Keeping Them Down on the Farm

...The action, based on a complaint by the grower-sponsored Free Marketing Council, charged that the UFW had workers under contract in commercial packing sheds, and that these "industrial" members made the union subject to NLRA restrictions...

...The UFW also reached an agreement with the NLRB that should a similar case arise again, the union would be given a chance to divest itself of nonagricultural workers before the government began legal action...

...Citing First Amendment and equal protection violations, the UFW is now challenging the constitutionality of these measures in the courts, where the case is expected to be tied up for several years...

...An angry Cesar Chavez declared: "This position is so unfair that it is hard to imagine how reasonable men could take such a course...

...Union recognition, too, is much harder to obtain: The grower must furnish the state's Agricultural Labor Relations Board with the list of workers eligible to vote on his farm, and the time-consuming election procedures required make it difficult for any but permanent employes to vote...

...As Chavez put it, "Either we defeat Proposition 22 or we don't have a union...

...And they fear that after having been left out of the NLRA in 1935 when it could only benefit them, they will be placed under its most restrictive provisions at the very time when this would severely hinder them...

...Neither the UFW's newness (union contracts cover barely 5 per cent of the nation's agricultural workers) nor the earnings of migrant laborers (still under $2,000 per year) seem likely to influence its opponents...

...What was different here, though, was the severity of Nash's suit: At issue was a mere handful of workers —approximately 0.1 per cent of the union's membership—yet the injunction, if granted, would have had the practical effect of halting UFW activities for a year or more while the full NLRB decided the case...

...Totally ignored is the fact that very little has changed for most migrant workers since Edward R. Murrow observed in his Harvest of Shame documentary a decade ago, "We used to own our slaves . . . now we just rent them...

...In support of the Administration position...

...Farm-labor activities are restricted far more by the new Arizona law than they would be under the NLRA...

...Indeed, the President has never hidden his opposition to Chavez's union and its tactics...

...While the various farm-labor bills remain bottled up in committee, the Nixon Administration has been seeking other avenues to curb the UFW's effectiveness...

...Among other things, H.R...

...But the Republican party has apparently decided to make a direct political attack on the farm workers' movement...

...and local boycott staffs began putting pressure on individual Republican politicians, promising that if their protests went unheard, they would send 25,000 farm workers to demonstrate at the Republican National Convention...

...This body would consist of three members appointed for five-year terms by the President, plus a general counsel, installed for a four-year term and invested with the power to investigate all complaints of unfair farm-labor practices...

...In addition to organizing door-to-door canvassing throughout the state against the measure, he plans to bring thousands of farm workers into California's urban centers after the harvest season ends this month to register Chicano, black and low-income voters...

...The Administration's most serious threat to the UFW came last March when Peter Nash, the newly appointed general counsel of the NLRB, petitioned the District Court of Fresno, California, for an injunction against the union's boycott of nine Napa Valley wineries...

...Meanwhile, the nationwide lettuce boycott has become an issue in the Presidential campaign—highlighted by Senator Kennedy addressing the Democratic Convention as "fellow lettuce-boycotters," and by "Elephants Eat Lettuce" buttons on the lapels of Republican delegates in Miami...

...Its estimated annual budget would be $3.6 million...

...Of the seven farm-labor bills currently before the House Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, four propose bringing agricultural workers under the authority of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB...

...In New York, church and labor forces blocked an even harsher proposal that would have outlawed all agricultural strikes, submitting them to binding arbitration...

...His sentiments were later echoed by Secretary of Agriculture Earl L. Butz, who declared on Meet the Press, "The use of the secondary boycott by Cesar Chavez is, in my opinion, not a justified tactic for the organization of workers...

...A lavishly funded media campaign to promote the initiative, designated Proposition 22, has been proclaiming that its purpose is to "lower food prices" and "protect the farm worker's right to choose his union...

...Even year-around employes could hardly strike unless they were prepared for a marathon battle...

...If passed, the initiative would prevent all but a handful of permanent employes on a farm from voting in union elections, in effect rendering the UFW powerless...

...To maintain something approximating that kind of parity, the UFW is determined to defend its present independence from the NLRA...

...It has enabled them to succeed despite their powerless-ness to prevent growers from bringing in scab labor to harvest crops during a strike...

...In fact, the UFW has been especially careful to stay away from commercial sheds, where the employer's main business is usually packing other growers' products rather than his own as in an agricultural shed...

...13981 would require farm workers to give their employer a 20-day notice of intent to strike and, at any time within the year after that expired, allow him to invoke an additional 40-day mediation period when work stoppage would be forbidden...

...The right to ask consumers to boycott not only a struck product but all stores carrying it was an important weapon in the industrial unions' arsenal until it was outlawed by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Amendments to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA...

...In Oregon, where the UFW threatened a nationwide boycott of the state's farm produce, Governor Tom McCall vetoed as unconsitiutional a resolution banning picketing for union recognition and limiting a worker's right to bargain with his employer over pesticide use...

...At the same time, the state is seeking a court order to remove the issue from the ballot, charging forgery and "massive fraud" in the collection of petition signatures...

...Moreover, the Pentagon buys heavily from nonunion farms even when their prices are higher than the market average...

...Children working in agriculture are excluded from child labor and school attendance laws...

...The only resolution to permit secondary boycotts is that authored by the subcommittee's chairman, James O'Hara (D.-Mich...

...A week before he was to appear in court, Nash withdrew his petition, and the matter was settled without any legal acknowledgment of fault by the union...

...Last year, for example, the Defense Personnel Subsistence Center in Los Angeles ordered 49,000 pounds of lettuce from Bud Antle, Inc.—an agribusiness giant in which Dow Chemical has heavy investments —at $5.54 a crate, although the highest quality wrapped lettuce was going at $3.50 a crate...

...Besides confronting Depression-era practices like blacklisting by growers, wages as low as $1.20 per hour, and the charging of field hands for water, it has had to fight for the basic legal protections long ago accorded industrial employes...

...During the 1968 campaign, candidate Nixon posed for pictures eating California grapes, then labeled the boycott "illegal," insisting that it should be put down with the same firmness as "any other form of lawbreaking...

...who would also Nicolaus Mills, a previous contributor to these pages, has written widely on farm-labor problems...

...Chavez urged his supporters to begin a massive letter-writing campaign to GOP National Chairman Robert Dole...

...The seventh bill, most strongly supported by the growers' American Farm Bureau organization, calls for the establishment of an independent Agricultural Labor Relations Board...

...Now that the UFW holds some 200 contracts covering 30-40 thousand workers, state legislatures and the Federal government are starting to focus their attentions on the legal vacuum in which the union has operated...

...Instead of trying to compensate for past neglect, however, they appear determined to prohibit what at this point is crucial to the effective organization of farm workers—the secondary boycott...

...The Arizona statute, viewed by the American Farm Bureau as a model piece of legislation, was a severe blow to the UFW, which considers the state a key battlefield in its continuing national boycott of nonunion iceberg lettuce...

...The farm-labor bills in Congress, the attitude of the present Administration, and the agricultural legislation pending in several statehouses all appear to be directed at one question: How do you keep them down on the farm after they've got a union...

...One of them would go so far as to eliminate all agricultural strikes by providing for the settlement of disputes through binding arbitration...

...Since the union had previously been forced to divest itself of a group of peanut shelters on similar grounds, the case was not without precedent...

...They are discriminated against in minimum wage coverage . . . and Social Security laws...

...Finally, if a union calls a strike, an agricultural employer may petition for a virtually automatic 10-day injunction...

...Under these conditions, it would be virtually impossible for seasonal employes, who usually work only a few weeks on a single farm, to stage a walkout...

...In recent years agricultural workers, turning their exclusion from the NLRA into a relative advantage, have also found the secondary boycott vital...

...As Harrison Williams, former chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, noted during the grape strike, "Farm workers are specifically excluded from unemployment insurance and collective bargaining laws...

...Thus, if the union announced a strike before the harvest season, he could call up workers for 40 days to get his crops in...

...Commercial sheds are the province of the Packing House Workers, who have been organizing them for several years...

...BATTLE OVER THE BOYCOTT Keeping Them Down on the Farm BY NICOLAUS MILLS Since it began organizing in the early '60s, Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers union (UFW) has been locked in a labor struggle more appropriate to the '30s than the present...

...On the local level, growers' lobbies in at least 10 states have been pushing farm-labor bills that would abolish secondary boycotts and hinder conventional strikes as well...

...In view of the continuing argument over the propriety of the UFW's tactics, it should be pointed out that the farm workers are not demanding indefinite freedom from such Taft-Hartley restrictions as the ban on secondary boycotts...

...The union's ability to strike during harvest and the migrant's ability to make his presence felt during his brief stay on a single farm are thereby considerably abridged...

...Shortly after the bill was signed into law by Governor Jack Williams (who also declared May 28 John Birch Day in Arizona), Chavez went to Phoenix and began a 24-day fast, protesting that "growers through the Farm Bureau are seeking to bring the whole machinery of government against us...

...In California, after a similar bill was stymied by the legislature last year, the growers hired a professional signature-gathering firm, Alan Blanchard and Associates, to get their petition on the November 7 ballot...

...UFW Vice President Dolores Huerta initiated the union's own lobbying efforts in Washington...

...What Chavez is asking for is the opportunity the industrial unions had between the passage of the NLRA in 1935 and Taft-Hartley in 1947: 12 years to organize in a basically favorable legal situation...

...allow a union shop, even where it is now banned by state law...

...Defense Department purchases of grapes and lettuce jumped as much as 350 per cent during some phases of the UFW boycotts...

...But in Arizona, Kansas and Idaho, anti-farm-worker bills have been signed into law...