Here—a stone’s throw from where John Steinbeck set the events of his 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath—they slept, cooked their meals, and talked over what California had done to their dreams of reestablishing themselves as farmers. They also talked about Joseph DiGiorgio and as they talked they got angry. One of the first to join Local 218 was Phineas Parks, a preacher who worked in DiGiorgio’s packing sheds and who pitched in immediately for the cause. Hasiwar recalled how Parks would start the meetings, telling the workers,

My God, we need a Union! We got to stand up like men. The bosses are no more men than we are. They get into their pants just like we do, one leg at a time. These guys got so much money they buy Cadillacs so big that when they make a turn they need hinges on them.

A Bakersfield Central Labor Council committee collected and distributed over one hundred thousand dollars worth of clothes, food, and money to the strikers’ families. Much of this support arrived in caravans sent by the Los Angeles and San Francisco labor councils, including one in March 1948, with over three hundred cars and trucks. Victor Van Bourg, a teenaged apprentice painter, rode in a bus chartered by his Communist-controlled Hollywood Painters union local to the DiGiorgio picket lines. It was a formative experience for the young Van Bourg; years later, after he became an attorney, he volunteered his time doing legal work for the farmworker cause.

Teamster drivers and winery workers refused to cross Local 218 picket lines. The Retail Clerks union informed DiGiorgio that they would not handle his produce in Los Angeles, and the California State Labor Federation, AFL, contributed five hundred dollars a month to the strike and called for a consumer boycott of DiGiorgio products. The national AFL, thanks to a personal friendship between AFL president William Green and H.L. Mitchell, also pitched in, covering Hasiwar’s expenses.

The Hollywood Film Council consisted of a group of craft unions dominated by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE, or simply “the IA”). The IA had just emerged triumphant from a bloody two-year struggle with progressive unions over job control on Hollywood movie sets. This was a more extreme version of the traditional jurisdictional divisions encouraged by studio producers for decades between AFL building trade unions and the IA. Beginning with the successful Disney studio animators’ strike of 1941, painter’s union leader Herb Sorrell built a credible democratic union federation, the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), as an alternative to the corrupt IA, which had been controlled by Chicago mobsters since the early 1930s.

Although the mob’s number one enforcer in Hollywood, Willie Bioff, and the IA national president, Richard Walsh, had gone to prison in 1940 along with a producer who had colluded with their money-skimming schemes, most IA Hollywood locals remained in the hands of the old guard. IA activists who had hoped for a revival of union democracy were disappointed; the meetings mostly had no quorums, a legacy of years of intimidation and shakedowns by Bioff’s associates. Studio workers interested in improving conditions turned to the Conference of Studio Unions.