work bent over double all day. It is painful
work, and after a few years, can cause permanent damage to a worker's
back. Pay systems use a bonus for each box of strawberries to ensure
that workers pick as fast as possible, and in his back pocket this
worker has the ticket keeping track of the boxes he's picked.
Chualar
Workers went on strike at D'Arrigo Brothers in 1998. Strikers
stopped the company busses from bringing strikebreakers in to work
early in the morning at the edge of a field in Salinas.
Chualar
D'Arrigo strikers call out from the edge of a field in which
strikebreakers are working, to convince them to stop work and join
the strike. Sheriff's deputies look on to keep them from actually
going into the field.
Chualar
Rodolfo Garcia, a UFW organizer, urges workers on a broccoli machine
to stop work and join the strike at D'Arrigo.
Sacramento
Thousands of farmworkers and their supporters converge on the state
capitol in Sacramento in 1994, at the end of the United Farm Workers'
month-long march from Delano, demanding the enforcement of the laws
protecting workers' organizing rights, and an end to
immigrant-bashing.
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
Two lectures on the political economy of migration by David Bacon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GgDWf9eefE&feature=youtu.be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd4OLdaoxvg&feature=related
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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