Chavez and Farm Workers Union

A number of articles have recently appeared in newspapers across the country bemoaning the plight of farm workers and the death of our union. The articles, of course, blame me, Cesar Chavez.

Don’t be fooled by these crocodile tears and these lies. The United Farm Workers union is alive.

The charges have a familiar ring. The most recent article appeared in The Times on Sept. 26, by Robert A. Jones, in his column “On California.” It claims our union is evaporating and that “the dream of unionizing California’s farm workers has also died.”

It asserts that the current table grape boycott has “little or no connection to the union.” Agribusiness would dearly love you to believe that, just as it would like you to ignore the dangers from pesticides. The men, women and children who harvest the crops for your table feel differently. For them, the dangers from pesticides are all too real.

“We live in the pesticides. We get in the pesticides. We don’t know what type of pesticides they are,” said farm worker Gonzalo Ramirez, as quoted in the Bakersfield Californian of Sept. 15. His 4-year-old daughter, Natalie, was discovered to have kidney cancer at the age of 2. Since 1983, seven cases of childhood cancers have been found in Earlimart, where the Ramirez family lives. That’s 1200% above the expected rate.

So we urge you to join farm workers and consumers everywhere who are boycotting table grapes. It’s for their health, and yours.

Throughout our struggle to build a union, agribusiness insisted we didn’t have the support of the workers. That myth exploded when a California law was passed in 1975 that gave workers a chance to make their views known by secret ballot. The United Farm Workers Union won about 90% of those elections.

As long as the law was enforced, we got contracts. We were certified to represent some 70,000 workers at more than 400 companies.

When Gov. George Deukmejian came into office, he changed the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, cut the funds, and made sure the law is no longer carried out fairly. Since then, we have not been able to get contracts when those we had expired.

As for our union headquarters being in the Tehachapis, it was not selected because I wanted to have a monastery setting. The property was a gift to the union.

Sure, we have had a high turnover in staff. Agribusiness calls it “purges” that I ordered. The truth is that most of our staff are volunteers. That’s all we can afford.

As for the claim that I “never trusted or even wanted the farm workers union,” the statement only proves that the author’s entire article is intended as a hatchet job, and has no basis in facts.

CESAR CHAVEZ

La Paz, Keene, Calif.