VIVA LA CAUSA!
By Dick Meister
The United Farm Workers union is celebrating the 42nd anniversary of the
extraordinary grape strike that brought California’s sorely oppressed
farmworkers worldwide support in their struggle for the basic rights long
denied them and the millions of other farmworkers nationwide.
The struggle continues. But the strike led by the charismatic Cesar Chavez
remains a source of great inspiration -- and of important lessons -- for
those who are waging today’s battles with the essential help of the allies
who originally joined them in response to the strike and the grape boycott
that stemmed from it.
The strike began in the fall of 1965 in the hot, dusty vineyards around
Delano, California, a nondescript valley town of 12,000 inhabitants. It was
called by the Filipino American members of an AFL-CIO affiliate who were
soon joined by the Mexican American members of Chavez’ organization. The
strike spread quickly to the state's other vineyards, where most of the
country's grapes are grown, but had little impact until strikers launched
the boycott three years later.
The boycott transformed the local strike – “La Huelga” -– into a worldwide
cause – “La Causa.” It was a compelling social movement that drew together
a potent coalition of union, church, civil rights and other sympathetic
organizations, liberal Democratic politicians, clergymen and women, young
activists, old-line union members, socially conscious shoppers and others.
By 1970, just two years after it had begun, the boycott forced California’s
grape growers to agree to the country’s first farm labor contracts.
Even more than that, the boycott led to enactment of the law that promises
California’s farmworkers the right to bargain collectively with employers,
the right that was granted most non-agricultural workers nationwide in the
1930s to enable them to better their miserable pay and working conditions.
There’s never been anything quite like the grape boycott. It was led by
farmworkers who had rarely been outside their small rural communities but
climbed into rickety buses to travel to major cities all across the country,
with the support -- financial and otherwise -- of their many and varied
supporters.
The workers and their supporters picketed thousands of markets, urging
shoppers not to buy grapes until farmworkers were guaranteed union
contracts. They convinced schools and other public institutions to remove
grapes from their menus. They got longshoremen to refuse to load grapes
destined for foreign markets.
The victory was short-lived. Grape growers refused to renew their contracts
with the UFW when they expired three years later, and ever since have
rebuffed union drives to renew them. The union is currently waging a
campaign at the Giumarra vineyards, the largest and most influential of
California's grape growers.
But despite loss of the landmark grape contracts and the decline in
membership to not much more than 25,000 today, the UFW has won other
important victories. They include a contract granted in response to a
nationwide boycott of the giant Gallo corporation, the country’s largest
winery and a UFW foe for many years. Other victories include contract
signings by growers in a variety of crops in California, Washington state,
Florida and elsewhere, and several pieces of legislation strengthening
farmworkers’ legal rights and health and safety protections.
The UFW’s efforts have inspired the formation of other farmworker unions in
several states and their use of the boycott and other UFW tactics to win
contracts and attempt to also win laws granting them collective bargaining
rights.
Yet for all that, most farmworkers, nearly all of them migrants with
families, remain mired in poverty, their working and living conditions a
national disgrace. Despite its ups and downs, the United Farm Workers union
still holds out their best, if not only, hope for a better life, as it has
since that day long ago when vineyard workers in Delano launched one of the
most important and hopeful campaigns in U.S. labor history.
Copyright © 2007 Dick Meister