Farm Workers Union Declines in Influence

At his peak Cesar Chavez, the son of migrant farm workers, commanded the respect of presidents and governors and became a hero to a new generation of California leaders.

“He was the spring, the root, where it all started,” said Richie Ross, a prominent Sacramento political consultant who began in Chavez’s United Farm Workers union. “He’s the bell that rang, and it cannot be un-rung.”

State flags were ordered lowered to half-staff in Chavez’s honor Friday by Gov. Pete Wilson, and political and religious figures from President Clinton to Cardinal Roger M. Mahony to Mayor Tom Bradley expressed their admiration.

But years before Chavez’s death Friday in a small town near Yuma, Ariz., the union he founded had ceased to be a major force in the California labor movement or in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley.

Time was, the red and black UFW flag and the threat of a boycott by Chavez could strike fear in growers. Through his boycotts, marches, and occasional fasts, he won rights for California’s army of migrant workers and dramatized the dangers of farm pesticides.

In recent years, however, big agriculture had taken to dismissing him. On Friday, industry leaders said his passing will have little effect.

“I don’t think there is any significance (in his death) in the agricultural industry, other than there will be a change in leadership at the UFW,” said Marion Quesenberry, general counsel to the Western Growers Assn. in Irvine.

Kern County grape grower John Giumarra signed a contract with the UFW in 1970. “I sat across the bargaining table from Chavez for hours and hours and days and days,” Giumarra recalled Friday.

In 1973, Giumarra’s workers switched to the Teamsters union. The UFW, he said Friday, “wasn’t oriented toward the needs of farm workers. It was oriented toward gaining political power and influencing legislators and shaping a social agenda.”

Lionel Steinberg, a Coachella Valley grower, made history when he signed a contract with Chavez on April 10, 1970. “I had a high regard for Cesar--he was an honest man,” Steinberg said Friday. “(But) he was running the union with priests and nuns and Ivy Leaguers on sabbatical. It was more like a political crusade than a trade union effort.”

Still, those were heady times for the believers. “There was no way you could stop us,” said Jerome Cohen, a UFW attorney who split with Chavez in 1981, weeping as he recalled the early days. “And it all flowed from Cesar. He set a very high standard. . . . He was totally unselfish.”

Chavez cultivated no heir apparent, although political leaders from newly elected Sacramento Mayor Joe Serna to state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) and scores of others came from within the ranks of the UFW.

While many remained close to Chavez until the end, many more who devoted years, even decades, to the cause found themselves estranged or purged from the organization.

One possible successor is longtime UFW vice president Dolores Huerta, an English teacher when she met Chavez in Stockton in 1957. She has been on sabbatical from the union since 1991, but bristled Friday at the suggestion that the UFW is a dead union.

“Far from it,” Huerta said. “Every day of the week, we’re out there handling grievances, doing negotiations. In the last five years, we’ve won elections that covered tomato workers in Stockton, strawberry workers in Santa Maria, lettuce workers in Salinas.”

On paper the UFW has certificates to represent workers at 769 farms in California, according to the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board. In reality the UFW has contracts at no more than a handful. At its height in the 1970s, the union had at least 70,000 members. Now it has perhaps 5,000 members who are covered by contracts, said Bruce Janigian, the board’s chairman.

In the fields outside Fresno, news of Chavez’s death broke shortly before lunch. Fernando Cantu, a grape and orange picker whose father belonged to the UFW, said it was a “sad day, but we have to keep on.”

“We still remember him,” Cantu said. “We talked and some of us said this is the person who tried to help and did his best. But our problems are too big for one man. Our hope is that others will step forward and fill his place.”

Cantu, 25, has been picking grapes for 10 years. He knows of no one who is a member of the UFW.

In recent years, Chavez’s critics said, he had forsaken union organizing for token boycotts, fasts that seemed quixotic and protests over the use of pesticides based more on political beliefs than science.

Some of the UFW’s recent energy was poured into affiliate businesses that built low-cost housing using non-union workers and operated check-cashing stores. Instead of setting up picket lines outside farms, Chavez took to churning out direct mail appeals for money from his private compound La Paz in Keene, east of Bakersfield.

Some of the money was needed to defend himself and the union against lawsuits stemming from UFW actions taken a decade or more ago.

After losing a $2.4 million verdict in 1991, he issued a direct mail appeal for money late last year: “They’re trying to kill us. . . . They want to destroy us financially, using the legal system that’s supposed to work fairly for all of us.” In 1986, the union had a budget of $3 million, more than two-thirds of which came from members’ dues. In 1990, the union collected $2 million, half of which came from donations raised by direct mail pitches, the union’s financial reports show.

His followers held out hope Friday that the movement Chavez nurtured for more than 30 years would be reinvigorated.

“Cesar’s death will spark a new phase of organizing,” said Patrick Henning, chief consultant to the Assembly Labor Committee and chair of a UFW committee that resolves internal disputes.

A close confidant of Robert F. Kennedy, Chavez in his heyday wielded the union’s prestige as a formidable political tool on behalf of liberal Democrats, especially those courting the Latino vote.

One of his biggest successes was the passage of the Agriculture Labor Relations Act, the strongest law ever enacted to protect farm workers.

But in 1979 and 1980, Chavez enmeshed himself in a bitter fight over the speakership of the California Assembly, throwing his support behind then-Assemblyman Howard L. Berman, who had authored the Agricultural Labor Relations Act.

The Berman forces lost in part when two lawmakers from the Eastside of Los Angeles, state Sen. Torres and Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre, switched their support to Willie Brown.

Chavez sought revenge by lending campaign help to challengers of Torres, but he was unsuccessful and the union’s political clout was viewed by some as being on the wane.

Morain reported from Sacramento and Arax from Fresno. Times researcher Nona Yates also contributed to this story.