Workers on the Farm: After the Grape Pickers' Strike
Miller, M. Vincent
OCTOBER, 1966 Delano is entirely typical of the innumerable rural towns that dot the vast stretches of farmland in California's agricultural valleys. Lying off Highway 99, the main artery...
...it spelled "revolution," disorder, the Mexican farm workers' flag above the American flag...
...The Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Alameda County Central Labor Councils started making regular contributions to the strikers...
...However, in the absence of a militant and, at that time, interested national labor movement, Chavez and his coworkers were able to tap another source of outside support: There has come into being with civil rights and poverty politics a kind of nerve network running along the edge of American society that can be triggered into action by an appropriate struggle against social injustice...
...Whether the AFL-CIO leadership will give Chavez free rein to continue operating in his Delano manner remains to be seen...
...They brought along San Francisco public relations experts, set up shop in one of Delano's two relatively swank motels, drove out to the fields in new cars and minibuses Ioaded with fancy sound equipment, and passed out free key chains and soda pop to the workers...
...The AFL-CIO victory has by no means chased the Teamsters from the farmlands...
...Most previous farm strikes have remained isolated local phenomena, easily snuffed out by growers...
...But Di Giorgio, who had either encouraged the Teamsters in the first place or who now saw a chance to get rid of Chavez and Itliong, unilaterally arranged an election for June 24, in which only presently employed workers would be eligible to vote...
...Furthermore, it is much easier to organize workers in the grape territory than in most agricultural areas...
...Yet this in itself would still not have prevailed against the grape growers...
...The events in Delano have aroused widespread public sympathy for the farm workers and rekindled the labor movement's desire to bring them into the fold...
...Governor Brown has made campaign promises about pushing farm labor legislation, which nobody, including himself, has taken seriously...
...Delano's middle-class citizenry reacted as though Jesse James and his gang had ridden in to shoot up the place...
...Not until mounting public pressure forced him to take steps with regard to the Di Giorgio election did he become involved at all...
...Moreover, there were signs that Di Giorgio foremen were passing out Teamster membership cards and ordering employees to vote for the Teamsters...
...Even Chavez has decided to back Brown before then, since a Reagan victory could stand in the way of important pending farm labor legislation...
...OCTOBER, 1966 Delano is entirely typical of the innumerable rural towns that dot the vast stretches of farmland in California's agricultural valleys...
...Brown sent in Ronald W. Haughton, a labor relations expert from Wayne State University, to investigate...
...Reuther followed up with $5,000 a month to be split between AWOC and NFWA...
...From an early point in the strike, NFWA and AWOC forces had worked up considerable rank-and-file and regional leadership support among union locals throughout California...
...But now the grape strike has put California Democrats on the spot...
...Conditions were more favorable than usual for calling a farm strike...
...They sold the company, if not the workers...
...Middle-class Delano looks to the churches for social solidarity and perhaps even salvation, but certainly not for political action...
...After months of intensely bitter struggle involving the entire Delano community, the strikers have won some unprecedented concessions from the two largest growers in the area...
...Delano's voters, for example, are Democrats by a margin of nearly two to one...
...In the eyes of the town burghers, the image of NFWA presented didn't mean simply unionism...
...Last June 21, NFWA and Schenley Industries, Inc...
...And on August 30, NFWA and AWOC, newly merged under the AFL-CIO, beat the Teamsters' Union in an election to determine who would represent the Di Giorgio Corporation's Delano and Borrego Springs field crews at the bargaining table...
...Formidable obstacles have prevented the farm worker in areas like Delano from improving his pathetically low wages, from obtaining even the most rudimentary bargaining rights, from breaking free of a stigmatized and rootless way of life...
...Under a new public law, braceros could be brought in only when special manpower shortages warranted it and with a guaranteed minimum wage of $1.40 an hour...
...Without doubt the Schenley and Di Giorgio boycotts were effective, not because they did the two companies grievous economic damage but because their public images were hurt...
...In large measure, their vulnerability may have been due to the fact that they are national corporations...
...When guards hired by the growers beat up farm workers on the picket lines, the local police arrested the farm workers...
...NFWA alerted SNCC and CORE, the student movement, the churches newly awakened to social problems by the Negro, and the Migrant Ministry, a group of clergymen sponsored by the National Council of Churches, who through working with farm laborers in the fields for many years had come to combine their concern for the Holy Word with an interest in radical social action...
...III If Chavez's coalition of moral activists was building strong support outside Delano, it was having quite the opposite impact on the town...
...While Chavez's entry into the AFL-CIO will hardly radicalize that organization, neither does it appear that the AFLCIO will try to press Chavez into one of its more conventional leadership molds...
...the first big picket line in Los Angeles against Di Giorgio products was manned by several hundred Teamsters...
...Squadrons of top Teamster organizers arrived in Delano, looking urban and expensive in contrast to NFWA's grass-roots style...
...Larry Itliong, AWOC regional director, asked NFWA's large, well-organized Mexican-American constituency to cooperate...
...Students and ministers were frequently jailed on vague charges...
...On the west and south sides an assortment of structures, from cheap tract homes to shacks, contains that portion of the Mexican and Filipino farm worker families fortunate enough to avoid the labor camps on the growers' property...
...If the labor movement had ever thrown its full weight behind AWOC, these strikes might have been more effective...
...The Delano effort, which still has a long way to go, is only a surface scratch in agriculture's traditional resistance to unions, but it is one that can't be smoothed over...
...Numerous organizing drives and strikes have started up on California farms, but these have rarely made any real headway...
...But since the strike, farm workers cannot be ignored politically for very much longer—they are becoming increasingly well-organized, ready for action, and have gained wide liberal and labor support...
...In 1962, he resigned from CSO and came to Delano, where he started NFWA as an independent union...
...On September 8 Filipino workers staged a sit-in at the grower-owned camps...
...sub Sequent bills extending this to agricultural workers have been strangled...
...There is a shady middle-class residential area on the east side with pleasant old homes...
...There was one other event which fed resentment in the town...
...Memberships were built up and sometimes slight wage increases achieved...
...But bad feeling remained, no doubt placing the federal government in the "outside agitator" category...
...but no meaningful contracts with growers followed...
...Explaining the new concept to the press, Conway singled out NFWA as the model for what he has in mind...
...With the cards thus stacked against them, workers in the Delano grape fields, led by the AFL-CIO's Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the locally-based National Farm Workers Association, went out on strike in the fall of 1965...
...Apparently Kircher had conferred official AFL-CIO status upon the whole lot for the benefit of the press...
...Senator Harrison Williams of New Jersey, who, with Bobby Kennedy and George Murphy, held a Senate hearing in Delano, has initiated new legislation to extend bargaining rights to farm workers, and Congressman Phil Burton from San Francisco has done the same in the House...
...These achievements have considerably brightened the outlook for unionizing farm labor in America...
...Apparently the latter possibility did not bother Di Giorgio...
...And Paul Schrade and other labor officials in Los Angeles have helped create the Watts Labor Action Council, a neighborhood union staffed by AFL-CIO rank-and-file who live in the area, to recruit Negroes for jobs, set up training and recreation programs, and press for better general living conditions...
...And in recent months, there have been farm strikes in Texas and marches in Wisconsin, stirrings in Oregon and Arizona, Florida and Colorado...
...Some of the resident workers live in town where the organizer can get to them, and they can pass on the message during work to those who live in the camps...
...IV The grape strike entered a new phase early last summer, when big labor came to Delano in full battle dress, not only to fight the growers but to engage in civil war...
...NFWA held a meeting on September 16 and voted to join the strike...
...According to NFWA, however, these particular "organizers" were almost entirely students, along with a few activist ministers and NFWA strikers that Chavez had sent out...
...Its business district spans three or four streets about half a dozen blocks long...
...In order to get anything remotely approximating steady work, they usually have to move from crop to crop, often traveling a circuit through several states (there exists, however, an important exception to this in Delano, which will become clear later...
...In its seven years AWOC had called strike after strike without winning any contracts...
...To turn over the coin—with farm workers in its fold, the Teamsters would have substantial control over agricultural labor operations at almost every point from the fields to the marketplace...
...Perhaps the threat that students posed was ultimately the lesser...
...One can imagine the feedback in Delano when the Schenley New York office found the New Left and the churches organizing against it...
...What most profoundly shook the town were the student radicals and clergymen who took part in the struggle...
...V1 The farm workers' future also depends heavily on whether the strike will have political consequences that might significantly affect farm labor legislation...
...On the one hand, the furious Delano growers and townspeople, as well as farmers elsewhere in the state, anxiously watching the stirrings around them, have been demanding that their elected guardians of law and order quell Chavez and his friends...
...There were some immediate practical reasons for this move: Staying separate would mean a split in the Mexican and Filipino Di Giorgio vote...
...The ILWU members on the San Francisco docks refused to load Delano grapes for shipping...
...The Teamsters in Delano were promoting their "business unionism" formula, which emphasizes preserving harmonious labor-management relations by using the most tranquil routes to collective bargaining...
...Perhaps the chief reason has to do with the ingenious manner in which NFWA, led by Cesar Chavez, drew on the heritage of moral response created by the civil rights movement, in order to dramatize the farm worker's plea for better wages and working conditions...
...A group of local merchants, businessmen, housewives, and pensioners formed an organization called Citizens for Facts, whose avowed aim is to distribute impartial information about the strike but whose practice has more often been to attack NFWA and its outside help in the vocabulary of witch-hunting paranoia...
...And they formed the corps that NFWA used to implement national boycotts of Schenley and Di Giorgio products...
...There is no question that Brown's lack of interest in the Easter march did him political damage...
...If they are to flourish, grapevines require careful attention, involving several different operations, during ten or eleven months of the year...
...But threatened pocketbooks probably did not count for as much in the town's reaction as threatened class and social values...
...Thus with NFWA's entrance, the strike almost at once became a grass-roots movement...
...The weapon that NFWA mobilized against the growers was not merely economic power but also moral power...
...It is difficult to say whether political shifts in the state, following in the wake of the strike, will aid the farm labor cause very much in the near future...
...Chavez asked the OEO to hold the money in abeyance...
...Battle lines were drawn between the AFLCIO and the Teamsters, and the issues raised in that confrontation will have a far-reaching effect on future farm labor organizing in America...
...Subsequently, various labor, religious, and Mexican-American organizations— including California's powerful Mexican-American Political Association—pushed Governor Brown (who up to this point had kept himself entirely aloof from the events at Delano) into doing something about the bizarre, one-sided election...
...NFWA carried its cause into state politics with a three-week march from Delano to Sacra mento which ended on Easter Sunday at the State Capitol building amid a throng of 10,000 enthusiastic supporters...
...For one thing, the townspeople by and large have always echoed the growers' anti-union sentiments...
...Even as they continue fighting grass-roots skirmishes, the fledgling farm labor unions must look to the lawmakers to help them win the war...
...Teamster organizers, attempting to unhorse both NFWA and AWOC, appeared on the Di Giorgio grounds and started their own organizing drive, although they drew back after a few days upon being denounced, remarkably enough, by NFWA's church support...
...With the new election a few weeks away, the Teamsters opened a full-scale campaign at the Di Giorgio farm...
...Brown capped his inaction by being notably absent from Sacramento when the marching farm workers arrived on Easter Sunday...
...It centers around the notion that organizing for bargaining power can be extended from the job site out into the community at large, so that not only wages and working conditions are at stake but education, housing, poverty, and unemployment as well...
...In normal times, the tempo of life in Delano is slow, though it fluctuates with the seasonal cycle of the grape crop...
...Grower by grower, crop by crop, wherever Chavez and the AFL-CIO goes, Teamster organizers will follow, and vice versa...
...These quarrels have considerably shaken the California denominations...
...William Kircher, head of AFL-CIO organizing, and IUD's executive director Jack Conway worked to build a bridge between AFL-CIO policy and the NFWA approach...
...They helped farm workers man roving picket lines that tried to pull out scabs by shouting to them from the county roads running through the grape fields...
...Needless to say, the Teamsters won...
...One explanation is that the huge union has a vulnerable flank to protect...
...With respect to the social structure it creates, this sector of American agriculture resembles a feudal system in which the laborer who tends the crop plays the role of a nomadic serf...
...Growers and Delano townspeople figured this money would be used to fund the strike...
...In protest, NFWA and AWOC called for a boycott of the polls and refused to permit their names on the ballot...
...signed a contract that guarantees Schenley's field labor a minimum wage of $1.75 per hour and substitutes an NFWA hiring hall for the customary practice of employing directly or through labor contractors...
...And no doubt some AFL-CIO veteran organizers who came in to help with the campaign felt uneasy working alongside the youthful, idealistic radicals...
...No matter who had won, a representation election held on the farms of a major agricultural producer was in itself a historic event...
...But seeing out-of-town ministers of their own faiths engaging in "revolutionary activities" on picket lines hit the citizens where it hurts...
...These forces responded instantly—a steady procession of civil rights workers, college students, ministers and priests, and progressive union people began to file through Delano...
...The two questions are closely related...
...In response to the Teamster threat, it was decided that NFWA and AWOC would become a single AFL-CIO organization...
...Under the direction of Ann Draper of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the San Francisco Labor Council sent monthly motorcades, bearing food and clothing...
...Chavez was ap pointed director...
...Though Teamster support was uneven in the Valley, it was fairly strong at first in Northern and Southern California...
...most liberal and labor elements in the state were represented that Sunday, arrayed in a show of strong sympathy with the farm workers...
...Thirty years ago, Congress excluded farm labor from the legislation that enabled industrial workers to engage in collective bargaining...
...The strike took on a tone of moral urgency, such as one associates with a freedom drive in Mississippi or Alabama...
...Constant agitation by AWOC and other groups, such the Berkeley-based Citizens for Farm Labor, had finally killed the bracero program...
...Under Chavez's guidance, however, the grape strike became more like a movement for social justice, a cause for national liberal and radical sentiment to rally around...
...On occasion, they sought support in what would seem forbidden territory to a labor union: William Grami, coordinator for the Teamster Drive, gave an address before the Citizens for Facts, in which he attacked NFWA in terms not unlike those of his audience...
...The local State Senator, Walter Stern, also mostly kept to himself...
...Marvelously inspiring as the Delano struggle has been, both for the farm workers themselves and the students, ministers, and trade unionists who helped them, anyone who reflects upon the recent events in California must conclude that, for the American dispossessed, political and economic action have to go together...
...V The arrival of big labor in Delano raises questions about the sort of unions farm workers can now hope to get...
...flag was being flown below NFWA's own flag, as though this somehow indicated what the strikers' real intentions were...
...Toward the end of spring, a change in Teamster policy quickly eliminated any further possibility that Chavez's organization might remain outside the national labor movement...
...and on Haughton's recommendations, the August 30 election was established...
...I1 Why did the grape strikers succeed in pushing their demands farther than farm workers have been able to do in the past...
...Social unionism, as formulated by Walter Reuther and the IUD's Jack Conway, takes its cue in part from the new political mood generated by Alinsky, Martin Luther King Jr., and other community action leaders...
...Frequently their only homes are in the field camps, where they can't be reached easily by labor organizers who are supremely persona non grata on grower property...
...Despite these circumstances, it seems certain that the strikers would not have had much success in a traditional labor-management economic tug-of-war with growers like Schenley and Di Giorgio...
...And now that the AFL-CIO has absorbed Chavez and the NFWA, what impact will the centralized labor giant and the tiny democratic and activist farm workers' organization have on one another...
...NFWA was uniquely equipped to come up with a new approach to these problems...
...In future struggles for votes and contracts, perhaps the chief advantage that the AFL-CIO has over the Teamsters is the grass-roots and moral-cause appeal of Chavez's group and its loose coalition of outside support...
...About the time the strike began, the Office of Economic Opportunities awarded NFWA a grant of more than $250,000 to train indigenous farm workers in rural leadership...
...The grape strike set the stage for the first real meeting between big labor and the student movement, two groups who have not felt much trust and warmth for one another in recent years...
...the same tactics probably would not have broken the numerous independent growers, though they will eventually have to fall in line now that the two local giants have capitulated...
...In mid-December Walter Reuther who, like Bobby Kennedy in the Democratic party, is always sensitive to a potential political base to the left of the chief, appeared in Delano to address the strikers and join Chavez and Itliong in a march through town...
...CSO had close connections, financially and philosophically, with Saul Alinsky, and Chavez gained experience in grass-roots organization techniques...
...but although the AFL-CIO continued to provide AWOC with enough funds to stay alive, unionizing farm labor had not been one of its overwhelming enthusiasms...
...If, for example, a militant farm workers' union like NFWA were to gain sufficient statewide influence in agriculture, it could call harvest strikes that might suspend work for some 150,000 Teamster food-processing workers in California canneries and packing sheds, as well as for large numbers of truck drivers...
...Up till now, the state Democratic party has managed to keep the growers' friendship by not actively worrying—to put it mildly—about the plight of farm workers...
...NFWA director Cesar Chavez, who had been a migrant laborer in his youth, had left the fields to spend ten years with the Community Service Organization, a group that deals mainly with the problems of California's urban Mexican-American population...
...Farm workers, even locally organized ones, could not gain sufficient leverage against the growers' wealth, their alliances with local and state authorities, the ease with which they could bring in scab labor...
...By this time it was common knowledge that the Teamsters were on friendly terms with Di Giorgio—the company published an open letter to its employees urging them to elect the Teamsters on August 30...
...The town could release its rage by calling them Communists and beatniks...
...And the merger would enable Chavez to draw freely on AFL-CIO resources and prestige...
...For one thing, the outcome of the Brown-Reagan contest is too uncertain for too many reasons...
...Some AFL-CIO high-level circles began to realize at an early date that what was happening in Delano was not the usual agricultural strike...
...From a strictly utilitarian angle, it is questionable whether this attitude makes sense—an argument as reasonable as any other is that the wider buying power and more stable, responsible work force created by union wage increases and hiring practices would be good for the town's economy...
...he may never see it now...
...The Delano Record took a fervent stand against NFWA...
...the rest went back to their cities and campuses to spread the word, organize fund-raising drives, stir up support in trade union locals...
...Kircher and Conway wanted Itliong's group to join the march to Sacramento, but California AWOC head Al Green refused to work with elements outside established labor, and he dissuaded the Filipinos from marching...
...The strike began at the outset of the 1965 harvest season, when AWOC's local membership, consisting predominantly of Filipino field workers, refused to pick grapes unless their $1.10 or $1.20 per hour wages were raised to $1.40...
...As a result bitter disputes about the clergy's role in society have broken out between Delano churches, which are strongly opposed to the strike, other San Joaquin Valley churches which have taken various positions, and parishes and archdioceses outside the region which have been some of NFWA's best support...
...This relatively permanent labor force can form a solid core...
...Just outside town begin the miles of vineyards upon which the community's economy stands or totters...
...During the Di Giorgio clash the AFL-CIO pitted its newest organizing concept, called "social unionism," against Teamster business unionism...
...But on the whole, relations between the student volunteers and the labor officials were remarkable for their harmony, achieved under the duress and excitement of at least a temporary common cause...
...It is significant that the AFL-CIO officials who became most involved in the Delano events were social unionism's leading advocates...
...Despite their conservative social values, many California agricultural communities like Delano are by no means political throwbacks to rugged frontier individualism—that strange yearning seems to well up most strongly in California's suburbs...
...Paul Schrade, NAW Western regional director, became a strong NFWA supporter and a key liaison between Chavez and top AFL-CIO echelons...
...However, this sort of alienated liberal sentiment will not show up to any significant degree in the November race with Reagan...
...In three years' time, NFWA had become a militant organization of Mexican-American farm workers, operating along highly democratic, communal lines and supporting a number of self-help projects...
...Another suggestion of a shift toward the experimental within AFLCIO ranks was brought out when the Di Giorgio election drive was at its peak...
...Some stayed on as full-time NFWA staff workers...
...What brought the Teamsters into the fray...
...William Kircher was quoted in the Fresno Bee just before the election to the effect that AFL-CIO organizers were strung out from Oregon to the Mexican border trying to locate eligible voters who had moved on to other crops...
...How much difference is there ultimately between what the AFL-CIO and what the Teamsters' Union has to offer...
...At an AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in Chicago a week before the election, the merger received official blessings and a new name, United Farm Workers Organizing Committee...
...Perhaps there is more hope in the long run for action from Washington...
...When Chavez joined the AFL-CIO, no doubt some students who had been with the NFWA movement from its beginnings felt that they had been sold out...
...There are signs, however, that the AFL-CIO may go farther in this direction than one might have expected...
...While there is little overt tone of white supremacy in Delano, the Mexican and Filipino laborers are treated with a genteel paternalism that keeps most of them firmly in place as second-class citizens...
...John Williamson, the State Assemblyman from the district that includes Delano (and who also happens to be chairman of the Assembly's Committee on Agriculture), kept silent—which alienated almost everybody...
...This had cut off one of the farmers' main sources for keeping wages depressed and breaking strikes...
...Lying off Highway 99, the main artery through the San Joaquin Valley, it is a thoroughly unimpressive-looking place, with some 13,500 inhabitants...
...Thus far, social unionism is mostly ideology, although a few pilot projects have been set in motion: In Chicago, UAW organizers funded by the IUD have hooked up with the tenants' unions started by King to work out a new basis for dealing with slumlords...
...It is difficult to say just what brought Schenley to the bargaining table and Di Giorgio to the polls...
...Most field workers come from non-Caucasian minorities and thus have little chance of gaining entry into the farming community's white middle class or, for that matter, of being hired for industrial jobs in the cities...
...What accounts for this violent antagonism toward the strike...
...Even though migrant workers pour into Delano during the harvest, when jobs and wages are at a peak, there is also a semi-skilled residential population that works all year long...
...Since the strike began, NFWA has been able to supply the strikers with an incredible amount of welfare and morale support, including a credit union, a weekly newspaper, a three-meal-aday strike kitchen, an indigenous theater group, and a medical clinic staffed by volunteer doctors, nurses, and dentists...
...Although the Delano grape growers do not generally use braceros to harvest the crop, the new stricter law had created an atmosphere more conducive to demands for higher farm-labor wages...
...As the strike swung into high gear last fall and winter, the politicians assumed their customary position—they saw fit to take a walk...
...In one issue, the caption to a photograph of Chavez addressing a rally in San Francisco asked readers to notice that the U.S...
...Only at the federal and state levels can moral conscience pressuring for social change become translated into the kind of political power which can offset those economic and class interests that want to preserve the status quo...
Vol. 13 • November 1966 • No. 6
