Cesar Chavez
President of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO
Speaking at the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco 9nov84
What the Future
Holds for
Farm Workers and Hispanics in California
Former ambassador and Commonwealth Club President Shirley Temple Black conducted the Q&A. Here is how attorney and former Club Board member Michael Lee introduced Chavez:
Cesar Chavez founded and still leads the first successful farm workers union in United States history. He is the man the late Senator Robert Kennedy called one of the heroic figures of our time and who many credit with the passage of the historic California Labor Relations Act of 1975.
Mr. Chavez was born in 1927, near Yuma, Arizona. At age ten, his family lost land to the Depression and began a bleak life as migrant farm workers. Mr. Chavez, himself, left school after the eighth grade to help support his family. In 1952, after serving in the Navy, getting married and settling in the San Jose area, Mr. Chavez met an organizer for the Community Service Organization, a Barrio-based self-help group, and, as they say, the rest is history. Within months, Mr. Chavez was a full-time organizer with the CSO, coordinating voter registration, battling racial discrimination and forming huge chapters across California and Arizona.
Eventually Mr. Chavez served as CSO 's National Director, but his dream was to create an organization to help migrant farm workers. So, in 1962, he moved to Delano, California and founded the National Farm Workers Association. Next followed years of difficult and dangerous organizing efforts as he built up his union, but build it up he did. Beginning in 1965, he led a successful five year boycott against California Grape Growers that rallied millions of supporters to the UFW and forged, perhaps, the broadest coalition in labor history. As a measure of its effectiveness, by 1975, a nationwide Harris Poll showed that 17 million American adults had stopped buying grapes.
Today, although the farm worker is far better off than he was when Mr. Chavez started his organizing efforts, life is still hard. But he remains a revered, almost mystical figure who will continue to have a profound impact on the future of farm workers and Hispanics in California.
Twenty-one years ago, this last September, on a lonely stretch of railroad track paralleling U.S. Highway 101 near Salinas, 32 Bracero farm workers lost their lives in a tragic accident. The Braceros had been imported from Mexico to work on California farms. They died when their bus, which was converted from a flatbed truck, drove in front of a freight train. Conversion of the bus had not been approved by any government agency. The driver had tunnel vision. Most of the bodies laid unidentified for days. No one, including the grower who employed the workers, even knew their names. Today, thousands of farm workers live under savage conditions, beneath trees and amid garbage and human excrement near tomato fields in San Diego County; tomato fields, which use the most modern farm technology. Vicious rats gnaw at them as they sleep. They walk miles to buy food at inflated prices and they carry in water from irrigation ditches.
Child labor is still common in many farm areas. As much as 30 percent of Northern California's garlic harvesters are underaged children. Kids as young as six years old have voted in states, conducted union elections, since they qualified as workers. Some 800,000 underaged children work with their families harvesting crops across America. Babies born to migrant workers suffer 25 percent higher infant mortality rates than the rest of the population. Malnutrition among migrant workers' children is ten times higher than the national rate. Farm workers' average life expectancy is still 49 years, compared to 73 years for the average American. All my life, I have been driven by one dream, one goal, one vision: to overthrow a farm labor system in this nation that treats farm workers as if they were not important human beings. Farm workers are not agricultural implements; they are not beasts of burden to be used and discarded. That dream was born in my youth, it was nurtured in my early days of organizing. It has flourished. It has been attacked.
I'm not very different from anyone else who has ever tried to accomplish something with his life. My motivation comes from my personal life, from watching what my mother and father went through when I was growing up, from what we experienced as migrant workers in California. That dream, that vision grew from my own experience with racism, with hope, with a desire to be treated fairly, and to see my people treated as human beings and not as chattel. It grew from anger and rage, emotions I felt 40 years ago when people of my color were denied the right to see a movie or eat at a restaurant in many parts of California. It grew from the frustration and humiliation I felt as a boy who couldn't understand how the growers could abuse and exploit farm workers when there were so many of us and so few of them. Later in the 1950s, I experienced a different kind of exploitation. In San Jose, in Los Angeles and in other urban communities, we, the Mexican-American people, were dominated by a majority that was Anglo. I began to realize what other minority people had discovered: that the only answer, the only hope was in organizing. More of us had to become citizens, we had to register to vote, and people like me had to develop the skills it would take to organize, to educate, to help empower the Chicano people.
I spent many years before we founded the union learning how to work with people. We experienced some successes in voter registration, in politics, in battling racial discrimination. Successes in an era where Black Americans were just beginning to assert their civil rights and when political awareness among Hispanics was almost non-existent. But deep in my heart, I knew I could never be happy unless I tried organizing the farm workers. I didn't know if I would succeed, but I had to try. All Hispanics, urban and rural, young and old, are connected to the farm workers' experience. We had all lived through the fields, or our parents had. We shared that common humiliation. How could we progress as a people even if we lived in the cities, while the farm workers, men and women of our color, were condemned to a life without pride? How could we progress as a people while the farm workers, who symbolized our history in this land, were denied self-respect? How could our people believe that their children could become lawyers and doctors and judges and business people while this shame, this injustice, was permitted to continue?
Those who attack our union often say it's not really a union. It's something else, a social movement, a civil rights movement, it's something dangerous. They're half right. The United Farm Workers is first and foremost a union, a union like any other, a union that either produces for its members on the bread-and-butter issues or doesn't survive. But the UFW has always been something more than a union, although it's never been dangerous, if you believe in the Bill of Rights. The UFW was the beginning. We attacked that historical source of shame and infamy that our people in this country lived with. We attacked that injustice, not by complaining, not by seeking handouts, not by becoming soldiers in the war on poverty; we organized.
Farm workers acknowledge we had allowed ourselves to become victims in a democratic society, a society where majority rule and collective bargaining are supposed to be more than academic theories and political rhetoric. And by addressing this historical problem, we created confidence and pride and hope in an entire people's ability to create the future. The UFW's survival, its existence, were not in doubt in my mind when the time began to come. After the union became visible, when Chicanos started entering college in greater numbers, when Hispanics began running for public office in greater numbers, when our people started asserting their rights on a broad range of issues and in many communities across this land. The union survival, its very existence, sent out a signal to all Hispanics that we were fighting for our dignity. That we were challenging and overcoming injustice, that we were empowering the least educated among us, the poorest among us. The message was clear. If it could happen in the fields, it could happen anywhere: in the cities, in the courts, in the city councils, in the state legislatures. I didn't really appreciate it at the time, but the coming of our union signaled the start of great changes among Hispanics that are only now beginning to be seen.
I've traveled through every part of this nation. I have met and spoken with thousands of Hispanics from every walk of life, from every social and economic class. And one thing I hear most often from Hispanics, regardless of age or position, and from many non-Hispanics as well, is that the farm workers gave them the hope that they could succeed and the inspiration to work for change.
From time to time, you will hear our opponents declare that the union is weak, that the union has no support, that the union has not grown fast enough. Our obituary has been written many times. How ironic it is that the same forces that argue so passionately that the union is not influential are the same forces that continue to fight us so hard.
The union's power in agriculture has nothing to do with the number of farm workers on the union contract. It has nothing to do with the farm workers' ability to contribute to Democratic politicians. It doesn't even have much to do with our ability to conduct successful boycotts. The very fact of our existence forces an entire industry, unionized and non-unionized, to spend millions of dollars year after year on increased wages, on improved working conditions and on benefits for workers. If we were so weak and unsuccessful, why do the growers continue to fight us with such passion? Because as long as we continue to exist, farm workers will benefit from our existence, even if they don't work under union contract. It doesn't really matter whether we have 100,000 or 500,000 members. In truth, hundreds of thousands of farm workers in California and in other states are better off today because of our work. And Hispanics across California and the nation who don't work in agriculture are better off today because of what the farm workers taught people about organization, about pride and strength, about seizing control over their own lives.
Tens of thousands of children and grandchildren of farm workers and the children and grandchildren of poor Hispanics are moving out of the fields and out of the barrio and into the professions and into business and into politics, and that movement cannot be reversed. Our union will forever exist as an empowering force among Chicanos in the Southwest. That means our power and our influence will grow and not diminish. Two major trends give us hope and encouragement. First, our union has returned to a tried and tested weapon in the farm workers non-violent arsenal: the boycott. After the Agricultural Labor Relations Act became law in California in 1975, we dismantled our boycott to work with the law. During the early and mid-'70s millions of Americans supported our boycott. After 1975, we redirected our efforts from the boycott to organizing and winning elections under the law. That law helped farm workers make progress in overcoming poverty and injustice.
At companies where farm workers are protected by union contracts, we have made progress in overcoming child labor, in overcoming miserable wages and working conditions, in overcoming sexual harassment of women workers, in overcoming discrimination in employment, in overcoming dangerous pesticides, which poison our people and poison the food we all eat. Where we have organized these injustices soon passed in history, but under Republican Governor George Deukmejian, the law that guarantees our right to organize no longer protects farm workers; it doesn't work anymore.
In 1982, corporate growers gave Deukmejian $1 million to run for governor of California. Since he took office, Deukmejian has paid back his debt to the growers with the blood and sweat of California farm workers. Instead of enforcing the law as it was written against those who break it, Deukmejian invites growers who break the law to seek relief from governor's appointees. What does all this mean for farm workers? It means that the right to vote in free elections is a sham. It means the right to talk freely about the union among your fellow workers on the job is a cruel hoax. It means that the right to be free from threats and intimidation by growers is an empty promise. It means that the right to sit down and negotiate with your employer as equals across the bargaining table and not as peons in the fields is a fraud. It means that thousands of farm workers, who are owed millions of dollars in back pay because their employers broke the law, are still waiting for their checks. It means that 36,000 farm workers, who voted to be represented by the United Farm Workers in free elections, are still waiting for contracts from growers who refuse to bargain in good faith. It means that for farm workers child labor will continue. It means that infant mortality will continue. It means that malnutrition among children will continue. It means the short life expectancy and the inhuman living and working conditions will continue.
Are these make-believe threats? Are they exaggerations? Ask the farm workers who are waiting for the money they lost because the growers broke the law. Ask the farm workers who are still waiting for growers to bargain in good faith and sign contracts. Ask the farm workers who have been fired from their job because they spoke out for the union. Ask the farm workers who have been threatened with physical violence because they support the UFW, and ask the family of Rene Lopez, the young farm worker from Fresno who was shot to death last year because he supported the union as he came out of a voting booth. Ask the farm workers who watch their children go hungry in this land of wealth and promise. Ask the farm workers who see their lives eaten away by poverty and suffering.
These tragic events force farm workers to declare a new international boycott of California grapes, except the 3 percent of grapes produced under union contract. That is why we are asking Americans, once again, to join the farm workers by boycotting California grapes. The newest Harris Poll revealed that 17 million Americans boycotted grapes. We are convinced that those people and that good will have not disappeared. That segment of the population which makes the boycotts work are the Hispanics, the Blacks, the other minorities, our friends in labor and the church. But it is also an entire generation of young Americans who matured politically and socially in the '60s and the '70s, millions of people for whom boycotting grapes and other products became a socially accepted pattern of behavior. If you were young, Anglo and/or near campus during the late '60s and early '70s, chances are you supported farm workers.
Fifteen years later, the men and women of that generation are alive and well. They are in their mid-30s and 40s. They are pursuing professional careers, their disposable incomes are relatively high, but they are still inclined to respond to an appeal from farm workers. The union's mission still has meaning for them. Only today, we must translate the importance of a union for farm workers into the language of the 1980s. Instead of talking about the right to organize, we must talk about protection against sexual harassment in the fields. We must speak about the right to quality food and food that is safe to eat. I can tell you that the new language is working, the 17 million are still there. They are responding not to picket lines and leafleting alone, but to the high-tech boycott of today, a boycott that uses computers and direct mail and advertising techniques, which has revolutionized business and politics in recent years. We have achieved more success with a boycott in the first 11 months of 1984 than we achieved in the last 14 years, since 1970.
The other trend that gives us hope is the monumental growth of Hispanic influence in this country. And what that means: increased population, increased social and economic clout, and increased political influence. South of the Sacramento River, Hispanics now make up now more than 25, percent of the population. That figure will top 30 percent by the year 2000. There are now 1.1 million Spanish-surnamed registered voters in California. In 1975, there were 200 Hispanic elected officials at all levels of government. In 1984, there are over 400 elected judges, city council members, mayors and legislators. In light of these trends, it's absurd to believe or to suggest that we are going to go back in time as a union or as a people.
The growers often try to blame the union for their problems, to lay their sins off on us, sins for which they only have themselves to blame. The growers only have themselves to blame as they begin to reap the harvest of decades of environmental damage they have brought upon the land: the pesticides, the herbicides, the soil fumigants, the fertilizers, the salt deposits from thoughtless irrigation, the ravages of years of unrestrained poisoning of our soil and water. Thousands of acres of land in California have already been irrevocably damaged by this wanton abuse of nature. Thousands more will be lost unless growers understand that dumping more and more poison from the soil won't solve their problems in the short or in the long term.
Health authorities in many San Joaquin Valley towns already warn young children and pregnant mothers not to drink the water because of the nitrates from fertilizers which has poisoned the ground water. The growers have only themselves to blame for an increasing demand by consumers for higher-quality food, food that isn't tainted by toxics, food that doesn't result from plant mutations or chemicals that produce red luscious-looking tomatoes that taste like alfalfa. The growers are making the same mistakes American automakers made in the '60s and '70s when they refused to produce more economical cars and opened up the door to increased foreign competition.
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"Today
the growers are like a punch-drunk |
Growers only have themselves to blame for increasing attacks on the publicly financed handouts and government welfare: water subsidies, mechanization research, huge subsidies for not growing crops. These special privileges came into being before the Supreme Court's "one person, one vote" decision, at a time when rural lawmakers dominated the legislature and the Congress. Soon, those handouts could be in jeopardy as government searches for more revenue and as urban taxpayers take a closer look at front programs and who they really benefit. The growers only have themselves to blame for the humiliation they have brought upon succeeding waves of immigrant groups that have sweated and sacrificed for a hundred years to make this industry rich.
For generations, they have subjugated entire races of dark-skinned farm workers. These are the sins of growers, not the farm workers. We didn't poison the land, we didn't open the door to imported produce, we didn't covet billions of dollars in government handouts, we didn't abuse and exploit the people who work the land. Today the growers are like a punch-drunk old boxer who doesn't know he's past his prime. The times are changing; the political and social environment has changed. The chickens are coming home to roost, and the time to account for past sins is approaching.
I am told these days farm workers should be discouraged and pessimistic. The Republicans control the governor's office and the White House. There is a conservative trend in the nation. Yet, we are filled with hope and encouragement. We have looked into the future and the future is ours. History and inevitability are on our side. The farm workers and their children and the Hispanics and their children are the future in California, and corporate growers are the past. Those politicians who ally themselves with the corporate growers and against farm workers and the Hispanics are in for a big surprise. They want to make their careers in politics, they want to hold power 20 and 30 years from now. But 20 and 30 years from now, in Modesto, in Salinas, in Fresno, in Bakersfield, in the Imperial Valley and in many of the great cities of California, those communities will be dominated by farm workers and not by growers, by the children and grandchildren of farm workers and not by the children and grandchildren of growers.
These trends are part of the forces of history which cannot be stopped. No person and no organization can resist them for very long; they are inevitable. Once social change begins it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. Our opponents must understand that it's not just the union we have built - unions like other institutions can come and go - but we're more than institutions. For nearly 20 years, our union has been on the cutting edge of a people's cause, and you cannot do away with an entire people and you cannot stamp out a people's cause. Regardless of what the future holds for the union, regardless of what the future holds for farm workers, our accomplishments cannot be undone. La causa, our cause, doesn't have to be experienced twice. The consciousness and pride that were raised by our union are alive and thriving inside millions of young Hispanics who will never work on a farm.
Like the other immigrant groups, the day will come when we win the economic and political rewards, which are in keeping with our numbers in society. The day will come when the politicians will do the right thing for our people out of political necessity and not out of charity or idealism. That day may not come this year. That day may not come during this decade, but it will come someday. And when that day comes, we shall see the fulfillment of that passage from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament: "The last shall be first, and the first shall be last." And on that day, our nation shall fulfill its creed, and that fulfillment shall enrich us all.
Question & Answer Session
Q: Do you welcome the suggestion made last August by AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland that the nation's labor laws be repealed, letting business and labor battle out their differences?
A: Although we're not covered under the federal legislation - we're not covered under any law outside of California - I should explain that farm workers were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act back in 1936, and we're excluded still, except in California where we have a state law. But I would say from what I hear and see other unions going through, it's no big shake being under the federal law these days. It probably would be better to either revamp the law completely or give labor the right to go out and secondary boycott and those things so that they can take care of themselves.
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SIMPSON-MAZZOLI
IMMIGRATION BILL |
Q: What is your position on the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration bill, and how would you solve our immigration dilemma?
A: Well, the Simpson-Mazzoli Bill is dead for the time being, and my personal position is that if there is a problem with immigration it's an economic problem, not a legal problem. And I don't really think you're going to do anything by legislating, trying to keep people out of the United States, where there's jobs and where people come because they have hungry kids back where they come from. And unless we do something about developing jobs on the other side of the border or wherever they come from, if we don't do that, we're not going to stop them unless we have the whole Army from Tijuana to Brownsville.
Q: What Is the UFWA position on the proposal for guest workers?
A: We're very much against it. We do not need captive, submissive labor in this country. That is something that happened many years ago; it shouldn't come back. We have unemployment in the fields. There are American workers who want to do the work. We don't need them, unless they want to bring them here so they can have a larger labor pool so they can continue to keep the wages and the conditions down.
Q: Yesterday, the UFW filed a $100 million lawsuit against the general counsel of the state farm labor board. Has the farm labor board failed in its duties to oversee farm labor relations?
A: They failed miserably. That law that was enacted back in 1975 is totally not working today. The workers are owed over $70 million of cases that have been, that have gone through all of the hearing procedures including up to the state Supreme Court and then back. Seventy million dollars have not been collected. This last budget session, the state legislative analysts proposed that it be a million-dollar budget addition so they could implement a group of people within the agency to go collect that money and Governor Deukmejian vetoed the alignment of the bill. So it's not working and the suits that we're filing against them is because workers cannot, at this point, file grievances or file cases with the board.
Q: What is your analysis of the anti-bilingual ballot initiative in the state election? Do you consider bilingual balance a right or a privilege?
A: Well, the issue is not bilingual. The issue is the enfranchisement of people or citizens of this country. And I don't care who it is, I don't care what language he speaks or if he speaks no language at all, that the issue is not bilingual. The issue is whether people who cannot read English, who cannot understand English, if they're citizens, should they or should they not vote? That's the issue and I say they should vote. It doesn't matter what language they use. That's the issue; enfranchisement of people who do not speak the English language because they happen to be citizens, too.
Q: Mr. Chavez, why do you think many of the labor union workers voted for President Reagan instead of their traditional support for Democrats?
A: I can't speak for many of the workers who voted for President Reagan. I can only surmise that President Reagan is, personally, a very popular president. But I don't know what percentage voted for him.
Q: Forty-nine percent.
A: Forty-nine percent; well, it's a little higher then. Hispanics in California -
Q: Hispanic vote.
A: In California, we're under 25 percent.
Q: Right.
A: And four years ago they were 36 percent and we voted down to 25 percent. I think we're making some progress there.
Q: Now watch out, I've been a union member for 41 years so I'm older than you are even. Well, at least in union age. Hispanics in California have been called the sleeping giant of state politics. How and when will this giant be awakened?
A: Well, I don't know if they are giants, but there are certainly a lot of us, and it's a gradual development, and we see from the days of 1948, '47, right after the Second World War and I got involved in this work. And today we compare that - we've come a long ways. When you look ahead we have a long ways to go, but if the Hispanics are given the right to go to school, the right to jobs, and we can knock down the discrimination and bring sor- more equality, and they will progress faster. And someday, they'll be able to truly make their contributions that they can make and we want to make to our society, our country where we live.
Q: For fruits and vegetables, Mexico is a major competitor with California agriculture. How do farm labor conditions in Mexico compare with those in California?
A: Well, in expectations, they're about the same we expect for workers in this country and the conditions are pretty bad. We don't expect too much in Mexico for work and the conditions are pretty bad.
Q: Do you favor the ongoing mechanization of the California wine grape industry?
A: There are some jobs that should be mechanized. They should have been mechanized many years ago, because some of those jobs are not fit for human beings. They aren't even fit for beasts of burden, and they should be given to machines.
We've never thought that mechanization and progress would hurt unions or hurt ourselves if, at the same time, those people, the universities who developed the machines to put people out of jobs, if they wouldn't go a step further and do something about people without jobs, then it would be okay. Our fight is not against mechanization; it's against the end-result mechanization and more so that the universities don't and the government don't pay any attention to those who lose their jobs because of machines.
Q: What is the single most important change In conditions for farm workers that your union has achieved?
A: Really, that's a difficult question and my personal - it is my very personal feeling. I think it's the most, and sure wages and working conditions, all those things are important. But to me, I think personally, that recognition of workers' dignity, that when a worker is recognized as a human being, to me, that's the most important thing.
Q: What steps is the farm union taking to combat the union-busting climate set by the present administration?
A: Really, in terms of the administrative powers, Governor Deukmejian has tremendous powers and he's really very much against our union, so very little can be done there. I think legislatively we can checkmate him in the state legislature and keep the law from being either gutted down or new bills against the law being enacted, but I think that our best bet is to do what we did when we had no law, and that was to boycott. And so we're starting the California grape boycott precisely because of that.
Q: How many members belong to your union at the present time? I think this person wants to join. How much are your union dues?
A: Well, we have a little over 100,000 members, but they don't work. They're sometimes like actors and actresses. They work, you know, sporadically.
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UFW
VS. BRUCE CHURCH INC. Michael Payne, an executive with Bruce Church, told The New York Times in 1984 that submitting to the good standing clause "would give Chavez absolute control over our work force, which we aren't going to give to anybody." Chavez and the UFW countered that the good standing clause was a necessary union-building tool for an industry fight with uncertainty stemming from the itinerant lifestyle of migrant fieldworkers and the downward pressure exerted on wages by new immigrants. Seeking
to break the deadlock, the UFW orchestrated several boycotts of Bruce
Church's Red Coach lettuce. In a highly successful 1984 boycott, the UFW
became one of the first advocacy groups to make use of computers and
direct mail to reach consumers. Eventually ten chains - including Lucky
grocery stores and McDonald's- stopped buying Bruce Church lettuce. Not
until 1996 - after the deaths of Chavez and former Bruce Church president
Ted Taylor, and appeals courts' rejections of several multimillion-dollar
judgments against UFW - did the two sides sign a new five-year contract
settling their dispute. |
Q: And political appointees, too.
A: That doesn't mean that they all work at the same time, but in the course of one year, we'll have those many people that work either one hour or 12 months.
Q: This one's kind of difficult, I think. Mr. Chavez: Do you credit McDonald's and Lucky's with deciding to buy union lettuce for charitable reasons or because they support the UFW, or are there economic reasons?
A: I think we presented a very compelling legal argument to those, to McDonald's and Lucky's and the others when we laid out all of the legal history of the case that we have against Bruce Church, and I think they did it because of that.
Q: When do you plan to run for your first elective public office?
A: Never.
Q: Okay, I'll give you a hard question then. Isn't there a strong analogy between the Hispanic situation in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California and Canada's French problem in Quebec? Don't both present problems to which no satisfactory solution is likely to be found within the foreseeable future?
A: And, I should include, most of the countries throughout the world the issue of minorities all over the world is a difficult issue. And I think that probably the biggest stumbling block, as I study the issue of minorities are very interesting throughout the world, is that the failure of the majorities to understand, to really understand the culture and the expectations of minorities. It is difficult to want to put one's self in somebody else's shoes. But I think the failure to understand people's histories and people's desires and such things is probably the most difficult thing to overcome. Once that's been accomplished, then it can happen. Also remember, minorities also sometimes become majorities.
Q: And for your last question: If you had it to do over again, would you?
A: I would 30 times over, yes. Thank you.
*All Real Audio on
source: http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/20thcentury/84-11chavez-speech.html 11oct03
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