UFW Used Brinkmanship to Win 2 Laws

As the clock ticked toward midnight, Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers union, faced a momentous decision.

It was Aug. 31, barely three hours from the time when the California Legislature was required by law to adjourn, and the UFW had a historic offer on the table. After trying for months to block union efforts to rewrite the state’s farm labor law, Gov. Gray Davis was offering to sign a bill giving farm workers mandatory mediation, a powerful new weapon when contract negotiations with growers stall--but only for three years and 35 cases.

Rodriguez agonized over his decision for a minute or two, then spoke into his cellular phone to union advisor Richie Ross at the Capitol: Call the governor’s bluff and send him a bill for five years and 75 cases--a bigger program that stood a better chance of ending decades of poverty and failed contract negotiations for farm workers, UFW leaders reasoned.

“It was a gamble, there’s no doubt about that,” said Rodriguez, son-in-law of the late UFW founder Cesar Chavez. “Cesar taught us that sometimes you need to take risks to make progress. If he were here, I think he would have done the same thing.”

The gamble paid off this week when Davis decided to sign a pair of UFW bills into law--a decision union officials and their political allies are hailing. The legislation gives the United Farm Workers of America--and a handful of other unions representing agricultural workers--the right to request a form of binding arbitration in 75 cases over the next five years.

Growers say the governor’s action will cripple California’s $27-billion agriculture industry.

In signing the bills, Davis turned aside political pressure from the growers, who have contributed endorsements and hundreds of thousands of dollars to his reelection campaign. Some of those growers reacted to the governor’s decision by withdrawing their endorsements this week.

Davis acknowledged growers’ concerns Wednesday on San Francisco’s KGO-AM (810), noting that “farmers are under a lot of pressure from international competition” and “consolidation in the supermarkets.” But, he added, “very few people on the planet Earth live under more difficult circumstances than farm workers, and if this helps allow them to convert some of their elections into contracts, I think it’s a good thing.”

How the UFW managed to pull off such a triumph after years of declining membership and failed negotiations is a story of legislative skill, political brinkmanship and 1960s-style street tactics, say union leaders, lobbyists, labor experts and other analysts.

“This is truly a historic piece of legislation,” said Kent Wong, director of the Center for Labor Research and Education at UCLA. “It’s a major breakthrough for the farm workers.”

UFW leaders are quick to share the credit with everyone from Senate leader John Burton (D-San Francisco), who carried the original bill and subsequent versions through the Legislature, to Davis, who ultimately dropped his opposition to the UFW legislation and engaged the union in serious negotiations, union leaders say.

Latino Clout

The success is also testament to the growing clout of Latino legislators in Sacramento, according to UFW leaders and others involved in the battle.

Monday’s victory was the culmination of three years of efforts to position the UFW as a political force in Sacramento, said Ross, a longtime UFW advisor and political strategist.

As the UFW tells the story, it was an effort that began with the union’s successful attempt in 2000 to block and then rewrite a bill making Chavez’s birthday a state holiday. And it built on Davis’ August 2001 signature on a bill aimed at preventing labor contractors from cheating farm workers out of wages--the first time in more than 20 years the UFW had gotten a piece of its legislation signed into law, labor experts say.

The seeds of Monday’s success were planted in December, as UFW leaders were discussing possible bills for the 2002 Legislature. Ross received a call from Richard Rios, a labor consultant for Assemblyman Herb Wesson (D-Culver City). Rios had worked on a Wesson bill the previous year that gave backstretch workers at racetracks the right of binding arbitration in contract disputes with employers.

Rios “calls me up and says, ‘Mr. Ross, have you ever thought about binding arbitration’ [for farm workers facing stalled negotiations with growers]? As soon as he said it, I knew that was it,” Ross said.

In January, the UFW leaders and Ross drafted a bill inspired by Wesson’s approach, but the UFW quickly ran into its first roadblock when Wesson--just taking over as Assembly speaker--wouldn’t agree to carry it, Ross said.

With the deadline for filing bills less than a week away, the UFW went to Burton. The Senate leader, a longtime friend of labor, agreed to lead the UFW charge by carrying the bill.

Burton was certain to deliver the Senate, so the UFW turned its attention to the Assembly and lined up 41 coauthors.

“I knew ultimately the governor would go to the speaker [Wesson] and say, ‘Listen, I need a favor, I’m going to do this bill next year, I need you to put the brakes on it,’ ” Ross said. “I understood that once they got us to the Assembly, the play would be to slow it down, negotiate, we’ll do it next year.... I wanted to head that off.”

The growers quickly found themselves playing catch-up.

“They had 41 coauthors in the Assembly, I think, before we even found out about the bill,” said Mike Webb, a lobbyist for the Western Growers Assn., which represents 3,500 California and Arizona farmers.

By June, Ross said, he had secured a crucial commitment from Wesson: When the inevitable call from the governor came, the Assembly speaker would tell Davis he couldn’t help him on the UFW bill.

If the governor was poised to call the speaker, Wesson beat him to the punch. He says he phoned Davis to tell him he was supporting the UFW legislation.

For the UFW and the governor, the endgame began Aug. 5, when an amended version of the binding arbitration bill won final approval in the Assembly and returned to the Senate.

Contentious Meeting

With the Senate poised to take up the revised legislation, senior Davis aides laid out their concerns in a tense meeting with UFW leaders. Davis’ Cabinet secretary, Susan Kennedy, accused the union of trying to paint the governor into an election-season corner, Ross said.

Kennedy says she “definitely made it clear that this office wasn’t happy about being jammed. I said friends don’t jam each other. Why didn’t you come to us?”

Ross quickly fired back, boasting to reporters that he would organize a political shunning of Davis if he vetoed the UFW legislation and spreading the word that Dolores Huerta, the union’s fiery 72-year-old co-founder, was going to fast until Davis signed the bill.

The warning Ross hoped to convey: Davis faced a public relations disaster, especially among Latinos, if he spurned the farm workers.

UFW leaders and Ross now say they knew by August that they would have to compromise to have any chance of getting a bill that Davis would sign. That process began around the third week of August, when a key Davis labor advisor, Marty Morgenstern, began facilitating a series of meetings between UFW leaders and growers.

“My goal always was to get something that works [and] that accommodates both sides”--not dictate the governor’s desires, said Morgenstern, a veteran labor leader and mediator.

But the meetings failed to find any common ground between the union and growers.

“We made it clear that binding arbitration in whatever form was unacceptable,” Webb said. “We listened to the UFW and what their problems were with the system. The UFW outright rejected everything we had to offer.”

UFW officials say the growers wanted to do little more than create a blue ribbon panel to study the reasons farm workers were failing to win contracts from growers.

In an effort to break the impasse, Morgenstern sought ideas from Bill Gould, a Stanford University labor law professor and former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board under President Clinton. Gould referred Morgenstern to a book he had written, which discussed various forms of mandatory mediation adopted by several Canadian provinces.

Morgenstern laid out some of the Canadian solutions during his meetings with UFW leaders and growers. Ross took notes.

Ross rewrote the UFW bill and began touting the new version as the “Morgenstern proposal”--a useful exaggeration that suggested Davis’ imprimatur, Ross concedes with a chuckle.

Meanwhile, the UFW was turning up the pressure on Davis. On Aug. 15, waving the red-and-black Aztec eagle flags that evoked powerful memories of Chavez, Rodriguez and Huerta began leading a 160-mile march through the Central Valley to Sacramento.

“We knew we had a shot now,” Ross said. “There was genuine dialogue between us and Marty Morgenstern. We needed to create a focal point.”

The march ended Aug. 25 with a raucous Capitol rally that attracted several thousand people.

Key Conversation

The following day, a perturbed Davis phoned Rodriguez.

I don’t know why you’re doing this to me, Davis said at one point to Rodriguez, according to UFW officials familiar with the conversation.

“Artie was giving it right back to him,” said Ross, who was in the room at the time. “On three occasions, I heard Artie say: ‘Governor, I don’t tell Dolores Huerta what she can and can’t do.’ ”

Kennedy, who was in the room with Davis, said the governor told Rodriguez--a longtime friend--that he was disappointed the UFW hadn’t sought his personal input on such an important piece of legislation. In the governor’s eyes, the UFW had “waited to the end of the legislative session and jammed him with a PR campaign,” Kennedy said.

At the end of the hourlong call, Davis asked Rodriguez to call Morgenstern.

Negotiations on the second UFW initiative--the mandatory mediation idea--got underway, with Davis aides proposing to limit the remedy to two years and 25 cases. The union asked for seven years, but said the number of cases was negotiable, Ross said.

Webb says growers weren’t aware these negotiations were taking place.

On Saturday, Aug. 31, the final day of the legislative session, Barry Goode, the governor’s legal advisor, made a new offer: 35 cases over three years, but applying only to companies involved in long-running disputes with workers, a proposal that Ross dismissed out of hand.

About 8 p.m., Goode returned with a final offer: Davis would sign a bill that would include all growers, with caps of three years and 35 cases, according to Ross.

Ross phoned Rodriguez, who was at the UFW annual convention in Fresno.

“Artie, I don’t even know if I can get a bill and do this. I only have three hours and I have to go through both houses of the Legislature,” Ross recalls telling Rodriguez.

Rodriguez decided to gamble: Five and 75, he told Ross.

Shortly afterward, Ross and Goode gathered with legislative staff in a Capitol office to finalize the language of the revised UFW bill.

The moment came to fill in the length of the program and number of cases, and Ross sprang his surprise on the governor’s negotiator: “Gentlemen, it’s five and 75,” Ross announced.

Goode walked out of the room.

An hour before midnight, the revised bill cleared the Legislature.

Throughout September, Davis kept UFW leaders guessing as to whether they had overreached.

Finally, on Monday, with two strokes of the governor’s pen, the UFW bill that was finalized in the closing minutes of the Legislature and a companion measure approved a night earlier became the new framework for resolving conflicts between California’s largest industry and its workers.

Growers are bitter about the outcome.

“To have this significant a change to the [1975 farm labor law] unilaterally pushed on us in the waning moments of the legislative session, with absolutely no opportunity for agricultural input, is the wrong way to go about making public policy in California,” said Webb, the lobbyist for growers.

Morgenstern says he hopes that growers “will recognize the governor took the best option available to him” and will give the program a chance.

“It’s a modest approach,” Morgenstern said, a characterization that growers dispute. “Take a relatively small number of cases and see if we can bring labor and management together where they want to be, which is working together.”