A David vs. Goliath Battle in the Fields of Delano

In Las Vegas, the line was running 3 to 1 against Cesar Chavez and his upstart labor union. And with good reason.

As head of the newly formed United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, Chavez had been waging an unprecedented campaign to unionize laborers at the Di Giorgio Corp., a huge Delano-based grape grower.

And in doing so, he had forced the first union representation election ever held in agriculture, a head-to-head free-for-all against the mighty International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

It was David vs. Goliath. And for Chavez, the very survival of his fledgling farm workers union was at stake.

Although it had only $100 in the bank and a small band of dues-paying members, the farm workers union would scratch out a decisive victory in Delano that would launch what would become one of the most important labor movements in the state’s history.

Indeed, that victory in the fields catapulted Chavez and the UFW to national prominence. Chavez, the son of immigrant farm workers who had been jailed for trespassing during the organizing drive, would soon find his picture on the cover of Time Magazine and count the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. among his supporters.

That made sense. Chavez had adopted King’s tactics of nonviolent Christian activism, along with Mohandas K. Gandhi’s practice of fasting to gain support for his cause: getting better working conditions for farm laborers, who at that time worked for a fraction of minimum wage in fields where they would be sprayed by crop dusters along with the crops.

Just as important, that single triumph would kick off the cultural renaissance known as El Movimiento, a Chicano civil rights campaign that would add a third hue to the American dialogue about race relations, which at that time were turbulent at best and largely defined in shades of black and white.

“That vote absolutely put us on the map and established Cesar as a bona fide labor leader,” said Dolores Huerta, the union’s co-founder and still its vice president.

There was no way that the newspaper story at the time--played halfway down the front page, bordered by stories of racial violence in Michigan and a boycott by whites of integrated schools in Louisiana--could have begun to capture the significance of the vote.

In its wake would follow bitter and often brutal battles out on the picket lines and the massive grape boycotts that would galvanize public support for farm workers and bring many growers to their knees. Yet, more than 30 years later, the UFW would have lost a good deal of its influence and would be struggling to remain a force in California agriculture.

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Some say the union’s power was eroded by years of unfavorable rulings by a Republican-controlled Agricultural Labor Relations Board. Others say the union--like much of the American labor movement as a whole--simply lost touch with workers over the years, becoming largely irrelevant to new waves of immigrants stooping in the fields.

But that was a long way in the future from the farm workers election at Di Giorgio.

In a 1975 biography by Jacques E. Levy, Chavez recalled the grower’s attempts to thwart the organizing efforts of the UFW, then known as the National Farm Workers Assn. Those efforts began in 1965 with a strike and a work slowdown against Di Giorgio.

The company’s response was to invite the Teamsters to unionize the work force. According to the biography, Chavez knew that past strikes had been broken when growers signed with the Teamsters. And he feared if that happened at Di Giorgio, the entire struggle would be lost.

In fact, it was close to slipping away just a few months earlier when the company called a quick election as Chavez was working to build support. That election featured Chavez’s farm workers union, the AFL-CIO-backed Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the Teamsters.

Chavez was so infuriated by the ploy to undermine his group’s influence that his organization boycotted the election. The Teamsters won that vote but intervention by then-Gov. Pat Brown forced another election to take place.

By the time September rolled around, Chavez’s farm worker association and the AFL-CIO organizing committee had agreed to merge, assuring a solid bloc of support for the newly formed United Farm Workers Organizing Committee.

Their victory would result in a union contract that provided the first medical plan for farm workers.

It would be a short-lived victory. Di Giorgio, which has since been acquired by a New Jersey investor, sold its vineyard two years later, a move that dissolved the union’s contract. But by then, Chavez had used the vote at Di Giorgio to step up organizing efforts across the rest of the state.