Chavez - source of UFW's success and decline
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/18/IN1B18NVA6.DTL
Eric Brazil
Sunday, July 19, 2009
What made the United Farm Workers Union the most successful farm
labor movement in American history? What brought the union to its
present sad state, with vastly diminished membership and a handful of
contracts?
Marshall Ganz, a member of UFW's inner circle and a go-to guy for
organization and strategy in its glory days of the 1960s and 1970s,
contends that the union's iconic founder, Cesar Chavez, bears primary
responsibility for wrecking it.
Ganz, 66, teaches organizing at Harvard University's Kennedy School
of Government to students who are interested in "change and renewal."
He also helped design the basic organizing approach used in President
Obama's election campaign and coached its field advisers. He is a
rabbi's son from Bakersfield who joined Chavez in 1965, bringing the
commitment and passion for grassroots organizing that prompted him to
drop out of Harvard a year from graduation and volunteer for the
Mississippi Summer Project, the 1964 civil rights project.
For the next 16 tumultuous years, he served on the union's front
lines: as organizing director, director of the grape and lettuce
boycotts, as field tactician for major strikes and, for nine years,
as a member of its national executive board.
Throughout Ganz's densely written history of the farm labor movement
initiated by Chavez runs the theme of what he calls "strategic
capacity," an amalgam of motivation, creativity, enthusiasm,
patience, commitment and a willingness to keep learning. UFW had it
in spades. Its rival unions, the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO's
Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, didn't.
The UFW organized attention-getting demonstrations, like the 300-mile
Delano-to-Sacramento march, prosecuted boycotts of grapes and
lettuce, engaged in civil disobedience, espoused nonviolence and drew
nationwide support from churches and bewitched liberals and
politicians such as Sens. Robert F. and Edward Kennedy. Its rival
organizations possessed far greater resources but were inflexible and
no match for "La Causa" with its ethnic and religious overtones. For
the Teamsters, it was enough to sign up the growers, never mind
organizing. AWOC, in pursuing a straight industrial union strategy,
was tone deaf to the language, religion and culture of California"s
principal pool of unorganized farmworkers, who are Mexican.
Chavez, whose prolonged, much-publicized fasts to attract attention
to union causes and his jailing in Salinas at Christmastime in 1970
for defying a legal injunction made him a sympathetic figure in the
public eye, was indispensable in UFW's success.
Critical to Chavez's leadership "was his ability to identify, recruit
and develop other leaders while holding his team together so that its
diversity could become a source of strength and not of division or
paralysis," Ganz writes. "He was a virtuoso in the craft of
organizing, gifted in building relationships, possessed of a rich
strategic imagination, but firmly anchored in the practical reality
of what does and does not work."
In 1977, when UFW had finally cleared the field for organizing,
"Chavez's personal demons ... began to gnaw at his confidence, humor
and resilience," Ganz writes. And "a moment of victory became a
moment of danger. In the past the threat came from outside the union.
In turn, the union responded strategically, and it prevailed. This
time, however, the threat came from within, and it was not overcome."
At the time, UFW was suffering serious problems attributable to its
top-down command structure and absence of union locals, which
deprived the farmworkers of a meaningful voice in UFW policymaking.
But the pivotal event presaging its decline occurred when Chavez
turned to Synanon, a cultlike drug treatment program, as a
transformational mechanism to revive the union and forced staffers to
play the "Synanon game," which involves brutal, relentless targeted
criticism of individuals.
"This required turning the UFW into a community of unpaid cadre,
loyal to a single leader, governed by groupthink rituals and enjoying
the apparent efficiency of unquestioning obedience," Ganz argues. And
"within four years, the UFW stopped organizing, drove out most of its
experienced leaders (including Ganz and three other executive board
members) and entered into a decline from which it has not recovered.
... Ironically, Chavez's determination, which had expressed itself in
risk taking, confidence and a spirit of hope that animated the early
movement, now turned into a sullen stubbornness, which was a poor
substitute for commitment."
Farmworker wages in California are now 20 to 25 percent below those
paid in the late 1970s. Labor contractors, who were among UFW's
principal adversaries, control about half of today's farm labor jobs.
The union's membership, more than 60,000 at its peak, is now about 5,000.
Chavez died in 1993 at the age of 66 and is buried at the union's
headquarters in Keene (Kern County) in the Tehachapi Mountains. His
legacy includes leading the struggle to create the first sustained
success in winning union recognition for farmworkers and the abiding
memory of the union's glory days when the black eagle flag flew over
California's fields. His face appears on a postage stamp, and dozens
of schools, streets and parks bear his name. His birthday, March 31,
is a holiday in California and seven other states.
--
Meet Marshall Ganz
Who: Ganz was the chief organizer for Cesar Chavez during the years
of the United Farm Workers' biggest successes, including the Salinas
Valley strike of 1970.
What: A signing for his new book, "Why David Sometimes Wins" (Oxford
University Press, 2009).
Where: Crossroads Cafe, a project of the Delancey Street Foundation,
699 Delancey St., San Francisco
When: 6 to 9 tonight
--
Eric Brazil, 75, is a retired newspaper reporter and editor who
covered the farmworkers' movement from 1964 until Chavez's death in 1993.
-------
Why David Sometimes Wins
http://inthesetimes.com/article/4552/why_david_sometimes_wins
Barack Obama is indebted to Cesar Chavez's trailblazing community
organizing strategies.
By Ethan Porter
July 17, 2009
Barack Obama's victory last November, improbable though it was, did
not come out of nowhere. Rather, his campaign was indebted to the
lessons and traditions of community organizing. Of course, before he
became a politician,Obama organized the churches of Chicago's South
Side. But there's a longer lineage. If the new book by organizing
guru and former Obama advisor Marshall Ganz is any indication, it's
clear that the Obama campaign was influenced by the 1960s and 1970s
organizing efforts of Cesar Chavez.
In Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy
in the California Farm Worker Movement (Oxford, June), Ganz details
how Chavez emerged from nowhere to lead the fight to unionize farm
workers. The similarities between Chavez's campaign strategy and
Obama's are striking. You could say that Chavez provided Obama with a
first draft.
Ganz's personal history and strategic insights make his argument for
him. In 1964, Ganz dropped out of Harvard, and a year later he joined
Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association in California, where
he soon ascended the leadership ranks. Decades later, things came
full circle when Ganz returned to Harvard as a teacher, preaching the
gospel of organizing to the American elite. In the summer of 2007, he
was recruited by the Obama for America campaign. At several "Camp
Obama" retreats for staffers and allies, he explained the principles
of community organizingprinciples that would later lead Obama to
victory against Hillary Clinton and then John McCain.
Why David Sometimes Wins is a look back as well as a look forward.
Ganz recounts the gripping story of Chavez and the farm workers and
synthesizes Chavez's lessons to explain why the farm workers
triumphed against the odds. He distills community organizing to its
most fundamental, and effective, principles.
Ganz places special weight on the biblical story of David and
Goliath, in which David, the meek shepherd, defeats the hulking
soldier Goliath. In Ganz's telling, David prevails not by emulating
Goliath, but by wisely using the tools that are available to him.
While Goliath arrogantly depends on his physical strength, the
strategically cunning David shoots Goliath down with a stone. The
moral: A well-implemented, original strategy can overcome innate disadvantages.
"The likelihood that a leadership team will devise effective strategy
depends on the depths of its motivation, the breadth of its salient
knowledge and the robustness of its reflective practice," Ganz
writes. At the height of its success, Chavez's team combined all
three. Since the turn of the 20th century, efforts to organize farm
workers had not achieved lasting change. The workerswho were exempt
from many labor law protectionsfaced brutal poverty. They worked
without anything resembling a contract and faced exploitation by
farmers and ranchers. A child of migrant workers himself, Chavez was
so deeply committed to the cause that he often worked for little or
no money. He often convinced his team to follow suit; they had to
"suffer" for the cause, he would say.
The National Farm Workers Association (which would later become the
United Farm Workers) coupled their motivation with a keen awareness
of the farm worker community's character. Unlike previous attempts to
organize workers, Chavez's union colored its efforts in overtly
religious themes. Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Mexican religious symbol,
was a fixture in the union's promotional materials; during one
strike, when the court prevented NFWA from picketing, the union held
a religious vigil instead.
Finally, the union's "reflective practice" was robust. Chavez held
townhall-style meetings among union members, and in leadership
meetings he demanded input from everyone. For the NFWA, "open
deliberation" were words to live by.
The results, for a few fleeting years, were pure glory. Despite
having minimal experience, the NFWA improvised its way to a 1970
victory against the powerful grape growers of Delano, Calif., from
whom they elicited a contract and a pay raise due in part to Chavez's
mastery of drawing support from the establishment. Sen. Robert
Kennedy (D-N.Y.) famously pledged his solidarity, as did California
Gov. Pat Brown. The union later rode their momentum to another
victory over the storied DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation. The legend of
Cesar Chavez as a champion of the poor and downtrodden was enshrined
in the national consciousness.
The analogies between Chavez's campaign and Obama's are numerous.
Both faced dual GoliathsObama had Clinton and McCain, while Chavez
had Teamsters bent on encroaching upon his territory, as well as the
farm owners. And both turned their disadvantages into advantages.
What they lacked became the reason why they won.
Obama began the primary race as an outsider, with few connections to
big money donors and with the powerhouse consultants in the
Democratic Party on the other team. Out of necessity, he cultivated
an army of grassroots donors who provided him an overpowering edge
against the initially better-funded Clinton. Clinton's consultants,
meanwhile, suffered from the blinding overconfidence common among
Goliaths. They focused on winning the popular vote in expensive
states, while Obama's campaign concentrated on capturing the delegate
count, which gave him the edge and the nomination.
Chavez, too, started as the quintessential outsider. The Teamsters
were far better funded and established, and the growers had squashed
every organizing effort for decades. But the Teamsters had little
working knowledge of what made farm workers tick, using the same
methods in the fruit fields of California as they did everywhere
else. The growers were just as clueless about the tide of grassroots
opposition that Chavez had generated. During a 1973 strike, 17
million Americans boycotted food such as wine, lettuce and grapes in
solidarity with the workers.
By the end, both Obama and Chavez were more than merely leaders of a
campaignthey inspired movements. They electrified their supporters,
who were willing to devote extraordinary amounts of time and money in
the name of a larger cause (or, in Chavez's case, ¡la causa!).
Their opponents, on the other hand, relied on hired help, whose
primary objective was not to change the world or even to win, but
simply to get paid. Sure, Obama had hired staffbut again, he
followed the Chavez model and blended his top leadership levels with
campaign veterans and amateurs. He mixed establishment figures like
David Axelrod with countless operatives who lacked presidential
campaign experiences (memorably resulting in a Che Guevara poster
found hanging up in an Obama office.)
Even Obama's widely admired advances in Internet campaigning seem
descended from what Ganz sees as the Chavez model. Obama's "MyBO"
webpage, a self-sustaining social network, connected supporters from
across the country to discuss, encourage and, at times, criticize the
candidate. It became an extreme sort of "robust reflective
practice"sometimes too robust, such as when the site's users united
against a particular stance of Obama's. But this only further fueled
his supporters' motivation. Moreover, it provided the campaign a
treasure trove of information about his supporters. The "salient
knowledge" that Obama had of those he was attempting to organize came
in the form of addresses, phone numbers and warm bodies for "get out
the vote" efforts.
The strategic approach outlined by Ganz drove both Chavez and Obama
to victory. But what happens after such a victorywhat happens when
David becomes Goliath? Does he become arrogant and tactically
incompetent? Ganz knows this is a danger: "Remaining David can be
even more challenging than becoming David in the first place."
For Chavez, the challenge proved too great. After the NFWA's initial
historic wins, later successes were hard to come by. Under Chavez's
late-period leadership, the union turned inward and Chavez-centric:
He installed friends in key leadership positions and went on periodic
purges against those he deemed "disloyal." In 1977, the union stopped
organizing altogether. It's still around today, but wages in the
California agricultural industry are actually 20 to 25 percent lower
than what they were in the early 1970s. Ganz concludes, "The living
and working conditions of California farm workers are little better
at the beginning of the 21st century than when [Chavez] began
organizing in the early 1960s."
Obviously, it's much too early to reach any conclusions about the
efficacy of the Obama presidency. Yet to avoid the fate of Chavez,
Obama would be well-served to avoid one thing: entrusting too much to
himself. In other words, from Obama's perspective, it must be
tempting to think that his own star power, like Chavez's, will carry
him through many rough patches. It probably will, as it already
repeatedly has. Yet after he scores a few too many victories and
convinces himself that his personality alone is enough to conquer
anything, the public is likely to tire of him. Even after winning,
Obama will have to remain humble. To remain Goliath, in other words,
you must continue to behaveand strategizelike David.
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