Socialist Action /September 2002
UFW Marches Again - but Toward What
Goal?
By JEFF MACKLER
 Retracing the route of the march on Sacramento
led by United Farmworkers of America (UFW) President Cesar Chavez in 1966,
farmworkers and their supporters marched across California on Aug. 15 in
a 10-day, 175-mile march to pressure Gov. Gray Davis to sign a bill mandating
binding arbitration on stalled contract talks.
UFW leaders wanted Davis to sign Senate Bill 1736, authored by the California
Senate's president pro tem, Democrat John Burton of San Francisco. The governor,
however, refused to sign the bill.
As we go to press, the state assembly and representatives of the governor's
office are instead considering a new bill, touted as a "compromise"
between the demands of the farmworkers and those of agribusiness. The new
bill would establish a complex and lengthy mediation process to supposedly
resolve stalled negotiations.
California agribusiness interests have contributed over $1.5 million
to Davis' re-election campaign but the growers insist that they were not
trying to buy the governor's veto of the original bill.
Indeed, they speak the truth. Agribusiness, along with aerospace-military
production, is king in California, a state that would rank sixth in the
world in Gross Domestic Product if it were placed in the category of a country.
California's multi-billionaire growers, with offices on Wall Street and
the world over, own the state legislature and virtually every politician.
They have no need to buy a governor they already own.
But form is still important in the world of propaganda dominated by the
rich. "I'm asking the governor to veto the bill based on the facts,"
said Manuel Cunha, a Fresno grower who heads the Nisei Farmers League, which
gave Davis $1000 in August. Cunha and his ilk argue that stalled contract
negotiations are as much the UFW's fault as the growers'.
UFW President Arturo Rodriguez responded that UFW members on more than
240 California ranches have voted for UFW representation but have no contract
years after winning a state-organized election.
Boycott movement gathered mass support
The first farm labor bill in the state's history, the Agricultural Labor
Relations Act (ALRA), was signed in 1975 by Gov. Jerry Brown, the first
Democrat to run for office with the label, "fiscal conservative."
Brown, a "liberal" on many social issues, was among the first
of the nation's Democratic Party capitalist politicians, in the context
of the Nixon wage freeze then in effect, to launch the drive to make American
corporations more competitive on world markets.
At that time, and for the first time since the end of World War II, U.S.
capitalism began lagging behind its major European and Japanese competitors,
who had rebuilt their war-destroyed industrial infrastructure on a technological
base far in advance of the less productive and older factories in the United
States. To make U.S. capitalism more competitive, American workers were
slated for massive wage cuts, cutbacks in social services, and increased
taxation.
Brown took the assignment with gusto while at the same time, in tune
with his "liberal" credentials," courting and funding the
central leaders of the Black Panther Party as he helped negotiate the release
of imprisoned Panther leader Huey Newton in return for Panther support to
the Democratic Party in Oakland.
At the time of Brown's signing of the 1975 bill the Cesar Chavez-led
UFW was at the height of its popularity among the state's farmworkers, Latino
communities, and the youth in general-who were radicalizing under the impact
of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.
Chavez's decade-long head lettuce and grape boycotts, as well as the
boycott of the powerful Gallo wine corporation, were taken up by UFW supporters
in virtually every state in the nation. Mass support to La Causa, [the UFW
cause] as it was popularly known, forced key supermarket chains to refrain
from carrying boycotted products.
But the UFW's resort to the boycott was an indication of weakness, not
strength. A powerful array of forces lined up against the union, making
progress difficult and often impossible. Not only did the union face the
full power of the state's agricultural barons and their hired thugs backed
by state and local police, but the labor bureaucracy was either hostile
or indifferent to the farmworkers' plight.
The Teamsters, in particular, led by a host of corrupt national and state
officials, distinguished themselves as treacherous enemies of the UFW, going
so far as to sign sweetheart (pro-company and fake) contracts with growers
that lined the pockets of Teamster tops while blocking UFW organizing efforts.
The AFL-CIO officialdom was not much better, paying lip-service to UFW
efforts while withholding real support from the beleaguered farmworkers.
The farmworkers' virtually token picket lines in rural areas were largely
incapable of preventing the growers, aided by goons and police, from herding
non-union workers, often immigrants, through UFW picket lines.
The early UFW policy of rejecting membership to "illegal" immigrants
added to the union's difficulties. Under pressure from the ranks, the UFW
eventually reversed this reactionary policy.
Chavez himself, albeit with far fewer forces at his disposal, was far
from the kind of union militant that in previous generations had brought
powerful corporations to their knees. He favored Gandhi-style non-violent
civil disobedience tactics, personal fasts that sometimes brought him close
to death, boycotts-and especially, alliances with state and national Democratic
Party officials-rather than the organization of mass forces in struck fields
to prevent the breaking of UFW strikes.
Chavez, whose personal courage and moral authority were a product of
pacifist and religious conviction rather than class-struggle politics, was
a frequent guest at Democratic Party gatherings. Democrats seeking office
often found it "political" to visit UFW offices in Delano for
Chavez photo opportunities.
In spite of all the UFW weaknesses, the union organized more than 100,000
farmworkers into its ranks and established itself as a moral force in the
growing Latino communities and in society more generally. Chavez's UFW struggle
to a significant degree paralleled the civil rights movement led by Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Farm legislation contained loopholes
In 1975, the decades-long boycotts that had forced a few of the big growers
and a number of smaller operations to reluctantly sign UFW contracts compelled
the Democratic Party to seek other means to stifle the organization of farmworkers.
The 1975 legislation, for the first time in the state's history, legalized
farm labor collective bargaining. But it contained fundamental flaws that
favored the bosses, especially those allowing state officials to utilize
one pretext or another to postpone an election once the UFW had signed up
a majority of the workers to require one.
And even after the UFW won an election, the employers, confident they
could defeat a UFW strike, stalled negotiations for years while the Agricultural
Labor Relations Board (ALRB) established by the ALRA, looked on with indifference.
The loopholes in the law combined with the UFW's incapacity to effectively
challenge the bosses' power in the fields. The result was the virtual decimation
of the union. Of the 428 elections won by the UFW since 1975 only 185, or
43 percent, resulted in contracts. Most of these have long been lost.
Today, membership has dwindled to some 27,000. The bosses became expert
in turning UFW victories into defeats. ALRB delays in holding elections
allowed the bosses to fire and otherwise persecute UFW members while hiring
non-union workers beholden to the bosses to replace them and vote against
the union if and when an election was held.
One ruse after another was employed to the UFW's disadvantage-from the
state legislature's failure to fund the ALRB, to providing insufficient
staff to hold elections, to the ALRB recognizing employer-funded and organized
company unions to challenge the UFW for bargaining rights.
Since 1975 the ALRB has assessed 58 growers a total of $34 million for
bad-faith bargaining. But only $4.4 million has been paid to workers. Years
of employer stalling made it impossible to find most of the long gone aggrieved
workers while the growers took advantage of the delays to go out of business
and/or reopen under new names. The net effect was to save the growers billions
of dollars in wages and benefits they would have had to pay out had the
law been implemented.
The August 2002 UFW march to the state capitol to ask Gov. Davis to sign
a bill to compel growers to accept binding arbitration of contract disputes
(in the event that mediation fails) is a sure sign that the union today
sees no other way to force growers to agree to the most basic of farmworker
demands. Citing concerns about potential harm to "business interests,"
Davis's aides have all but affirmed that the governor is likely to exercise
his veto.
It is an old trade-union maxim that you can't win in arbitration what
you can't win on the picket line. For the severely weakened UFW, and in
the context of a general labor misleadership with no social vision other
than to make capitalism more profitable for the boss class, the UFW is compelled
to seek solace in the decisions of state-appointed arbitrators whose employment
is contingent on their adherence to ruling-class politicians.
The UFW leadership believes it has no alternative but to accept contracts
imposed by the bosses' agents as opposed to no contract at all. California's
farmworkers earn on average less than $10,000 per year. This is the figure
for full-time workers only.
The tens of thousands of part-time workers are even more subject to the
whims of the corporate rich who dominate agribusiness today and who view
farm labor as akin to slave labor as they maintain inhuman working conditions,
expose farmworkers to deadly pesticides, and utilize the INS to deport workers
before they are paid.
We are witness to a tragedy of massive proportions as the dignity and
struggle of California's poorest of the poor is degraded while the potentially
powerful California Labor Federation, with its 1.8 million members, stands
by in pitiful helplessness.
On Labor Day, union officials greeted Gray Davis with orchestrated chants
of "four more years!" Simultaneously, they begged the governor
to sign a bill that few unions would even consider-and then pressed for
another bill that is equally repugnant.
Socialist Action /September 2002 |