In a move geared to intensify its organizing potential and influence, the United Farm Workers Union, founded in California's central valley by Cesar Chavez in the mid-1960's, has severed its ties with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and joined a new umbrella group, the Change to Win Federation, which formed in 2005.
The organizational shift comes as the Union finds itself embroiled in a major controversy stemming from a series of articles by investigative reporter Miriam Pawel that ran in the Los Angeles Times in mid-January. The two events are unrelated, however. The Union's board of directors decided to join the Teamsters, the Service Employees International, and several other unions in moving to Change to Win six months ago. UFW's announcement that it was leaving the AFL, which came as the highly critical Times series was running, was coincidental.
Characterizing the current state of the UFW's relationship with farm workers and its organizing capacity as "a broken contract," Pawel's lead article asserted that all that's left of the union today is "the name, the (black) eagle (logo) and the trademark chant of 'Sí se puede' ('Yes, it can be done') — a slogan that rings hollow as UFW leaders make excuses for their failure to organize California farmworkers."
"Chavez's heirs run a web of tax-exempt organizations that exploit his legacy and invoke the harsh lives of farmworkers to raise millions of dollars in public and private money," Pawel asserted, adding that "Most of the funds go to burnish the Chavez image and expand the family business, a multimillion-dollar enterprise with an annual payroll of $12 million that includes a dozen Chavez relatives."
The response from the union was quick and emphatic. In the introduction to his 101-page, point-by-point response to the series, which is posted on the UFW's website, union spokesman Marc Grossman wrote, "Over nearly a year’s period, the Farm Worker Movement spent more time and effort with Miriam Pawel than any reporter in its history. Yet almost none of its side of the story ended up in her articles."
"Everything that was written is dishonest, and the facts are distorted," says Grossman, who also contends that "With these articles, Pawel contradicts 12 years of reporting from other journalists." At the center of Grossman's refutation of Pawel's criticism is a long list of LA Times articles by no fewer than 22 reporters (including Pawel) detailing the UFW's organizing activities since 1994, when the union made a renewed push to sign up farmworkers and win new contracts.
Luke Cole, the director of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation's Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, which maintains offices in San Francisco and Delano, and who has worked jointly with the UFW over the years to help improve conditions for migrant farmworkers in the fields, calls Pawel's series "a political hit piece on the UFW."
"The story of any socal movement and any charismatic leader is a complicated one with many facets." Cole said in a telephone interview. "The story told in the LA Times was not telling a multi-faceted story. It was a political hit piece."
Asked specifically about the third article in Pawel's series, which focuses on changes in the organization and direction of the union under Cesar Chavez's leadership in 1977 and 1978, Cole says only that it was "incredibly one-sided and hostile to Cesar."
Pawel maintains that during this time, Chavez "grew intent on keeping control. He crushed dissent, turned against friends, purged staff and sought a new course." She traces much of what she believes is the union's current ineffectiveness to the changes which occurred during this time.
Much of this article, and the fourth installment in the series which immediately follows, features interview material with Eliseo Medina, an organizer who left the UFW in 1978 and today is an executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, which has also recently joined the Change to Win Federation, along with the UFW and the Teamsters.
"This change has been in the works for a long time," Grossman says. "The union board decided to join the Change to Win Federation last July. The only recent news is our disaffiliation with the AFL/CIO."
Luke Cole comments that "a number of unions have made the decision that they’ll be more effective in the Change to Win Federation than they were in the AFL," and adds that "These are all very sophisticated union leaders responding to one of the most hostile environments for union organizing in the last century," a reference to "the local, state, and federal governments, and the press."
The United Farm Workers Union has a long and illustrious history. It was organized in Delano in 1965 by Cesar Chavez and his associates. On Mexican Independence Day of that year, Chavez's group consisting of 1,200 member families voted to join a strike against Delano-area grape growers already begun that month by the mostly Filipino-American members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, affiliated at the time with the AFL-CIO. This began the five-year Delano Grape Strike.
The following year Chavez and several thousand of his followers marched 340 miles from Delano to the state Capitol in Sacramento to draw national attention to the plight of farm workers. This was at a time when agricultural wages were below minimum, and working conditions in the fields were so bad that most workers had no access to toilets or drinking water while on the job.
During the march and after a four-month boycott, Schenley Vineyards negotiated an agreement with the new union and this was the first genuine union contract between a grower and farm workers' union in U.S. history.
Between 1967 and 1970, the UFW organized and implemented a continent-wide table grape boycott which drew support from such national figures as Robert Kennedy and Coretta Scott King. As a result, most California table grape growers ended up signing labor contracts with the UFW. A nationwide boycott of lettuce, aimed mainly at Salinas Valley growers followed, and in 1975, after Governor Jerry Brown took office, the lettuce boycott convinced growers to agree to a state law guaranteeing California farm workers the right to organize and bargain with their employers. Chavez's influence was largely instrumental that year in the state legislature's passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act.
While the role and function of the United Farmworkers in recent years may be a subject of controversy, it's apparent that the history of this union, and of the six others who have associated with them in the Change to Win Federation, is about to take a new turn. The new federation may very well signal a rebirth and reconfiguration of organized labor in the U.S., because its members and member organizations are largely drawn from the service sector which represents large numbers of women, immigrants and people of color, as opposed to the mostly white, male, and native-born manufacturing union membership which formed the basis of labor's strength for many years.
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