United Farm Workers

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UFWA

United Farm Workers of America
Founded	1962
Affiliations	Change to Win Federation
Website	www.ufw.org

The United Farm Workers of America (UFWA) is a labor union founded by Philip Vera Cruz, Dolores Huerta, and Cesar Chavez. This union changed from a workers' rights organization that helped workers get unemployment insurance to that of a union of farmworkers almost overnight, when the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) went out on strike in support of the mostly Filipino farmworkers of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) led by Larry Itliong in Delano, California who had previously initiated a grape strike on September 8, 1965. The NFWA and the AWOC, recognizing their common goals and methods, and realizing the strengths of coalition formation, jointly formed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee on August 22, 1966. This organization eventually became the United Farm Workers and launched a boycott of table grapes that, after five years of struggle, finally won a contract with the major grape growers in California.

Roles

César Chávez, cofounder of UFW

The union then brought in thousands more corn workers in the Salinas and Imperial Valleys and orange workers in Florida employed by subsidiaries of Coca-Cola.

The union publicly adopted the principles of non-violence championed by Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The union was poised to launch its next major campaign in the orange fields in 1973 when a deal between the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the growers nearly destroyed it. The growers signed contracts giving the Teamsters the right to represent the workers who had been members of the UFW.

The UFW responded with strikes, lawsuits and boycotts, including secondary boycotts in the retail grocery industry. The union struggled to regain the members it had lost in the lettuce field; it never fully recovered its strength in grapes, due in some part to incompetent management of the hiring halls it had established that seemed to favor some workers over others.

The battles in the fields became violent, with a number of UFW members killed on the picket line. The violence led the state in 1975 to enact the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, creating an administrative agency that oversaw secret ballot elections and binding arbitration for collective bargaining impasses.

On July 22, 2005, the UFW announced that it was joining the Change to Win Federation, a coalition of labor unions functioning as
an alternative to the AFL-CIO. On January 13, 2006, the union officially disaffiliated from the AFL-CIO. In contrast to other Change to Win-affiliated unions, the AFL-CIO neglected to offer the right of affiliation to regional bodies to the UFW. "AFL Discriminates Against UFW." Workinig Life. February 22, 2006.

Foundation of the UFW

By 1959, Cesar Chavez had already established professional relationships with local community organizations that aimed to empower the working class population by encouraging them to become more politically active. In 1952, Chavez met Fred Ross who was a community organizer working on behalf of the Community Services Organization. This was a group which was affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation which was headed by Saul Alinsky.

During Chavez’s participation in the Community Services Organization, Fred Ross trained Cesar Chavez in the grassroots, door-to-door, house meeting tactic of organization, a tactic which was vital to the UFW’s recruiting methods. The house meeting tactic successfully established a broad base of local Community Service Organization chapters during Ross's era, and Chavez used this technique to extend the UFW's reach as well as to find up and coming organizers. During the 1950’s, Cesar Chavez and Fred Ross developed twenty-two new Community Services Organization chapters in the Mexican American neighborhoods of San Jose. In 1959, Chavez would claim the rank of executive director in the Community Services Organization. During this time, Chavez observed and adopted the notion of having the community become more politically involved in order to bring about the social changes that the community sought. This would be a vital tactic in Chavez’s future struggles in fighting for immigrant rights.

Cesar Chavez’s ultimate goal in his participation with the Community Services Organization and the Industrial Areas Foundation was to eventually organize a union for the farm workers. Saul Alinsky did not share Chavez’s sympathy for the farm workers struggle, claiming that organizing farm workers, “was like fighting on a constantly disintegrating bed of sand.” (Alinsky, 1967)

On March 1962 at the Community Services Organization convention, Chavez proposed a pilot project for organizing farm workers which was rejected by the organization’s members. Chavez’s reaction to this led him to resign from the organization in order to pursue his goal of creating a farm workers union which would later come to be known as the National Farm Workers Association.

By 1965 the National Farm Workers Association had acquired twelve hundred members through Chavez’s person-to-person recruitment efforts which he learned from Fred Ross just a decade earlier. Out of those twelve hundred, only about two hundred paid dues.

Although still in its infant stages, the organization lent its support to a strike by workers in the rose industry in 1965. This initial protest by the young organization resulted in a failed attempt to strike against the rose industry. That same year the farm workers who worked in the Delano fields of California wanted to strike against the growers in response to the grower’s refusal to raise wages from $1.20 to $1.40 an hour, and they sought out Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association for support. The Delano agricultural workers were majority Filipino workers who were affiliated with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee which was a charter of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. The unification of these two organizations, in an attempt to boycott table grapes which were grown in the Delano fields, resulted in the creation of the United Farm Workers of America.

Historic Complications in Organizing Farm Workers Prior to the Formation of the UFW

In the early history of American agriculture, farm workers experienced many failed attempts to organize agricultural laborers. In 1903, Japanese and Mexican farm workers attempted to come together to fight for better wages and better working conditions. This attempt to organize agricultural laborers was ignored and disbanded when organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor, neglected to support their efforts, many of which withheld assistance on the basis of race.

In 1913, the Industrial Workers of the World organized a rally at a large ranch in the rural area of Northern California which involved two thousand farm workers. This resulted in an attack against the participants of the rally by national guardsmen. As a result of the violence the two lead organizers for the Industrial Workers of the World were arrested, convicted of murder, and were sentenced to life imprisonment. It is believed that the two people arrested were wrongly convicted of the murder charges.

In the later teens and 1920’s in the United States, further attempts to organize farm laborers were undertaken by spontaneous local efforts, and some which were led by communist unions. These attempts also resulted in failure because during that time employers were not required by law to involve themselves with negotiations with their workers. During this time period, Employers could also legally fire their employees if they chose to join a union.

In 1936, the National Labor Relations Act was put into effect. This legislation provided most American workers the right to join unions and bargain collectively. Agricultural workers were exempt from the protection of this law. Some believe that this labor category was excluded as a result of a political tactic to gain the support of Southern politicians in the passing of this law.

In 1941, the United States Government and the Mexican Government enacted the Bracero Program. Initially, this joint project between the United States and Mexico was established during the Second World War in order to address labor shortages by allowing “guest workers” from Mexico to work in the American agricultural industry until the end of the crop harvest. Thousands of Mexican Nationals were brought north to work in the fields in the United States and growers used this opportunity to undercut domestic wages, and the Braceros were also utilized in breaking strikes from resident farm workers. This program was extended until 1964.

Texas Strike

In May 1966, California farm worker activist Eugene Nelson traveled to Texas to rally support for the Schenley Farms boycott. While in Houston, AFL-CIO state representatives suggested that he visit Rio Grande City on the Texas-Mexico border in the lower Rio Grande Valley. Seeing the possibilities for organizing workers in the impoverished region, he quickly set about recruiting volunteers for the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC) as both strikers and assistants. Other UFWOC activists joined Nelson in Rio Grande City, including Gilbert Padilla, Antonio Orendain, and Bill Chandler.

On June 1, Nelson led workers to strike demanding $1.25 as a minimum hourly wage, protesting La Casita Farms and others packing sheds. The activists also protested the hiring of "scab" labor, mostly those with green card visas from Mexico, who were allowed to cross the border as day workers. In the dispute, reports and allegations of vandalism to equipment, produce, and public property caused Starr County officials, along with the support of the growers, to call for additional law enforcement, which arrived in the form of the Texas Rangers. Both county officials and rangers arrested protestors for secondary picketing, standing within 50 feet of one another, a practice illegal at the time. Allegations of brutality and questions of jurisdictional limits created national headlines in what came to be known as “La Huelga.”

On July 4, members of UFWOC, strikers, and members of the clergy set out on a march to Austin to demand the $1.25 minimum wage and other improvements for farm workers. Press coverage intensified as the marchers made their way north in the summer heat. Politicians, members of the AFL-CIO, and the Texas Council of Churches accompanied the protestors. Gov. John Connally, who had refused to meet them in Austin, traveled to New Braunfels with then House Speaker Ben Barnes, and Attorney General Waggoner Carr to intercept the march and inform strikers that their efforts would have no effect.

Protestors arrived in Austin in time for a Labor Day rally, but no changes in law resulted. Strikes and arrests continued in Rio Grande City through 1966 into 1967. Violence increased as the spring melon crop ripened and time neared for the May harvest. In June, when beatings of two UFWOC supporters by Texas rangers surfaced, tempers flared.

At the end of October as the harvest was ending, members of the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, including Senators Harrison Williams and Edward Kennedy, arrived in the lower Rio Grande Valley to hold hearings in Rio Grande City and Edinburg, Texas. The senators took their findings back to Washington as a report on pending legislation. Subsequently, the rangers left the area and the picketing ended. On September 20, Hurricane Beulah's devastations ruined the farming industry in the Valley for the following year. One major outcome of the strikes came in the form of a 1974 Supreme Court victory in Medrano v. Allee, limiting jurisdiction of Texas Rangers in labor disputes. Farm workers continued to organize through the 2100's on a smaller scale, under new leadership in San Juan, Texas, independent of César Chávez.

Texas Campaign

By mid-1971 the Texas campaign was well underway. In Sept. 1971, Thomas John Wakely, (aka Tommy) recent discharge from the United States Air Force joined the San Antonio office of the Texas campaign. His pay was room and board, $ 5.00 a week plus all of the menudo he could eat. The menudo was provided to the UFOC staff by the families of migrant workers working the Texas fields.

TJ worked for UFOC for about 2 years and his responsibilities included organizing the Grape Boycott in San Antonio. His primary target was the H.E.B grocery store chain. In addition, he attempted to organize Hispanic farm workers working the farmers market in San Antonio - a institution at that time controlled by the corporate farms. Among his many organizing activities included at early 1972 episode where he and several other UFOC staff members who were attempting to organize warehouse workers in San Antonio were fired upon by security agents of the corporate farm owners.

In mid-1973 the San Antonio office of the UFOC was for taken over by the Brown Berets. This radicalization of the San Antonio UFOC office led to the eventual collapse of the San Antonio UFOC organizing campaign.

Recent developments

In July 2008 the farm worker Ramiro Carrillo Rodriguez, 48, died of a heat stroke. According to United Farm Workers he is "13th farm worker heat death since CA Governor Schwarzenegger took office" in 2003. In 2006 California's first permanent heat regulations were enacted but these regulations are not strictly enforced, the union says.

Further reading

• Bardacke, Frank. "Cesar's Ghost: Rise and Fall of the UFW." The Nation. July 26, 1993. [1]
• Ferriss, Susan; Sandoval, Ricardo; and Hembree, Diana. The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998. ISBN 0156005980
• Ganz, Marshall. Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement. Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-516201-1
• Gutierrez, David G. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995. ISBN 0520202198
• Nelson, Eugene. Huelga! The First One Hundred Days of the Delano Grape Strike. Delano, Calif.: Farm Worker Press, 1966.
• Pawel, Miriam. "Farmworkers Reap Little as Union Strays From Its Roots." Los Angeles Times. January 8, 2006. [2]

External links

• Official Website
• Farmworker Movement Documentation Project
• United Farm Workers Union: 1965 Grape Boycott Case Study - University of California, Berkeley
• California UFW collective bargaining agreements - A searchable and browseable collection from the UC Davis Library.
• United Farm Workers Union entry, Encyclopedia of Texas Online Edition
• University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections - Vietnam War Era Ephemera This collection contains leaflets and newspapers that were distributed on the University of Washington campus during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Includes ephemera from the United Farm Workers.
• Cal Poly Pomona University Library UFW Collection
• http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/exhibits/fw/ufw1.html