The Rise Of The UFW Essay Research

The Rise Of The UFW Essay, Research Paper

UFW History

The Rise of the UFW

For over a century farmworkers had been denied adequate life in the fields of California. Farmworkers were necessary to the biggest industry of the state, but only if workers remained cooperative and obedient. Many had tried but failed to coordinate the farmworkers. By the early 1960’s things were starting to revolutionize. Within two decades more over 50,000 farmworkers were signed under union contractsi.

The Bracero program, an agreement between the United States and Mexican governments, became Public Law 78 in 1951. The program to provide Mexican agricultural workers to growers. Public Law 78 stated that no bracero, a temporary worker imported from Mexico, could replace an American worker. However, the law was rarely enforced. Growers wanted the Bracero program to persist after World War II because they wanted to replace domestic workers.

A small but active National Farm Labor Union, led by Ernesto Galarza, wanted to create a lasting California farmworkers union in the 1940’s and 50’s. /Farmworkers, guided by Cesar Chavez, were able rally up other unions. In churches and community groups, workers allied with the growing civil rights movement to gain enough support on politicians to end the Bracero Program by 1964.

But many things were unable to change. Grape pickers in 1965 were making an average of $.90/hour, plus ten cents per basket picked. Growers ignored state laws regarding working standards. At a ranch, workers were forced to pay a quarter for a cup of water. No ranches had portable field toilets. Workers’ temporary housing was divided by race, and they paid two dollars or more per day for shacks with no indoor plumbing or cooking facilities. Farm labor contractors played favorites with workers, selecting friends first, sometimes accepting bribes. Child labor was rampant, and many workers were injured or died in easily preventable accidents. The average life expectancy of a farmworker was 49 years old.

Two organizations attempted to represent and organize the farmworkers. One had been formed in 1959 by the AFL.CIO, called the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. It was an branch of an earlier farmworker organization, the Agricultural Workers Association (AWA). AWOC was mostly composed of Filipinos, Chicanos, Anglos and Black workers. The Filipino workers in particular had experience organizing unions in the fields and with strikes. Two of its early leaders were Larry Itliong, a Filipino, and Dolores Huerta, a Chicana.

The National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) was started by a young Chicano named Cesar Chavez in 1962.

Chavez had become the CSO.s national director. CSO worked with communities to solve problems through organizing and direct action. But when CSO refused to concentrate its efforts on organizing farmworkers, Chavez left to found the NFWA. From his base in Delano, he traveled for three years from town to town in the central valleys of California, meeting with groups of farmworkers in their homes, building an organization he hoped would one day become an effective union. His cofounder was Dolores Huerta, one of the CSO’s farmworker activists.

Two strikes occurred in 1965. Eighty-five farmworkers in a McFarland rose farm asked the NFWA to help them gain a wage increase. Assisted by Chavez and Huerta, the workers struck. After a few days the growers agreed to the wage increase but not to union recognition. The workers contented themselves with the money and returned to work. Around the same time AWOC led a strike of hundreds of Filipino and Mexican grape pickers in Coachella Valley. Although the bracero program had officially ended the year before, a new U.S..Mexico agreement allowed growers to import Mexican workers, if they were paid $1.25 an hour, and never paid more than domestic workers. When Coachella grape growers attempted to pay the local workers less than the imported workers, the Filipinos, many of whom were AWOC members, refused to work. Getting the grapes picked and to market quickly is crucial to the Coachella growers’ profits. After ten days the growers decided to pay everyone $1.25 per hour, including Chicanos who had joined the Filipinos. However, no union contract was signed.

At the end of summer, many of the farmworkers from the successful Coachella action had come up to Delano, trailing the grape harvest. Farmworkers demanded $1.25 per hour, and when they didn’t receive it, on September 8 nine farms were struck, organized by AWOC’s Larry Itliong. After five days growers began to bring in Chicano scabs from the surrounding area. AWOC approached Chavez and asked the NFWA to join the mostly Filipino strike. At a meeting on September 16, packed with hundreds of workers, the NFWA voted unanimously to strike too. Chavez was apprehensive. Asked later when he felt his organization, which had $100 in its bank account, would have been ready to go out on a big strike.

In joining the strike, the NFWA, with many more members than AWOC, took the lead. It also strengthened the ethnic make up of the strike: now the majority of workers involved were Chicano. By September 20 more than thirty farms were out, with several thousand workers leaving the fields. Despite the large numbers of striking farmworkers, however, the workers could not muster picket lines at all the ranches s