THE FARM WORKERS FIGHT IT OUT
Mills, Nicolaus
The Teamster actions are disgraceful. They are clearly union-busting. They are engaged in a concerted campaign to wipe out the United Farm Workers. —GEORGE MEANY Ever since 1968, Cesar...
...The only neutral poll this year—a survey of 1,000 field workers conducted by a delegation of ministers and congressmen—produced the following results: 795 votes for the Farm Workers, 80 for the Teamsters, and 78 for no union at all...
...We'll break them...
...They are clearly union-busting...
...Five years, ten years...
...Under the contractor system the grower hires a contractor, who in turn supplies a crew of workers to do whatever is required...
...They are engaged in a concerted campaign to wipe out the United Farm Workers...
...Don't ask me how long it will take...
...q 398 IN THE WORLD OF LABOR...
...In one nine-day period—during which a local judge ruled that strikers had to be 100 feet apart and could only use a bull horn one hour out of each day-2,700 protesting Farm Workers were arrested...
...Although the current clash between the two unions is their most serious, it is not the first...
...Most Teamster strategy has been designed to offset what Frank Fitzsimmons, in a speech before the American Farm Bureau, called the "revolutionary" goals of the United Farm Workers...
...Although they have denied that theirs is a "sweetheart" relationship to the growers, Teamster contracts in lettuce and grapes reflect anything but the hard bargaining Jimmy Hoffa was noted for...
...The contracts the Teamsters have been signing bear out the Court's observation...
...The Teamsters' violation of those jurisdictional agreements has not been spurred by newfound support among California's migrant workers...
...Although the difference between the hourly wages of the Farm Workers and the Teamsters is often slight (in the Coachella Valley, Farm Worker contracts were $2.40 an hour and Teamster contracts $2.30), the Teamster contracts have been notably insensitive to the protections farm workers need...
...Since that time the Teamsters have lost every free election they have had with the Farm Workers, and in addition lettuce pickers they claimed to represent have gone on strike in protest against Teamster contracts...
...The Farm Workers promised to stay out of such Teamster strongholds as the West Coast cannery industry...
...Missing from the Teamster contracts, for example, are strong grievance procedures and safeguards against pesticides that have become standard in Farm Worker agreements...
...GEORGE MEANY Ever since 1968, Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers have had two principal opponents: the growers who control California's $5 billionperyear agricultural industry and the Nixon administration, which, through Department of Defense purchases of nonunion grapes and lettuce and National Labor Relations Board attacks on the Farm Workers' right to boycott, has sought to cripple the union...
...Even the Farm Workers don't deny the damage the Teamsters have caused...
...In 1966, when the Farm Workers were just beginning, the Teamsters sought to oust them from the DiGiorgio Ranch, and in an election supervised by the American Arbitration Association, the Teamsters went down to a stunning 530 to 331 defeat...
...He is at the mercy of the contractor for his job...
...The strike is not going to be lost even though we may not win it now," Cesar Chavez noted recently...
...For the worker, the system is one that subjects him to easy abuse...
...The Farm Workers now have a $1.6 million strike fund supplied by the AFL-CIO, and in the major cities across the country their boycott machinery is hard at work...
...The Teamsters in turn promised to abandon organizing field workers...
...The Court stated, From a practical point of view, an employer's grant of exclusive bargaining status to a nonrepresentative union must be considered the ultimate form of favoritism, completely substituting the employer's choice of union for his employees' desires...
...The first is the Union's tangible assets...
...THE FARM WORKERS' BELIEF that the Teamsters' victories can be offset are based on two sets of factors...
...We're very patient...
...The Teamsters and the growers had merely acted in collusion to block the Farm Workers' organizing efforts...
...As in the past, the Teamsters and the growers are relying on the chaos of the California labor situation to produce enough workers to break picket lines...
...The negative bias of the Teamsters has been duly noted by the California Supreme Court, which, in a decision handed down at the end of 1972, ruled that Farm Workers could not be restrained from picketing growers who had signed with the Teamsters because legally there was no jurisdictional dispute involved...
...Striking Farm Workers have been subjected to bloody attacks by the Teamsters as well as a series of severe restrictions by local judges...
...Most of all, however, the Farm Worker's confidence in themselves rests on the knowledge that they are a movement, even more than a union, especially for the Chicano workers who harvest most of California's agriculture...
...When asked by a reporter if farm workers should be allowed to choose their union, Teamster President Frank Fitzsimmons replied, "Why should we have an election if we already have the contracts...
...What we accomplished in eight years of organizing is all being wiped out with one stroke of the pen," Cesar Chavez said recently...
...Most significant of all, the Teamsters have brought back the contractor system to replace the hiring-hall procedures the Farm Workers introduced to assure that jobs would be awarded on the basis of seniority...
...The advantage to the grower is that he has a labor supply that can be controlled with very little effort on his part...
...In New York, for example, 300 pickets answered a 5:00 AM call to protest the arrival of nonunion grapes at the Hunts Point Terminal...
...In addition, the Farm Workers expect that grandjury indictments will soon be handed down to the Teamsters for accepting payments from growers in violation of the Taft-Hartley law forbidding such transactions between an employer and a union...
...This year, with the expiration of contracts signed in 1970 at the conclusion of the grape boycott, the Farm Workers acquired a third major opponent: the world's largest and richest union, the 2.2 million-member International IN THE WORLD OF LABOR Brotherhood of Teamsters...
...The Teamsters are not, however, about to chance the kind of defeat that scuttled their 1966 organizing at DiGiorgio...
...Over the past year the Teamsters took more than 50 contracts from the 60,000-men Farm Workers, and in the coming months that figure is expected to rise...
...As a result, in 1967 and again in 1970, the two unions signed jurisdictional agreements...
...and he may be charged for anything from drinking water, to transportation, to a hiring fee...
Vol. 20 • September 1973 • No. 4
