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 the scabs to leave the fields. Remarkably, their appeals were successful much of the time in emptying the ranches of workers, who were persuaded it was in their interest to strike.

The growers, overconfident, made a mistake almost immediately. They had always been able to end strikes with small wage concessions. Soon after the strike began they raised wages to $1.40 per hour. But this time they were shocked to discover it wasn’t enough. The raise merely encouraged the strikers to believe they were being effective. Now there had to be a union contract, too.

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. Union volunteers were sent out to big cities, where they established boycott centers that organized friendly groups—unions, churches, community organizations—to not buy grapes and to publicize the boycott and pressure stores to remove grapes from their shelves.

This was not a first. The National Farm Labor Union had used the tactic with some success during the DiGiorgio strike. But the grape strike took things to a new level. Combined with the union’s public disavowal of violence, this boycott was better funded, more extensive, more organized, and more effective. For one thing, it included a secondary boycott of stores selling grapes, not simply the primary boycott of the product itself. Although part of the difficulty farmworkers faced in organizing stemmed from their exclusion from the National Labor Relations Act, an advantage of being outside the law was their ability to use secondary boycotts, which had been removed from the NLRA by Taft-Hartley in 1947.

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 education and graduate school, such as teachers, social workers, librarians, and nurses, shared little at first glance with blue collar public employees like police and firefighters, trash collectors, school secretaries, and street maintenance and building construction workers. But what they all wanted—a greater say in how their jobs were run, better pay and benefits, and ultimately the right to bargain collectively to achieve these goals—produced enough glue to help overcome distinctions between “middle class” and “working class” occupations, and propelled a movement.

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 boards placed representatives of teacher organizations on the councils in proportion to their membership. These negotiations could be used by school boards to inform their decisions, which nonetheless remained final. In his organizing conversations with teachers across the state, Raoul Teilhet provided a metaphor to describe the process: “Meet and confer is what you do with your children. Collective bargaining is what you do with your spouse.”

AFT activists like Ezquerro derisively called the practice “meet and defer” or “collective begging.” Although the Winton Act was intended to stack the deck in favor of the much larger CTA, CFT members utilized its flaws as an argument for full collective bargaining. In some districts the union boycotted the council and called for elections instead of appointment to the body.

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 minority workers especially, employment in unionized industries provided the financial ability to climb up from poor neighborhoods to “middle class” surroundings with single-family homes, better schools, and safe streets.

By the late 1970s all this began to change. Mighty General Motors, the largest corporation in the world, was facing the challenge of increased global competition, particularly from Japan’s auto industry. By remaining blind to what the Japanese cars offered American consumers, GM watched its share of the U.S. car market shrink steadily. Its response, when it finally came, included three strategies to increase productivity and profits: stepping up automation; outsourcing production to the Third World; and introducing the team concept of labor-management cooperation, borrowed from Japan, to reduce industrial conflict.

In terms of automation, GM founded a robotics company in 1982, purchased software producer Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 1984, and bought California-based aerospace corporation Hughes Aircraft for $5 billion in 1985, signaling its recognition that machines were going to play an increasingly central role on the assembly line and computer-related technologies would do the same under the hood. And GM would introduce automation its own way.

Bridges articulated the members’ fear of automation: “Machines when they came appeared as merciless monsters, more deadly by far than slack times, because jobs swallowed never came back, as one could hope would happen when slack times eased.” The machines in this case were container cranes, already in operation in ports elsewhere in the world. Their introduction would make West Coast ports more competitive, but at the cost of jobs. Debate among the members raged across the West Coast for two years before negotiations opened. The question boiled down to, “Do we want to stick with our present policy of guerilla resistance or do we want to attempt a more flexible policy in order to buy specific benefits in return?”

Union negotiators were sent into talks with a comprehensive list of objectives. They would authorize the introduction of new technologies in exchange for the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) guaranteeing the current workforce continued employment, no compromises on the pace of work or health and safety, and crucially, the transfer of a reasonable share of the cost savings gained through the new machines to the workers, through a special mechanization and modernization fund paid for by the PMA. This savings transfer bought strengthened pensions, lifetime medical benefits, and life insurance policies, as well as a lump-sum payment for early retirement. The members were to be provided with thirty-five hours work per week, or paid a handsome minimum income of $111.65 ($3.19 per hour).

Older workers would be able to retire from the hard physical labor of the docks at an earlier age, due to incentives that made sense to them and to the employer. Higher retirement pensions would initially cost the PMA more but would make room for younger, less expensive workers.

Both parties agreed that the union hiring hall and multiple-employer, coast-wide bargaining remained firm commitments. By 1960, the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement had been submitted to the members, ratified, and signed.

The future of automation had clearly arrived twenty years after the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement. Continuous technological change seemed a given, outside the reach of a labor movement playing defense. Like the ILWU, the UAW boasted militant origins; but the Autoworkers union hadn’t sustained the deep traditions of rank and file democracy that the ILWU had. And unlike longshoremen, who occupied a key doorway in the distribution networks of the global economy, autoworkers labored in manufacturing, increasingly vulnerable to shifts in production from one place in the world to another.

Close to 11.5 million American workers were laid off due to plant closings and outsourcing between 1979 and 1984. In the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, America’s largest corporations saw the opportunity to retool how they did business. At GM, an internal management document leaked to the press in 1984 laid out a plan to further downsize its hourly workforce by 80,000 jobs within six years through a combination of outsourcing and automation.

The disappearance of auto manufacturing jobs from California in the late twentieth century was a story that could be told of many other industries that experienced similar catastrophic shrinkage.

Steel production facilities in Vernon, Fontana, and San Francisco downsized dramatically or closed their doors. The aerospace industry, California’s largest manufacturing sector, accounted for close to 200,000 workers, or more than a fifth of all manufacturing jobs, in 1987. It celebrated the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s by jettisoning over a third of its employees. Unionized Los Angeles garment factories were dismantled and shipped off to Asia and Latin America—although the industry continued to grow in the city through the reestablishment of low-wage, nonunion sweatshops.

Even agriculture, tied to the geography of the land like no other business, saw large parts of its industrial infrastructure uprooted. In 1994 the Watsonville Green Giant packing plant moved to Mexico. By then, thousands of workers in a dozen plants had lost their jobs in a town that had processed nearly half the frozen foods of the United States only a few years before. A nineteen-month strike by Teamsters Local 912 cannery workers in the late 1980s couldn’t stop the industry from doing as it pleased.

In 1980, 21 percent of national income share came from manufacturing. By 2005, it had declined to 12 percent. California’s economy was reshaped in twenty-five years as businesses decided to move offshore, seeking higher profits through cheap labor and ineffective or nonexistent labor laws. Left behind were devastated rustbelt communities—not as obvious as in the northeast of the country, due to the sheer size of the Golden State’s economy and its economic diversity—but still leaving giant holes where well-paying jobs once were and large numbers of displaced workers. The tax base of cities and counties across the state deteriorated as worker incomes slumped and corporate taxes disappeared, compounding the problem of how to fund local services in the wake of Proposition 13, precisely at the moment when they were most needed.

In this atmosphere, a number of building service companies rethought past practices. Some offered lower prices to the building owners for their services, thanks to wage and benefit reductions with nonunion labor. Other, unionized contractors pursued an increasingly common practice invented in the construction industry called “double breasting”: subsidiary companies, separate from corporate parents in name only, created simply to get out of collective bargaining agreements. The two largest contractors, ABM and ISS, went nonunion in Los Angeles by the late 1980s, despite operating under collective bargaining agreements in other cities. To keep its remaining contracts in downtown L.A., Local 399, now representing just 30 percent of the workforce, and shrinking fast, offered major wage and benefit concessions to the employers. Clearly a crisis was at hand.

The earliest efforts by janitors to employ the militant tactics that came to be known as the Justice for Janitors campaign occurred in Denver, Colorado, in 1986. SEIU president John Sweeney spent three days at the beginning of the campaign talking with Denver janitors and observing the action, and he liked what he saw. SEIU national organizers and local members raised “enough hell in the downtown area that the industry caved.” When this organizing model arrived in Los Angeles in 1988, it started by going after the nonunion side of a small, double-breasted company, Century Cleaning, which held a number of building cleaning contracts.