Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (48 page)

The growers, expecting sympathy from a Nixon Administration,
were lobbying for new farm labor legislation, and on April
16 Dolores Huerta, Jerry Cohen and Robert McMillen, the
Union’s legislative representative in Washington, appeared
before the Subcommittee on Labor of the Senate Committee on
Labor and Public Welfare, which was holding hearings on a
new bill to include farm workers under the National Labor
Relations Act. Other farm workers, from Wisconsin, Texas,
Florida and Colorado, also testified. Mrs. Huerta read a general
statement by Chavez, who could not be present; he was concerned
about the illusory protection that the NLRA would give
to farm workers unless the new union was at least temporarily
exempted from the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin amendments,
which would deprive it of the only weapons at its disposal,
and thus legislate it out of existence. “Under the complex
and time-consuming procedures of the National Labor Relations
Board, growers can litigate us to death; forced at last by
court order to bargain with us in good faith, they can bargain
in good faith—around the calendar if need be—unless we are
allowed to apply sufficient economic power to make it worth
their while to sign.

“We want to be recognized, yes, but not with a glowing
epitaph on our tombstone.”

Unfortunately, the Union had not publicized its position on
the NLRA before the hearings, and Chavez’s resistance was
misunderstood and resented, even by some segments of the press
that had been sympathetic. Inevitably, the growers and their
spokesmen ridiculed his fear that the “protection” of the NLRA
might legislate his union out of existence. “By opposing various
measures newly introduced in Congress to improve the bargaining
position of farm workers, the head of UFWOC has shown
up his cause for what it is: neither peace-loving nor compassionate,
but a ruthless grab for power,” cried an editorial in
Barron’s
on June 2; in this same issue, three months after
AWFWA had been exposed as a disreputable fake,
Barron’s
was still taking it seriously. Meanwhile the growers were spending
hundreds of thousands of dollars on anti-Chavez propaganda
prepared by expensive advertising firms, including an attack
by the president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League
which blamed UFWOC for “the terror tactics visited upon the
grocery outlets of this nation”; he referred to the fire bombings
at A&P stores in New York City in October 1968 which the
Union long ago admitted were probably the work of misguided
sympathizers. Out of context,
Barron’s
quoted from Chavez’s
“Marxist” response to the League’s attack: “‘While we do not
belittle or underestimate our adversaries, for they are the rich
and the powerful and possess the land, we are not afraid or
cringe from the confrontation. We welcome it! We have planned
for it. We know that our cause is just, that history is a story of
social revolution, and that the poor shall inherit the land.’”
The word “revolution” is the key to
Barron’s
uneasiness, but the
truth is that the United Farm Workers have never asked for land
reforms, nor considered revolt against the American Way of
Life; they ask only for a share in it.

An example of what
Barron’s
means by legislation “newly
introduced in Congress to improve the bargaining position of
farm workers” is the “Food Profits Protection Act,” sponsored
by a legislator who has called the farm workers’ strike “dishonest.”

WASHINGTON
, Apr. 30 [1969] (AP)—Senator George
Murphy (Rep., Cal.) Tuesday unveiled a plan that he said
would protect customers and agriculture from persons he
called “of narrow interest, limited vision,” such as organizers
of the California grape boycott  .  .  .

Murphy said his bill would safeguard production and
marketing of food products from labor disputes and provide
“an orderly system within which agricultural workers may
organize and bargain collectively.”

He would prohibit secondary boycotts, efforts to persuade
a farmer to join a union or employer organization or to
recognize or bargain with an uncertified union, picketing at
retail stores, and inducements to employees not to handle
or work on an agricultural commodity after it leaves the farm.

“Strikes at farms are not permitted if the strike may reasonably
be expected to result in permanent loss or damage to the
crop,” Murphy said.

He said that he expects to get President Nixon’s endorsement
of his plan but has not solicited it  .  .  .

President Nixon endorsed instead a plan attributed to his
Secretary of Labor, Mr. Schultz, under the terms of which farm
workers would remain excluded from the jurisdiction and protection
of the NLRB but would be subject to the strike-killing
provisions of the Taft-Hartley amendment that forbid secondary
boycotts and organizational picketing; a special “Farm Labor
Relations Board” could delay any strike at harvest time (in
farm labor disputes, a strike at any other time is a waste of
effort) with a thirty-day period of grace that could be invoked
at the discretion of the grower. After thirty days, when the
harvest in any given field would be largely completed, the
workers could strike to their heart’s content.

The Nixon plan was strongly criticized by Senator Walter
Mondale of Minnesota, who had taken over from Senator Harrison
Williams as head of the Subcommittee on Migratory
Labor, and by Senator Edward Kennedy, who had inherited a
vested interest in
la causa
from his brothers. Mondale and
Kennedy led the dignitaries who assembled, on May 18, to
greet a company of strikers who had trudged one hundred
miles in a 100-degree heat from Coachella to Calexico, to
dramatize their protest against the unrestrained importation of
poor Mexicans to swamp their own efforts to better their lot.
Cesar Chavez addressed the rally in Calexico, and so did Senator
Kennedy: a country that could spend $30 billion every year
on a senseless war, send men to the moon and present rich
farmers with millions of dollars in subsidies for crops they do
not grow, Kennedy said, could afford to raise the standard of
living of the poor who fed the nation. Both Kennedy and
Mondale pledged themselves to a fight for new green-card
legislation.

The strike in Coachella began ten days later, on May 28. Over
one hundred local workers manned the picket lines, and though
the harvest had scarcely started, another two hundred walked
out in the first two days. Many signed affidavits of the sort
required to certify a strike, and thereby make illegal the
importation of scab labor into that field, but this year the two
observers from Mr. Schultz’s Department of Labor refused to
interview striking workers or inspect their affidavits. When
David Averbuck, the Union attorney, protested to the department’s
regional director, he was told that “orders from Washington”
forbade the Labor officials to investigate or certify
strikes: unless the strikes are decreed official, there is no legal
recourse against the wholesale importation of Mexican strikebreakers.
Since an estimated fifty thousand workers are available
in this border region, with only three thousand needed to
harvest the grapes, the strikers would be giving up their jobs
for nothing.

Averbuck was also told that the federal men would make no
investigations whatever but would base all decisions on the
reports of inspectors sent by Governor Reagan. One of the latter
declared frankly that the state men would not interview the
strikers either. They were willing to accept signed affidavits,
which would then be made available to the growers; if the
growers used the affidavits to compose a blacklist, that was no
concern of theirs.

Averbuck, a cynical young man not easily surprised by
perfidy, was stunned. “It’s a Nixon-Reagan conspiracy to screw
the farm workers and to help the growers recruit workers
illegally,” he said. “It’s so blatant it’s unbelievable.”

In any case, the Coachella strike got off to a slow start, and
the growers, emboldened by open federal and state support,
were making the same old arguments. “If my workers wanted
me to sit down at the negotiating table, I would,” said a
Coachella grower interviewed by a
New York Times
reporter
in early June. “But my workers don’t want Union recognition.
If they did, they would have walked out and joined the strike.”

But one of his workers, interviewed in the same report, refuted
him. “I belong to the Union but I’m working here because I
have bills to pay. The Union can’t pay them and I can’t work
anywhere else. A lot of people like me are forced to do this.
How can you stand on a picket line when your family is hungry!
It’s hard for me to work here when the Union is out there
picketing, but I can’t help it.”

By the time I returned to Delano in late July 1969, the strikers
were back from the Coachella Valley and were preparing for
the harvest in Lamont. Dave Averbuck was convinced that the
campaign in Coachella had been a great success, whereas Jim
Drake, while acknowledging progress on all fronts (including
fair treatment from the Riverside County police, who did much
to prevent the violence of the previous year’s campaign), was
sorry to come back without a contract. Everyone agreed, however,
that most or all of the Coachella Valley would be under
Union contract before a single grape was harvested in 1970,
and although much the same thing was said last year, the evidence
for this year’s confidence is much better. Grape sales
were off 15 percent, and even those chain stores that were still
selling grapes have used the boycott as an excuse for paying
the growers so little that many grapes were left unharvested.
As a group, the Coachella growers were admitting that they
had been badly hurt, though a few still refused to be led from
the burning barn. “The Union’s boycott has failed,” Mike “Bozo”
Bozick declared manfully on July 11, the day after the local
agricultural commissioner estimated that 750,000 boxes of
Coachella grapes had been left in the fields to rot, and one
week after eighty-one of his fellow grape growers filed suit
against UFWOC, claiming boycott damages of $25 million.

A turning point, not only in the Coachella campaign but in
the four-year strike, was a sit-in, in early June, by Filipino
strikers at Bozick’s Bagdasarian Grape Company’s labor camp
Number 2 that led to a wave of sit-ins at other ranches. By the
time Bozick had the last holdouts evicted and arrested a few
days later, the Union had won its most significant victory since
the Schenley capitulation in 1966, and Dolores Huerta gave
much credit for this to the Filipinos of Bagdasarian. “Their
courage, their actions, may have been the final straw that scared
the growers into opening discussions,” she said.

On Friday the thirteenth of June, ten growers, who claimed
to represent 15 percent of the state’s table-grape production,
held a press conference at Indio at which they declared willingness
to negotiate with the Union. Their spokesman was Lionel
Steinberg, whose Douglas Freedman Ranch is the biggest in
Coachella. Steinberg, acknowledging publicly that the boycott
had been costly, said, “If we have a conference and discussions
with the Union and we see that there is a give-and-take attitude
on their part, there is no question that we are prepared to
recognize UFWOC as the collective-bargaining agent.”

Five of the growers were from Arvin-Lamont, the next area
to be harvested, and the spokesman for the Arvin group was
John J. Kovacevich, who had been holding private talks with
Jerry Cohen ever since March. Publicly Kovacevich was still
fulminating about the “illegal and immoral boycott,” but this
did not spare him the damnation of the Delano growers, led
by Martin Zaninovich and Jack Pandol, who said that the 93
percent of the table-grape industry that they spoke for would
fight Chavez to the end rather than sell out the consumer. The
actions of the ten, according to Pandol, were “un-American
and un-Christian,” an opinion apparently shared by the Christians
unknown who attempted to gouge out the eye of one of
the ten, William Mosesian, in a night attack outside his house,
and burned a stack of wooden grape boxes belonging to another,
Milton Karahadian, in the Coachella Valley. Grower
Howard Marguleas was warned not to set foot in Delano, John
Kovacevich was snubbed by friends in Top’s Coffee Shop in
Lamont, and Lionel Steinberg, after years of membership, resigned
from the California Grape and Tree Fruit League due
to the viciousness of the League’s attempts to defame the ten
growers and sabotage the negotiations.

The Union, of course, had welcomed the meetings, which
began on June 20 in the Federal Building in Los Angeles; the
negotiations were supervised by three officials of the Federal
Mediation and Conciliation Service of the Department of Labor,
whose job it was to keep them from breaking down. Most of
the ten growers were present at most of the meetings, which
continued until July 3; the Union was represented by Jerry
Cohen, Dolores Huerta, Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz, and
by Irwin de Shettler, an observer for the AFL-CIO. At the last
conference, on July 3, the ten were joined by Bruno Dispoto of
Delano. Dispoto had been hurt that spring in Arizona, but many
Union people felt that he had been sent in by other Delano
growers to find out what was going on. Bruno, introduced to
Dolores before the meeting, said, “I haven’t seen you since the
old days on the picket line.”

The talks were recessed for the Fourth of July and have not
been resumed. There had been inevitable differences (wage
scales, Union hiring halls, jurisdiction of workers, safety clauses,
and other matters), but the one that derailed the talks was the
matter of pesticides. The growers agreed to abide by the lax
state and federal laws regarding the use of dangerous chemicals
so long as the Union did “not embark on any program which
will in any way harm the industry to which the employer is a
member.” This clause, which also gave immunity to the non-negotiating
growers, would stifle all campaigns by the Union
against pesticide abuses, including the matter of chemical
residues on grapes; it was presented in the form of an ultimatum
by the growers’ negotiator, a fruit wholesaler named Al Kaplan,
and was promptly rejected by the Union. The growers retired to
think things over. At a press conference a week later, they
denounced the Union for its bad faith and demanded a new
“fact-finding commission,” to be appointed by President Nixon.
(The growers’ charges were excited, but it is true that the Union
was not overly accommodating: except on very favorable terms,
a settlement with a small part of the industry was simply not
worth the inevitable weakening of the boycott.)