[3+ items]
The dubious legacy of César Chávez
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/YatesOnUFW.html
by Michael Yates
Randy Shaw, Beyond the Fields: César Chávez, the UFW, and Struggle
for Justice in the 21st Century (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008), 347 pp., $24.95.
The thesis of this book is simple. Randy Shaw argues that most of the
social movements of the contemporary U.S.labor, immigrant rights,
antiwar, worker and consumer health and safety, anti-sweatshopare
fundamentally the progeny of César Chávez and the United Farm Workers
(UFW) union. Shaw attempts to prove this by showing that UFW alumni
have been critical leaders of these movements, and these causes have
employed tactics pioneered by Chávez and the farm workers. Shaw's
argument is deeply flawed.
It is certainly true that thousands of young people, radical
activists, trade unionists, clergy, and assorted other actors,
politicians, writers, and artists worked for or with the UFW during
its heyday from the mid-1960s until about 1980. I did, in the winter
of 1977, when I worked at La Paz, the union's headquarters in Keene,
California. For most of us, our UFW experiences were exciting and
meaningful. We carried them with us, and they informed our lives and actions.
But the same things could be said about the IWW before the First
World War; the CIO or the Communist Party during the 1930s; or the
SDS, the SWP, and the antiwar and the civil rights movements of the
1960s. Of course, there were historical continuities in all of these
movementsa problem for Shaw's arguments. The UFW didn't spring
full-blown from the body and mind of César Chávez and his mentor Fred
Ross. There is history here, and Shaw, by and large, ignores it.
Would the UFW have been possible without the radical Filipino farm
workers who started the organizing? The Filipinos drew strength from
struggles in their homeland and from the CIO upheavals of the Great
Depression. The union used the boycott to good effect, at least in
the beginning, and its use of volunteers to staff boycott offices in
every major city in the United States and some in Canada was
innovative. But the boycott built the AFL in the 1880s and 1890s.
Similarly, the civil rights movement used boycotts, nonviolent
demonstrations, and volunteers by the thousands, the sorts of tactics
that Shaw attributes to Chávez's genius. Certainly, someone could
write a similar book using this movement as its template. The UFW was
not unique.
Flaws up close
Consider three points, two small and one large.
First, Shaw says that, "During the 1950s, Chávez met Father Donald
McDonnell, who introduced him …to a recent encyclical from Pope Leo
XIII on the church's support for workers who protested unfair labor
conditions." The encyclical, Rerum Novarum ("Of New Things"), was
written in 1891, which hardly made it recent. But Shaw doesn't say
that the Pope wrote it in response to the growing popularity of
left-wing unions and politics among working people. It is an
anti-socialist screed, aimed at Catholic workers. It is very much a
defense of capitalism, and only goes so far as to suggest that
capitalists must treat workers fairly.
Shaw makes much of the UFW's alliance with religious groups and
clergy, and there is no doubt that church support for the
farmworkers' struggles helped the union immensely. However, the close
relationship the UFW and Chávez had with churches was a mixed
blessing. The Catholic Church is a hierarchical, dogmatic, and sexist
organization. The Church view is, at best, that the poor are worthy
sinners who have to be looked after by the priests, who, like Christ,
sacrifice for them.
Chávez imbibed this paternalistic ethic, and the ministers, who
flocked to the union and were powerful within it, encouraged him.
Chávez said that to sacrifice is to be a man. With the union's
successes, Chávez began to think of himself as a holy person,
Christ-like and above reproach. Once in a community meeting at La
Paz, César was criticized by some of us for making an incredibly
sexist remark. He became enraged and said, "I work eighteen fucking
hours a day for the union. Who of you can say the same?"
How do you challenge Christ?
Is it any wonder that when Chávez showed his disdain for
rank-and-file power in the union, almost none of the clergy
challenged him? Or many of his staff or board members either? Is it
surprising that Chávez was a staunch anti-communist and engaged in
vicious and mindless purges and red-baiting of those who challenged
his authority?
Chávez had a history, and the social doctrines of the Catholic church
were part of it. Unfortunately, Shaw ignores the seamier side of
these. You would never know from this book that the Church did some
evil deeds during the great CIO movement of the 1930s, even informing
about left-wing labor leaders to the FBI.
The Game
The final chapter in the book contains a long list of UFW alumni who
have continued to fight the good fight. It is a kind of "shout out"
to these often unrecognized models of courage and social solidarity
and an attempted empirical validation of Shaw's thesis. There are
some curious inclusions and omissions, and these raise a second point
of criticism. Under the heading "Labor Organizer/Union Staff," we
find the name, Fred Hirsch. Fred is a communist plumber, and he was
one of the first researchers to uncover the close relationship
between certain unions and the CIA. He worked diligently in support
of the UFW, beginning in the 1960s. Fred did not owe his politics or
dedication to labor to Chávez or the UFW but to the communist movement.
Fred's daughter, Liza, who is not on Shaw's list, began working with
(and then for) the union from age twelve. I helped her develop a
piece rate proposal for tomato pickers at a ranch near Oxnard,
California. We shared a friendship with a volunteer at La Paz, a man
who did carpentry and maintenance work for the union.
In the winter of 1977, Chávez hooked up with Charles Dederich, who
ran a drug rehabilitation center called Synanon. (To his credit, Shaw
discusses this in a chapter on the UFW's decline). Dederich had
concocted a psychological warfare scheme called the "Game," in which
addicts were subjected to relentless group attacks, the idea being to
break down their psyches so they could start over again, without
drugs. At the time of Chávez's fascination with Synanon and the
"Game," Dederich was a megalomaniacal cult leader, abusing his
clientele. A reporter who exposed the organization found a
rattlesnake in his mailbox.
César took to the "game" like Stalin to the secret police, and he
used it for the same purposeto consolidate his power in the union.
He took some trusted members of his inner circle to Synanon for
training and began immediately to force the game upon the staff. On
April 4, 1977, he incited a screaming mob of "Game" initiates to
purge the union of "troublemakers." All sorts of ridiculous charges
were made against "enemies of the union," including our carpenter
friend. When our friend confronted Caesar and demanded to face his
accusers in a hearing, as the union's constitution stated was his
right, Chávez called the Mojave police and had him arrested for trespassing.
The last time I saw him was at Fred Hirsch's house in San Jose, after
we bailed him out of jail. A few weeks later, Liza went to La Paz to
attend the wedding of a friend. César, with whom she had been very
close and in whose house she had once lived, summarily threw her off
the property and expelled her from the union.
Wreckage
If the UFW positively changed some peoples' lives, it harmed and
wrecked others. Shaw certainly knows this; he just chose not to
mention it. He devotes considerable space to the admirable parts of
the life and work of famed UFW leader Dolores Huerta, who is also on
his list. He uses her as a prime example of the importance of the UFW
in training and nurturing social change activists. She has won every
imaginable award given to women leaders and been in the forefront of
many struggles.
But Huerta has never repudiated Chávez's dictatorial, hateful, and
ruinous behavior. She could have, and it might have made a
difference. Instead, she was and still is a Chávez apologist. Shaw
reports that she was unhappy with the treatment of women in the
union. She says that women need to have power. She doesn't say for
what. Had she been union president, I doubt things would have turned
out much different.
Also absent from Shaw's list of UFW luminaries is Chávez's son, Paul.
The younger Chávez still lives at La Paz, from where he runs a group
of interlinked union enterprises, including radio stations and
housing companies. The union raises money from these and many other
sources: mass mailing fund-raising, marketing the Chávez name to sell
union trinkets and win public grants, political consulting, and
managing union trust funds. The union has precious few members; a
handful of members collect pensions or get health care from the trust
funds (though they sit on tens of millions of dollars); and the union
leadership seems little concerned about any of this. Paul Chávez is
paid more than $125,000 for his "services" to farm workers.
A charitable description of today's UFW is that it has become a
quasi-racket. Another UFW legacy Shaw neglects to discuss. Chávez
created an undemocratic union of migrant workers. He ran it as if it
were his property. History tells us that such an organization is ripe
for corruption. And so it was.
Legacy
The final and most serious flaw of Shaw's analysis shows itself in
the opening pages, where he says, "This legacy should not be based on
the size of the UFW's current membership rolls. Rather, it should be
evaluated by the impact of its ideas and alumni on current social
justice struggles."
Let's see now. The UFW managed, despite long odds, to organize farm
workers, attract thousands of talented volunteers to its banner,
build a feared grassroots political action machine, defeat the
Teamsters and the sweetheart contracts it had signed with growers,
and win passage of a farm workers' labor law unmatched by any other
such statute in the country. By 1977, the union was poised to achieve
a mass membership that would have made it a power to be reckoned with
in California, and maybe in the entire nation.
But then, under Chávez's autocratic leadership, the union dissolved
the boycott staff, firing its leader and accusing him of being a
communist; purged its staff, using the most disgusting means
imaginable; refused to entertain any local union autonomy and
democracy; denied the election of actual farm workers to the union
board; ruined the careers, and in some cases, the jobs, of
rank-and-file union dissidents; lost almost all of its collective
bargaining agreements, and began a long and ugly descent into corruption.
Today, farm workers in California are no better off than they were
before the union came on the scene. They still don't often live past
fifty; they still suffer the same job-related injuries and illnesses;
they still don't have unions; they are still at the bottom of the
labor market barrel. How is all of this not an important, indeed
critical, legacy of the UFW? If we judge the union and Chávez in
terms of the well-being of the workers they set out to organize, both
must be judged utter failures. If we compare the UFW to any number of
the CIO's left-led unions, for example, the United Packinghouse
Workers of America, the Farmworkers pale by comparison. The UPWA was
not only a multiracial and democratic union. It also led the struggle
to end segregation at work and in the workers' communities, and it
put the pay of the black and immigrant laborers who did the
unenviable work of slaughtering the animals we eat on a par with
those of steel and auto workers.
A union is supposed to organize workers and improve their lives.
Chávez and the UFW had their chances, and they threw them away.
Imagine that Martin Luther King had sought and taken advice from
Chuck Dederich after his "I Have a Dream" speech. And after that,
imagine that he had forced the Memphis garbagemen to play the "Game."
Surely historians would count that as a major part of his legacy.
Alumni
And if we follow Shaw's lead and look to the "impact of ideas and
alumni on current social justice struggles," we are still left with
serious problems. Consider two outstanding alumni, Marshall Ganz and
Eliseo Medina.
Ganz was a master organizer, of both union and political campaigns,
and he has put this skill, which he learned in the UFW, to use after
he left the union. He has led election campaigns for former U.S.
senator Alan Cranston, and he was a key organizer in getting Nancy
Pelosi elected to Congress. He now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy
School. Shaw makes much of the get-out-the-vote techniques Ganz has
mastered. However, these were not new when he used them. The AFL-CIO
employed them, and most of the tactics Shaw traces to the UFW, in a
1977 campaign to defeat a right-to-work ballot measure in Missouri. I
don't find Ganz's work for the Democratic Party to be particularly
progressive either. Nancy Pelosi? An old-line political hack trained
in the art of politics by the king of pork, John Murtha?
With Medina, we can make a similar criticism. He did many good things
with the UFW and after he left. But he was the one person who could
have mounted a challenge to Chávez. He chose not to, and he has, to
my knowledge, never repudiated the reprehensible tactics Chávez used
with the "Game."
There may be good reason for this. Today, Medina is a senior
vice-president of SEIU, a union that has used somewhat similar
tactics, but in a situation where the union is loaded with money. The
SEIU hires scads of young nonmember organizers, puts them though a
cult-like training (the same seems to be true of another union, HERE,
which also has many former UFW people on it staff, and which even
uses a variant of the "Game" to train new staffers), works them to
death, gives them no power inside the union, brooks no criticism, and
confines their education to the technocratic mechanics of organizing.
They learn little about the labor movement, economics, and the many
other things that would help them develop a radical, worker-centered ideology.
The same was true in the UFW; César even sent a spy to monitor a
labor history class I had begun to teach interested staff. The SEIU
is completely staff-dominatedand staff make a great deal of
moneyMedina is a long way from his UFW penury. His total
compensation in 2006: $194,336. SEIU leadership is as fearful and
intolerant of union democracy and rank-and-file power as the UFW. If
local workers assert themselves, there is a good chance that their
local will be put in trusteeship by the national unionexactly what
happened recently to a large local of healthcare workers in
California. It has been trusteed, and Medina is at the center of the
whole sordid episode. [Randy Shaw himself, on the civil war within
SEIU, is here; a more radical view, from Steve Early, here.]
SEIU is not above threatening to sue its critics, just like the UFW
threatened to sue The Nation magazine in 1977 after it published an
article I wrote critical of the union. Also, like the UFW, the SEIU
has witnessed serious incidents of corruption, involving theft of
money and shady dealings with third parties. There is a separate
heading for SEIU in Shaw's table of UFW notables. It is certainly
debatable whether this legacy of the UFW is a positive one.
The problem with Shaw is that he simply assumes that the various
movements and causes UFW alumni have either led or worked in are
good. He doesn't ask whether what they are doing is what needs to be
done to build a better society. Get out the vote for what? Boycott
for what? Organize workers for what? Teach people to organize for what?
I enjoyed the parts of Shaw's book that recount the UFW's epic
battles. But I did not find the rest of it credible or penetrating.
An objective history of César Chávez, the UFW, and the union's legacy
has yet to be written.
--
Michael Yates is Associate Editor of Monthly Review. A new edition of
his book, Why Unions Matter, is just out.
--------
Randy Shaw Responds to Michael Yates about the Chavez legacy and more
http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/randy-shaw-responds-to-michael-yates-about-the-chavez-legacy-and-more/
April 23, 2009
The UFW's Powerful Legacy
It is unfortunate that Michael Yates' deep-seated hostility to Cesar
Chavez and the UFW led him to so badly misrepresent my book, Beyond
the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the
21st Century. Yates not only misstates the book's thesis, but he
ignores the vast majority of the text; one would never know from his
review that the book primarily focuses on how, more than forty years
later, the spirit, strategies, and tactics of the UFW in its heyday
still strengthen the U.S. labor movement, build Latino political
power, provide a progressive grassroots electoral model and infuse a
growing national campaign for immigrant rights.
Beyond the Fields tells the story of how many of the ideas, tactics,
and strategies that Chavez and the UFW initiated or revivedincluding
the boycott, clergy-labor partnerships, and grassroots voter
outreach, particularly toward Latinosare now so commonplace that
their roots in the farmworkers' movement are forgotten. The UFW
became the era's leading incubator of young activist talent, creating
a generation of skilled alumni who went on to play critical roles in
progressive campaigns.
Yates' either ignores or disputes these themes. Consider his
challenge to my claim that the UFW created a grassroots electoral
model that such alumni as Eliseo Medina, Fred Ross, Jr., Miguel
Contreras, Marshall Ganz and others brought to future campaigns
According to Yates,
"Shaw makes much of the get-out-the-vote techniques Ganz has
mastered. However, these were not new when he used them. The AFL-CIO
employed them, and most of the tactics Shaw traces to the UFW, in a
1977 campaign to defeat a right-to-work ballot measure in Missouri."
Yates must have skipped the sections of my book that describe the
UFW's electoral outreach campaigns in California in 1968, 1972, and
1976. He also missed the chapters that show how these campaigns
created a model for grassroots outreach, particularly among Latinos,
that UFW alumnus Miguel Contreras used in Los Angeles to transform
that city's politics in the late 1990's, and which was then used
throughout California. This UFW electoral outreach model was used in
key contests to boost Latino turnout in the 2006 elections, and in
several swing states won by the Obama campaign in 2008.
I don't know about that right to work measure in Missouri in 1977,
but would be surprised to learn that it targeted many Latino voters.
Yates' review completely ignores my discussion of the UFW's role in
the rise in Latino voting and political power, as well as the growing
labor-Latino alliance, which are central to the book's message.
Even more surprising is Yates' claim that Shaw
"doesn't ask whether what they {UFW alumni} are doing is what needs
to be done to build a better society. Get out the vote for what?
Boycott for what? Organize workers for what? Teach people to organize for what?
What Yates claims is omitted actually comprises most of Beyond the
Fields. Get out the vote for what? Among other campaigns, I describe
get out the vote operations to defeat anti-immigrant candidates in
2006 and to elect 100% pro-labor Democrats like Hilda Solis. Boycott
for what? I discuss the UFW-inspired boycott of El Salvadorean coffee
by the group Neighbor to Neighbor, whose goal was to stop U.S.
military aid to El Salvador and end its government's attacks on labor
and other activists. I also discuss the UFW-inspired national hotel
boycott strategy undertaken in 2006 by UNITE HERE's Hotel Workers
Rising campaign.
Teach people to organize for what? How about for building an
immigrant rights movement, a subject that comprises two chapters in
Beyond the Fields yet Yates entirely ignores. Or building a campaign
for Justice for Janitors, which a UFW alum developed after
recognizing that janitors were a lot like "farmworkers in highrises."
I have an entire chapter on a Justice for Janitors campaign in Miami
in 2006 that Yates, mystified at what good works UFW alumni are
doing, must have skipped
Yates also seems to have missed my chapter on Cesar Chavez's
responsibility for the UFW's decline. He ignores my discussion of
Chavez's increasingly irrational and destructive behavior, and my
conclusion that the UFW's decline was primarily caused by Chavez's
driving the astonishing group of activists and lawyers away. It seems
that nothing short of my calling for the repeal of all state Cesar
Chavez Days would have satisfied Yates.
For someone who titled his book "Why Unions Matter," Yates appears to
have only negative words to say about currently existing unions. He
claims that SEIU and HERE use "cult-like training," and the only
labor organization that appears to meet his high standards is the
United Packinghouse Workers of America, which has not been autonomous
since 1979.
Readers looking for a more accurate account of Beyond the Fields
should look at Steve Early's discussion of the book in his soon to be
released, Embedded With Organized Labor, or visit
http://beyondthefields.net/. Better yetread the book and decide for yourself.
Randy Shaw
--------
From Portside
25 Apr 2009
Responses to the "Dubious" Legacy of Cesar Chavez
April 22, 2009
This review by Michael Yates includes some extensive
trashing of the Chavez legacy. Clearly that is
important to the writer. In general, I learn from the
writings of Michael Yates and respect his writing.
This piece, however, is over the top.
From internal comments in the review, I see that Mr.
Yates worked for the UFW during the winter of 1977.
This was indeed a difficult time. The charges of the
Game, and redbaiting among others, have their tale to
be told. Randy Shaw covers the Game in his book.
These events had their strongest effect in La Paz where
Michael Yates, according to his report, was a staffer.
A new book presently in preparation will go further on
this.
Having worked with the UFW for over 7 years, and
supported it for more, I think this review by Yates
over states the case against Chavez. You can read the
first hand accounts of hundreds who worked with the UFW
at: www.farmworkermovement.org .
Yates makes an assault on the role of Chavez and the
Catholic church, but in part he is wrong. While he is
correct about the role of the Catholic hierarchy, it
was not the hierarchy that supported Chavez. Indeed
working with the UFW was a form of exile for many.
There were a long series of priests and brothers who
were influenced by (early) liberation theology and who
devoted years to La Causa, as well as a number of
activists protestant clergy and laity. Recall these
were some of the same movements who gave their lives in
support of the Central American revolutions. I knew
3-5 of these folks very well. They were not a part of
the Catholic anti communist alliances referenced by
Yates.
From my own personal, direct experiences I have found
the tale of Fred Hirsch and his daughter to be
essentially correct as told by Yates. You can find
records of these struggles in the Farmworker Movement
documentation center.
One item missing from both the review by Michael Yates,
and the book by Randy Shaw is the major contributions
of the Chavez, Huerta and the UFW in building the
Chicano Movement in the Southwest. In the 60's Chávez
became the pre-eminent civil rights leader for the
Mexican and Chicano workers, helping with local union
struggles throughout the nation. He worked tirelessly
to make people aware of the struggles of farm workers
for better pay and safer working conditions. It is a
testament to Cesar Chavez's skills and courage that the
UFW even survived. They were opposed by major
interests in corporate agriculture including the Bruce
Church and Gallo Corporations as well as the leadership
of the Republican Party then led by Ronald Reagan.
Workers were fired, beaten, threatened and even killed
in pursuit of union benefits . Non union farm workers
today continue to live on sub-poverty wages while
producing the abundant crops in the richest valley, in
the richest state in the richest nation in the world.
Randy Shaw's book covers the later development of
Latinos and Labor in his chapter 7, but Yates ignores
this major contribution. Chicano politics and Chicano
Latino history were made. Several of today's Latino
elected officials got their start working for a few
months with the UFW. I do not know why this
significant contribution is largely ignored in the
Yates review. Perhaps it says some things about the
perspectives of the writer.
Yates offers some brief historical context of labor
history, but each of these examples are themselves full
of contradictions, for example Yates has a great deal
of praise for the United Packinghouse Workers. Well,
there are two or more sides to that story also.
Bottom line, there are many who denounce Chavez as
Yates has done and more to come. Yates also sharply
criticizes Eliseo Medina and Dolores Huerta - among
others. While I disagree with some of the positions
taken by each of these two leaders, note that it was
Eliseo Medina who apparently helped to bring the AFL-
CIO and Change to Win together in the direction of a
joint immigration policy. See the recent posts on this
topic. And, full disclosure, Dolores Huerta is a
friend of mine.
As Shaw argues, hundreds of activists in labor,
Chicano, and community organizations owe their skills
to UFW training and experience. Along with improved
working conditions, salaries, and benefits, training
this cadre of organizers remains a major legacy of the
UFW- as noted by Shaw.
The UFW experience taught us that all organizations
have problems, that all organizations are imperfect.
But, if you wait for the perfect organization, nothing
gets done. Building popular organizations builds
people's power, and democracy requires long, hard,
disciplined work. And, for doing this work you will be
assaulted, defamed, and attacked - as were both Martin
Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez.
From long and extensive personal experience, I do not
find Cesar Chavez to have been a saint, nor was he as
destructive as Michael Yates review alleges. You will
have to figure out where you stand on this for
yourself. My own view is closer to the views of Randy
Shaw in Beyond the Fields. See:
http://choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com/2009/03/cesar-chavez-lives-on-struggle-of.html
In Yates's view, the current weakness of the UFW is a
consequence of the failures of authoritarianism in the
union and the peculiar period of the Game.
This overstates the case against Chavez. Certainly the
current weaknesses of the UFW are primarily a
consequence of the assault on the union by corporate
agriculture and the Republican Party. This was the era
of Ronald Reagan. Many unions were weakened in this
period. Should we not expect a new, struggling union
to be impacted by corporate power.? If the decline in
organizing victories was a consequence of leadership
failures, then why have farmworkers been unable to
organize more successfully in Ohio/Indiana and Florida
and Texas?
On May 16, 2008, Maria Isabel Vasquez Jiminez, 17 years
old and pregnant, another undocumented worker in the
U.S., died of heat stroke. Maria and her husband were
working in the fields near Stockton, California when
she collapsed in the 105 degree heat. She was one of at
least 13 workers to die that summer from heat stroke
in California's fields.
Who is it that can fight back and defend these workers?
It is a union. A few people denouncing atrocious
working conditions is not enough. Defense of workers
rights requires organized power and institutions - a
union. The UFW is doing its share of this defense.
See www.ufw.org
I agree with Yates conclusion that a definitive
history of the UFW and its leadership has yet to be
written. The information for research is available.
An important question is what can we learn from these
experiences. For example, two UFW veterans Jerry
Cohen and Leroy Chatfield have organized a group to
advocate for inclusion of farmworkers and domestic
workers within the N.R.L.A. closely related to the
campaign for the Employee Free Choice Act.
Duane Campbell
Democratic Socialists of America
Sacramento
= = = = = = = = = = =
Thank GOD there is an "objective" 'left business
observer' available to us to make sure we don't follow
the life-example of Cesar Chavez. What we need instead
is a thrilling bio of a pure "objective" critic who is
never seduced by any blandishment, and reaches his
coffin unstained by any of the compromises that beset
practical leadership. Thanks too for linking Cesar
Chavez's Synanon experiment to Stalin's secret police,
and for outing Fred Hirsch as a Communist. I actually
knew Fred Hirsch as a friend in San Jose in the 1970's,
during which time I was active in the Communist Party
in the South Bay. Weird that I did not know he was a
Communist then -- those dang cells!! O well, another
debt of gratitude I owe to Mr. Yates disinterested
criticism. Who will rise and write HIS biography and
give us, finally, a sublime legacy? Or, will it be just
ridiculous?
John Case
= = = = = = = = =
Thanks to Michael Yates for correcting the book on
Cesar Chavez. When Yates talks about historical
precedents to UFW, it is important to remember Ernesto
Galarza, HL Mitchell--who led a farmers union in
Arkansas and California long before UFW-- the CP-
influenced Southern Tenants Farmers Unions and other
farm workers' organizers who struggled, largely
outside the law( since farm workers were "exempted"
from the protections of the Federal and State Labor
Relations laws) and succeeded in sinking roots. Mostly
these unionization efforts did not get contracts with
growers; their activities were met with state violence,
mass firings, and evictions. But they persevered. UFW
came toward the end of these efforts and achieved a
lot. But to say that the farm workers movement was
deeply indebted to the Catholic Church is surely a
gross distortion.
Stanley Aronowitz
= = = = = = = = =
.
