The Labor Movement: Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Worker's Union
**Note: The history of the United Farm Worker's Union (UFW) is much more extensive than what is presented here. However, the purpose of this essay is to attempt to provide some historical context and to present a full and balanced story about the relationship between farmers and laborers. To learn more about the UFW, please visit the research guide provided in the "Scrapbook Finding Aid" section of this website.
The following paragraph is Cesar Chavez’s account of farm laborer’s working conditions describe be historian Randy Shaw:
He saw that a typical farmworker ‘home’ was a shack built of cardboard cartons and linoleum scraps or a tent made of gunny sacks. For farmworkers living in labor camps, plumbing facilities were inadequate or nonexistent; often fifty to a hundred families shared one faucet. Years later, Chavez recalled that the camps’ toilets were ‘always horrible, so miserable you couldn’t go there.’ Although farmworkers spent their days in fields rich with fruit and vegetables, they lived in constant hunger. Most survived on beans, fried dough, dandelion greens, and potatoes. Working as stoop laborers in 100-degree heat was hard enough, but growers also forced farmworkers to use the short-handle hoe. This backbreaking tool damaged the health of Chavez and generations of farmworkers, leading him to conclude at an early age that growers ‘don’t give a damn’ about farmworkers as human beings but instead see them ‘as implements. And working hundred-hours a week, for $5 a week, plus room and board. [1]
Cesar Chavez came from a family of farm laborers. In adulthood, Chavez worked as a laborer, and during off seasons, he worked as an organizer beginning in 1950 in San Jose, California.[1] Later, Chavez met Fred Ross, a representative of the Community Service Organization (CSO), and in 1958, Chavez became a director of this national group. With interest in focusing solely to organize farm laborers, Chavez left the CSO to form the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) in 1962. The NFWA and Chavez found national recognition when they joined Filipino laborers in the Delano organization, California of the Agriculture Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) in their grape strike in 1965. The strike lasted five years. The NFWA became known as the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC). Of some of the turning points in the strike, a significant one was when Chavez led farm workers on a 300-mile march from Delano to Sacramento, showing the nation that the severity of the labor concerns as they promoted symbols of unity, hope and strength by carrying the union flag, displaying images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, performing El Teatro Campesino , and chanting Viva La Causa (Long live the cause).[2] By 1970, an agreement for a new contract was made. In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, Chavez received national attention as a leader and advocate for civil rights for farm workers.
The UFWOC officially became known as the United Farm Workers (UFW) in 1972. The UFW formed union contracts with 159 growers and had a membership of 50,000 to 60,000 farm workers. After Governor Ronald Reagan stepped down as governor of California in 1975, ten years after the Delano grape strike, Governor Jerry Brown enacted the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, a law that allowed farmworkers to vote in union elections. This was the first of its kind in the nation.
The UFW continued to organize, using what became a successful tactic, a combination of boycotts and strikes. For example, the UFW organized to reform the excessive and deadly use of pesticides in California fields. Governor George Deukmejian tried to block UFW challenges on the issue of pesticide use by farm growers. The pesticide industry in the 1960s was almost entirely unregulated.[4] While there were federal guidelines, they often protected growers, discouraging unions, physicians, and consumers from publicizing complaints by allowing growers to sue for damages. In California, responsibility for regulation enforcement was left to the farm growers. Therefore, the UFW informed the public, and especially consumers, not only about the poor working conditions, but also the dangerous and deadly working conditions, including the fact that workers were sent into the fields too soon after pesticide sprayings, and some fields were even sprayed while laborers picked crops.[5] To confirm these dangerous working conditions, in 1969, the California Department of Public Health publicized a survey that seventy-one percent of 548 farmworkers tested positive for symptoms of pesticide poisoning. Furthermore, only one percent of these pesticides were reported to the state.[6] The UFW attempted to convince consumers that the Food and Drug Administration appeared disinterested in the heath threat that pesticide use posed to food products. Also, UFW members passed out flyers at grocery stores stating, “This market sells poisoned grapes” and “California grape workers are killed and maimed every year by the pesticides you are eating.”[7] This tactic, galvanizing support from consumers led to a loss in sales of table grapes and encouraged consumers not to purchase grapes until they were pesticide-free.[8]
The UFW had already been successful with the passage of Proposition 22 in 1972 and the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, passed under Governor Brown in 1975. In 1976, Chavez pushed for legislation that would promote a farm labor initiative, Proposition 14, to prevent legislative interference with the funding of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board.[9] In particular, the UFW wanted to grant labor organizers the constitutional right to enter fields to organize workers in growers’ fields. However, the California Supreme Court had already granted organizers the right to organize on growers. Yet, Chavez was concerned about growers denying this right to their workers and local sheriffs arresting organizers for trespassing on growers’ property. UFW organizers’ tactics for galvanizing popular support for the proposition included voter registration drives, petition drives, door-to-door outreach, and visibility in the media. Growers demonstrated their opposition of Proposition 14, framing it as a form of trespassing on the private property of the homeowner, a privacy right infringement. Opponents of Proposition 14 even ran TV ads conveying that farmers’ families and workers were in danger if union organizers had unrestricted access to their property.[10] Proposition 14 was defeated, and the last time the UFW put a ballot measure before the California electorate.
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Footnotes
[1] Shaw, Randy. Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, The UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. University of California Press: Los Angeles, 2008.
[2] Richard W. Cesar Chavez: A Brief Biography with Documents. Bedford/St. Martin’s: New York, 2002.
[3] Ibid, pp. 2.