by
Fred Glass
332
25. “Sí Se Puede”: The United Farm Workers
0
terms
2
notes
338
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.
the Delano grape harvest strike
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.
the Delano grape harvest strike
339
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.
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.