Local Chapters of National Advocacy Groups: United Farm Workers (UFW)

Title

Local Chapters of National Advocacy Groups: United Farm Workers (UFW)

Description

Farm workers had been specifically excluded from the protection of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 because Southern Congressmen did not want to enable labor organizing among Southern Black agricultural and domestic workers. American farm workers were not guaranteed the right to organize and had no guaranteed minimum wage. Without federal protection, state laws that applied to farm workers were largely ignored.

In Santa Clara County, as in many parts of California, the majority of agricultural laborers were people of color living at the poverty level, often Spanish speaking with limited English skills, whose children might also be employed. Agricultural work was seasonal, so migrant laborers followed the harvests from one region to another, making them a difficult group to organize.

Another major obstacle was the Bracero Program, Public Law 78, started during WWII as a temporary agreement between the United States and Mexico to recruit workers to relieve a labor shortage. The program continued until 1973 with the encouragement of local growers. Legally, no bracero could replace a domestic worker, though this provision was rarely enforced. Bracero workers could be used as strikebreakers and could be paid less, which depressed farm workers’ wages in general.

In the decades immediately prior to the creation of the United Farm Workers Association (UFWA), two organizations had tried to organize farm workers in California. The Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee had been formed in 1959 by the AFL-CIO based on the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), which Dolores Huerta helped to found in 1960 while continuing to work with the CSO in Stockton. AWOC was largely composed of Filipinos, Chicanos, Anglos. and Black workers, and led by experienced Filipino field organizer Larry Itliong.

The National Farm Workers of America (NFWA) had been started by former Community Service Organization (CSO) organizers César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Gilbert Padilla in 1962. Beginning as an organizer in San José in 1952, Chávez, who had grown up as a farm worker, had risen through the ranks to become national director of the CSO. Although the CSO worked with local communities to identify and resolve urban problems, it was not interested in organizing farm workers, so Chávez, Huerta, and Padilla left in 1962 to found the NFWA.

At the end of the summer in 1965, farm workers with the AWOC demanded $1.25 per hour to pick the grape crop. When growers refused, on September 8, workers at nine farms went on strike. Growers then brought in strikebreakers, and the AWOC asked the NFWA to join the strike. On September 16, the NFWA voted unanimously to strike, and asked the public not to buy grapes without a union label. NFWA and AWOC merged to become the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO (UFWOC) and the grape boycott became one of their first joint efforts.

Born in Delano, Luís Váldez had returned to help the farm worker movement in 1965 after graduating from SJSU. That year, he created El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworkers Theater). The following year, Váldez, Dolores Huerta, and César Chávez drafted the El Plan de Delano, which framed the farm labor movement as a nonviolent revolution for social justice. UFWOC, as Chávez had envisioned, had become both a union and a civil rights movement.

In 1975, renamed the United Farm Workers (UFW), they won the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, a landmark agreement recognizing the right of farm workers in California to organize. In the face of continued opposition from the government and agribusiness, farm workers and Chicano student activists organized one of the largest labor rights campaigns in U.S. Farm Labor history, which was a significant milestone for the Chicano Movement.

The Civil Rights Movement had, in more than two centuries of struggle, increased public awareness of the effects of racism against people of color, such as lower standards of living and discrimination in housing, employment, schools, voting, and everyday life. While the Civil Rights Movement had focused on the treatment of Blacks in America, the struggle for farm labor rights in California showed that this was also a struggle for civil rights. Because of César Chávez’s connection to Santa Clara County during the 1950s through his residency and his work with the Community Service Organization, Chávez maintained close ties during his UFW years. He often worked with Guadalupe Church, the CSO, and his sister Rita Chávez Medina during his UFW campaigns.

Scholar Talk

https://library.sjsu.edu/sites/library.sjsu.edu/files/images/b4sv-tp6slide9-688.jpg

Additional Online Information

UFW History

1962: United Farm Workers Union - A Latinx Resource Guide: Civil Rights Cases and Events in the United States

The Farm Worker Movement | PBS LearningMedia

Cesar Chavez: American Civil Rights Activist - Fast Facts | History

American History Tellers | United Farm Workers: Birth of a Movement | Podcast

American History Tellers | United Farm Workers: The Fall | Podcast

Identifier

B4SV Exhibit Topic Six: Slide 009