The UFW Gets Back to Its Roots

On the front lines of the resurgent United Farm Workers union, there is no escaping the past.

Cesar Chavez, the union’s deceased founder and patron saint, is everywhere, his face on placards, T-shirts and buttons, his name invoked as a battle cry.

“Cesar Chavez!” the union’s new leader, Arturo Rodriguez, shouted at a recent rally to organize rose workers here. “Presente!” the huddled campesinos roared back. Cesar is still with us.

But it is Rodriguez, Chavez’s 46-year-old son-in-law, whose presence is now being felt across the rich agricultural lands of Central California. With an unassuming style that always pays homage to his late mentor, Rodriguez has turned the once-dying UFW into a bright light of the struggling American labor movement.

The union has won 13 straight elections on farms in California and Washington state and brought 4,000 workers into the fold. That success contrasts with Chavez’s final years when he was concerned more with pesticides and boycotting grapes than with organizing in the fields, and membership dwindled to at most 15,000 workers.

Today the union’s exact strength--which at its peak exceeded 100,000 members--is a matter of contention, and some in agriculture consider its clout minimal. But national labor leaders are again watching events in the San Joaquin Valley with interest.

“With their string of victories, the UFW has become a sparkling example of a new spirit in labor,” said John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO. “Cesar will always be the one we look to for inspiration, but Arturo is implementing a lot of what Cesar would have liked to have done.”

Said Richard Trumka, former head of the United Mine Workers of America: “Arturo has put his own stamp and personality on the union. He’s taken the best from Cesar and the best from himself and put together a winning combination.”

The radical idea of a union for farm workers was born in the vineyards around Delano and nurtured by Chavez, an Arizona-born field hand. In 1966, he led the new United Farm Workers on a march up the valley to Sacramento, and through fasts, boycotts and strikes--huelgas--they forced the nation to think about the mostly Latino families who picked its food.

Chavez became globally respected if not universally admired, and his cause a liberal favorite--he gave the speech nominating Gov. Jerry Brown for president at the 1976 Democratic convention. After Chavez died in his sleep in April 1993 at age 66, his body was carried through these fields in a procession 35,000 strong.

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Where Chavez tried to build a social movement, Rodriguez has returned the UFW to its roots in the fields. Roving the San Joaquin Valley in cowboy boots and Wrangler blue jeans, a vestige of his Texas youth, Rodriguez focuses on more realistic, if humble, goals.

Acknowledging that the UFW no longer holds much sway with workers in the big grape vineyards and fruit orchards, Rodriguez has targeted smaller industries such as roses and mushrooms. The union claims to represent half the rose workers in the state and two-thirds of the mushroom workers along the Central Coast.

By organizing a sizable portion of a particular industry, Rodriguez says, one grower can no longer argue that a union contract means he cannot compete with the grower down the road. He also sounds conciliatory about the struggles of farmers.

“We want to work closely with growers in a way that benefits both them and the farm worker,” he said. “The last thing we want is for them to go out of business.”

Skeptics say Rodriguez’s look of a winner is an illusion because he has targeted the weakest growers and barely made a ripple in the ocean of 350,000 permanent farm workers in the state. The true tests, they say, are the grape and tree fruit industries.

“I haven’t seen any activity at all,” said Tom Phillips of the Western Growers Assn. in the central San Joaquin Valley. “We keep hearing about a resurgence of the UFW, but none of our growers has reported being affected by union activity.”

“As far as the UFW is concerned, we haven’t seen or heard a thing,” said Bruce Obbink of the California Table Grape Commission. “They seem to be picking and choosing smaller targets.”

Rodriguez smiles a crafty grin that seems to say “just wait.” He may not have the benefit of Chavez’s charisma or moral authority, but he does have a plan. “We understand that there’s no way you can build a union for farm workers without organizing the grape, tree fruit and citrus growers. Right now we’re deciding which ones we should target.”

Rodriguez grew up in San Antonio, the eldest of seven children. His father was a sheet metal worker and his mother returned to college in her 40s, earned her credential and became a teacher. He was a small, skinny altar boy who excelled in baseball and football and earned the nickname “Happy Monster” because he smiled whenever he made a ferocious tackle.

Unlike his mentor, Rodriguez never toiled in the fields. His introduction to the UFW came during a Chavez-led march through the Rio Grande Valley in 1966. Seven years later, as a graduate student in sociology at the University of Michigan, he helped with the nationwide grape boycott that was a milestone for the union.

One of the volunteers shipped out from the West Coast was Chavez’s second daughter, Linda. She recalls being struck by Rodriguez’s passion and dedication. Invariably, he was the one who brought in the most money and organized the most picket lines. They married a year later and moved to La Paz, the UFW’s compound in the Tehachapi Mountains 100 miles north of Los Angeles.

“Arturo was a workaholic before he became president,” said Linda Chavez Rodriguez. “Now he’s dedicating 110% of his time and energy to fulfilling my dad’s dream of a national union for farm workers.”

After Chavez’s death, many figured it was time to write the union’s obituary. Even longtime supporters--recalling the early 1970s when the UFW had contracts with 80% of the valley grape growers--found little reason for optimism.

An almost singular focus on the grape boycott and the issue of toxic pesticides had isolated Chavez and the union from fieldworkers. Most of the money came not from dues-paying farm workers but from admirers. Not a single contract with grape growers remained when Chavez died.

The union blamed its troubles on changing political winds. Gov. George Deukmejian had gutted the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board, the agency used by Brown, his predecessor, to protect farm workers’ right to organize and bargain for union contracts.

But Rodriguez also seemed to recognize that fault lay within. In early 1994, he and union co-founder Dolores Huerta huddled in strategy sessions at La Paz. They emerged a few weeks later with a major shift in strategy, though they were reluctant to call it such out of concern that it would reflect unkindly on Chavez.

The grape boycott would no longer be the union’s centerpiece. They would return to the difficult task of organizing farm workers, enlisting new members, confronting growers and pushing for new union elections and contracts.

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The new era kicked off in spring 1994 with a symbolic Delano-to-Sacramento march that retraced the path of the union’s first trek. “At each stop in the pilgrimage, I could sense the same frustrations about falling wages and lack of health benefits and abuses by labor contractors,” Rodriguez said. “I could feel an urgency. The time was right.”

He said the UFW has signed up 10,000 new associate members since Chavez’s death. These are workers who pay an annual $20 fee for services such as income tax preparation, but who are not represented by the union.

How many workers the union now represents is a matter of dispute. Rodriguez says 24,000; critics say the number is closer to 12,000. But as a percentage of its base, the UFW has grown more than any other union in the country since 1994, according to Richard Bensinger, director of organizing for the AFL-CIO.

“Now if the American labor movement could expand by that much, we’d be talking millions of new members,” Bensinger said.

These gains are impressive, supporters say, when you consider that the union draws from a migratory work force that is poor and constantly replenished by newcomers from Mexico and Central America willing to toil in back-breaking conditions for low pay.

That illegal Latino immigration actually hurts the union cause is one of those uncomfortable truths that the UFW tries not to discuss. “It’s tough to organize farm workers when there’s a steady stream of undocumented workers entering the country,” said Phillip Martin, an agricultural economist at UC Davis. “Wages are kept down and there’s never a labor shortage.”

Managing a union that some consider a social-political movement requires a balancing act: Rodriguez must honor the legacy and keep the best parts of the union’s past without being hobbled by Chavez’s legend and often-grandiose designs.

When he confronts a tough problem, Rodriguez says he sometimes rises from his desk at La Paz and walks outside to the simple plot where Chavez is buried, and consults with his ghost. At rallies and speeches, he never misses a chance to call upon Chavez’s name or spirit.

Rodriguez said he believes that Chavez came to believe that the grape boycott was no longer an effective tool by itself and that the UFW would have to return to its roots.

Shortly before he died, Chavez led grape worker walkouts over low wages in the Coachella Valley. “Cesar knew the farm workers were once again ready to take direct action,” Rodriguez said. “I know what he was thinking. I spent more time with him than I did with my wife and children.”

After a series of election wins on vegetable and fruit farms in Oxnard, Coachella, Hanford and Santa Rosa in 1994, Rodriguez decided to target California’s rose-growing industry, which is based in western Kern County.

He began with Bear Creek Production Co., one of the country’s biggest and oldest rosebush producers, now owned by a Japanese pharmaceutical giant. Workers in the field complained that they had not received a raise in more than a decade. On the packing line, employees were losing wages because of rigorous performance demands that docked pay for any small mistake.

Twice in the 1970s the UFW had tried and failed to organize Bear Creek. This time, the clandestine organizing campaign took off quickly with union leaflets passed hand to hand and workers meeting at night in their homes.

Caught off-guard, Bear Creek tried to mount a counter-campaign, but it fell short. The union won the election, 648 to 433. The company immediately announced that it would forgo its right to challenge the election with the farm labor board.

“From election to contract, it took only three months,” said Huerta, the UFW vice president who led the negotiations. “The company deserves a lot of credit for bargaining in good faith.”

Under Rodriguez, the union is making better use of Radio Campesina, a chain of stations based in the San Joaquin Valley and run by Chavez’s middle son, Paul. It mixes news and union talk with Mexican ranchera music and phone calls from fieldworkers who vent frustration over such issues as labor contractors owing them money and foremen sexually harassing female workers.

Disc jockeys from the stations drive field to field in their vans, visiting crews during lunch breaks and handing out free tacos, enchiladas, compact discs and soft drinks provided by sponsors. This has prompted cries of protest from growers who accuse the union of bribing workers to support the union.

“With all the abuses farm workers face, it’s ironic that this powerful industry is worried about passing out food in the fields,” Rodriguez said.

“This isn’t about tacos and enchiladas. It’s about organizing and winning basic rights for the poorest workers in America.”