A Matter of Spirit

...Smith is still on the AFL-CIO payroll, but there are other staff members who have been dropped and the AWOC is trying to raise funds from outside sources and unions in the area...

...To them, all the big cars that whoosh past look alike, and all the people who ride in them are alike...

...At the executive board meeting held in February 1961, Norman Smith had asked for a $500,000 organizing fund but had been given only $250,000...

...For despite their victory over the AFL-CIO leadership, the shadow of the Teamsters can be seen on their land: Jimmy Hoffa is giving serious consideration to moving into the vacuum left by the cessation of the AWOC activity...

...The organizers' efforts, failures and successes were eloquently described in May by Franz Daniel, AFL-CIO assistant director of organization, to a meeting of the Industrial Relations Research Association...

...Sadly, one must conclude that the AFL-CIO has very little spirit left for dealing with problems which are not easily soluble in the old ways...

...So now, up in Stockton, California, the operations of the AWOC have been sharply curtailed...

...But Daniel's call was either unheard or unheeded...

...They dripped with sweat, too, the drops running down their faces and dissolving into the lumpy mass of beans thrown on their plates...

...the crops must be harvested and so the farmworkers stayed bent over in the fields from early morning until late at night, picking...

...The drive might even have ended in February, except for the pressure exerted upon Meany by John Livingston, AFL-CIO organization director, backed up by a few union presidents...

...Unconsciously evoking the past, the farm organizing group was called the AWOC, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, and its dedicated group of organizers literally labored in the vineyards under conditions very reminiscent of an earlier time in labor history...

...Paul Jacobs, whose articles have appeared in many journals, is a regular New Leader contributor...

...Sometimes the groups next to the trucks were all men, instantly identifiable by their straw sombreros, their dark brown weathered skin and the way they squat on their heels while they eat, staring incuriously at the autos racing by them on the highways...

...If they were Americans, old jalopies were parked on the road and the women were out in the fields picking too, while their children played in the ditches...

...Daniel, another CIO warhorse, told of the handicaps to union organization created by the migrant workers' lack of self-confidence, the growers' use of the braceros, the collusion between the police and the fanners...

...But despite all the considerable handicaps, including a very bitter strike in the Imperial Valley, the union had made some "actual accomplishments...

...It must be very hot over in the valleys," said the fashionable people of the peninsula, sleepily looking out their picture windows on Sunday morning and slowly coming alive for a lazy breakfast with the newspapers...

...For a long time to come, in the valleys of California, the trucks and jalopies will still be parked alongside the highways, the men and women will still be in the fields, their wages and working conditions still far below those of industrial workers...

...And as they sit in their favorite restaurants in El Centro and San Francisco, or walk in their dusty but very soft leather boots across the thousands of acres they own, these remnants of the feudal age, California's agri-industrialists, are thinking hard of what hey can do to make sure no union ever tries to organize farmworkers again...

...Then they may understand that organizing these people is, as Franz Daniel said, a matter of "spirit...

...Alongside the roads in the valleys, trucks were certain to be parked even on Sundays during the summer, and hunkered down alongside them, squeezed together in the little shade thrown by the truck bodies, were the farmworkers, come in from the fields for a hasty midday dinner...

...But Meany's anger was the result of his not understanding that the agricultural workers are used by the growers as a highly mobile labor force that is shifted from one part of the state to another by trucks in a matter of hours...

...It was hot in all of them— the Salinas, Sacramento, San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys—the four rich basins that run lengthwise through the state...

...Wage increases of more than $11 million could be traced with some justice to its work, the number of braceros had been cut down and more efficient harvesting methods had been developed...

...Measured in other, less tangible units, the distance is nearly infinite...

...These are the farmworkers, the "stoop labor," whom the AFL-CIO tried for two years to organize in a campaign directed by Norman Smith, a veteran of the CIO wars...

...More important than material things is the need of spirit," said Franz Daniel of what was required to organize farmworkers...

...Low purposes spawn at low levels and cannot be met successfully with an invitation to tea in the upper parlor...

...To do this, the AFL-CIO invested approximately $500,000 in the AWOC...

...Naturally, the California growers, the corporate farmers, are gleeful about the way in which their enemies have been forced, by orders from the top, to retreat from the battleground...

...The bitter resistance of the Western Growers Association surely must have stirred the audience as Daniels read part of its call to anti-union arms: "Proponents of panty-waist public relations, people with revolving cheeks and sensitive souls who shrink from using heat to cure the union blight should file quietly from the hall at this point...

...Sunday was a work day for them, like any other day...

...But in May, no one at Unity House protested Meany's announcement...

...Perhaps only a few of them understand the real significance of the AFL-CIO decision, but for those few there is only bitterness left as they look back at the effort they made to help themselves in the past two years...

...Daniels' description of the AWOC's work ended with his calling upon the American labor movement to use the organization of farmworkers as the AFL-CIO's "opportunity to renew its youth and to reassert its claim to the idealism of man's duty to his brother and to society...

...MIGRANT FARMWORKERS AND THE AFL-CIO A Matter of Spirit By Paul Jacobs San Francisco ALL SUMMER LONG, the Wet fog hung over the Monterey Peninsula of California and the patio furniture dripped with sweat on the lawns of the elegant homes in Carmel and Pebble Beach...

...There was no escape down there from the hot sun that burned in the bright blue sky, from the heat waves that shimmered across the highway, from the hot winds that nauseated...

...It is a very long way, much more than the actual 3,000 miles, from the AFL-CIO's air-conditioned marble palace in Washington to the hot dusty valleys of California...

...They were braceros—Mexican contract laborers brought north under Public Law 78 for the harvesting season...

...Indeed, no one even spoke publicly about it...

...They were right about the valleys...

...The AFL-CIO will make no further attempt to organize the farmworkers...

...Organization work among the farmworkers had been extremely difficult, Daniel reported...

...Six weeks later, at a meeting of the AFL-CIO executive board held in Unity House, the International Ladies Garment Workers' lovely and cool summer resort high in the Pocono Mountains, George Meany announced the ending of the farmworkers organization drive and the dissolution of the AWOC The AFL-CIO President's action was not totally unexpected...

...Meany was angry, for example, that the AWOC moved part of its organizing operation from Stockton, its headquarters in the north, 500 miles south to Imperial Valley where the growers fought back viciously, causing a bitter strike...

...The union had to fight each inch of the way...

...Nevertheless, they were frightened...

...The matter was raised and disposed of within the span of a minute or two...

...Perhaps someday the AFL-CIO leaders will come to California, not merely to attend a convention or a meeting in one of the state's two big cities, but to walk in the hot, dusty valleys and talk with the "stoop labor...

...If not, if the union leaders stay inside the cool comfort of their air-conditioned autos and only look out the windows, the workers in the fields will simply stare back incuriously...