Activity

Autoworkers put up with the conditions because it allowed them to live the Fordist dream of purchasing the products they made and, thanks to the part of the picture neither foreseen nor desired by Henry Ford—the UAW—workers could do even more: buy homes and live in a prosperous community. For minor…

The CTA sponsored a halfway measure toward collective bargaining in 1965. The Winton Act, AB 1474, was in fact intended to stave off collective bargaining. The act established the right of school district negotiating councils to “meet and confer” with administration over employment issues. School b…

Although the upsurge of unionism among public workers was the greatest of any group of workers since the 1930s, the backgrounds and aspirations of public employees were not homogenous. Professionals and semiprofessionals whose work required lengthy, specialized training, including a college educati…

A couple months after the strike erupted, Chavez and Huerta, on a suggestion from attorney Stewart Weinberg, initiated a crucial tactic, one that the farmworkers used to remarkable effect: a consumer grape boycott. The union called upon the public to refrain from buying grapes without a union label…

NFWA and AWOC set up a system of roving pickets, with different fields picketed each day. Fifteen or twenty cars full of pickets would go to a field where a grower was attempting to use strikebreakers. Striking workers, often harassed by the growers and police, sometimes violently, would try to get…