By Dick Meister
(The second part of a daily five part series)For me, it all began on a hot summer night in 1965 in the little Kern County town of Delano. I’d been told repeatedly by people whose judgment I respected that, as the SF Chronicle’s labor editor, I should talk with some guy named Chavez who was pitting together an honest-to-God farm workers’ union in Delano.
I scoffed, but I went. Chavez, shining black hair trailing over the edge of a face brushed with traces of Indian ancestry, wearing a green plaid shirt that had become almost a uniform, sat behind a makeshift desk topped with bright red Formica.
“Si se puede!” he said repeatedly to me as we talked into the early morning hours there in the cluttered shack that served as headquarters for Chavez and the others who were trying to create an effective farm workers union.
“Si se puede – it can be done!
But I would not be swayed. Too many others, over too many years, had tried and failed to win for farm workers the union rights they had to have if they were to escape the severe economic and social deprivation inflicted on them by their grower employers.
The Industrial Workers of the World who stormed across western fields early in the last century, the Communists who followed, the socialists, the AFL and CIO organizers – all their efforts had collapsed under the relentless pressure of growers and their powerful political allies.
I was certain this effort would be no different. I was dead wrong. I had not accounted for the tactical brilliance of Cesar Chavez, a sad-eyed, disarmingly soft-spoken man who talked of militancy in calm, measured tones; a devout Roman Catholic; a gentle and incredibly patient man who hid great strategic talent behind shy smiles and an attitude of utter candor.
Chavez grasped the essential fact that farm workers had to organize themselves. Outside organizers, however well-intentioned, could not do it. Chavez, a farm worker himself, carefully put together a grass-roots organization that enabled the workers to form their own union, the United Farm Workers, which then sought out – and won – widespread support from influential outsiders, including major labor, religious and political figures.
The key weapon of the newly formed UFW was the boycott. The union’s boycotts against grape and lettuce growers and wineries in the late 1960s won the UFW union contracts that had been denied farm workers for more than a century.
That led ultimately to enactment of the California law that requires growers to bargain collectively with workers who vote for unionization, despite the workers exclusion from the federal law that grants most non-farm workers the legal right of collective bargaining. And with that came substantial improvements in the pay, benefits, working conditions and general status of the state’s farm workers.
The struggle was extremely difficult for the impoverished workers, and Chavez risked his health – if not his life – to provide them extreme examples of the sacrifices necessary for victory. Most notably, he engaged in lengthy, highly publicized fasts that helped rally the public to the farm workers cause and that may very well have contributed to his untimely death in 1993 at age 66.
Fasts, boycotts. It’s no coincidence that those were among the principal tools of Mohandas Gandhi, for Chavez drew much of his inspiration from the Indian leader. Like Gandhi and another of his models, Martin Luther King Jr., Chavez believed fervently in the tactics of non-violence. Like them, he showed the world how profoundly effective they can be in seeking justice from even the most powerful of opponents.
What the UFW accomplished, and how the union accomplished it, will never be forgotten – not by the millions of social activists who have been inspired and energized by the farm workers’ struggle, nor by the workers themselves.
The struggle continues, for despite the UFW’s successes, most farm workers are still mired in poverty. But because of the union, they have a genuine hope of bettering their condition.
The UFW won important legal rights for them. But more than union contracts, and more than laws, farm workers now have what Cesar Chavez insisted was needed above all else. That, as he told me so many years ago, “is to have the workers truly believe and understand and know that they are free, that they are free men and women, that they can stand up and say how they feel.”
Freedom. No leader has ever left a greater legacy.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.