United Farm Workers
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| United Farm Workers of America | |
| Founded | 1962 |
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| Country | United States |
| Affiliation | Change to Win Federation |
| Key people | Arturo Rodriguez, president |
| Office location | Keene, California |
| Website | www.ufw.org |
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The United Farm Workers of America (UFW) is a labor union that evolved from unions founded in 1962 by César Chávez, Philip Vera Cruz, Dolores Huerta, and Larry Itliong. This union changed from a workers' rights organization that helped workers get unemployment insurance to that of a union of farmworkers almost overnight, when the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) went out on strike in support of the mostly Filipino farmworkers of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) led by Larry Itliong in Delano, California who had previously initiated a grape strike on September 8th, 1965. The NFWA and the AWOC, recognizing their common goals and methods, and realizing the strengths of coalition formation, jointly formed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee on August 22, 1966. [1] This organization eventually became the United Farm Workers and launched a boycott of table grapes that, after five years of struggle, finally won a contract with the major grape growers in California.
The union then brought in thousands more lettuce workers in the Salinas and Imperial Valleys and orange workers in Florida employed by subsidiaries of Coca-Cola.
The union publicly adopted the principles of non-violence championed by Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Chávez used fasts both as means of drawing public attention to the union's cause and to assert control over an often unruly union. However, it also resorted to both sabotage and violence, including such things as nail "stars" scattered over roadways and throughout crops to flatten tires, two-by-fours straddled off either side of vehicles running between rows of grapes destroying the crops, mobs blocking roads and crop rows, attacking people in their vehicles and other such violence typical of the 1930's union fights. These measures were used not only against large corporate growers in Tulare, and Kern Counties, California, but also against small "mom & pop" family farmers with less than 10 acres (40,000 m²) in places such as Parlier. The union was poised to launch its next major campaign in the orange fields in 1973 when a deal between the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the growers nearly destroyed it. The growers signed contracts giving the Teamsters the right to represent the workers who had been members of the UFW.
The UFW responded with strikes, lawsuits and boycotts, including secondary boycotts in the retail grocery industry. The union struggled to regain the members it had lost in the lettuce field; it never fully recovered its strength in grapes, due in some part to incompetent management of the hiring halls it had established that seemed to favor some workers over others.
The battles in the fields became violent, with a number of UFW members killed on the picket line. The violence led the state in 1975 to try to find a solution for these problems by creating an administrative agency, the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, to enforce a law modeled on the National Labor Relations Act that would channel these disputes into more peaceful forms.
On July 22nd, 2005 the UFW announced that it was joining the Change to Win Federation, a coalition of labor unions functioning as an alternative to the AFL-CIO. On January 13th, 2006, the union officially disaffiliated from the AFL-CIO. In contrast to other Change to Win-affiliated unions, the AFL-CIO neglected to offer the right of affiliation to regional bodies to the UFW. [1]
[edit] References and Notes
[edit] Further reading
- Eugene Nelson, "Huelga! The First One Hundred Days of the Delano Grape Strike"
- David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors. University of California Press: Berkeley. c. 1995
- Farmworkers Reap Little as Union Strays From Its Roots, Part I of LA Times series, January 8th, 2006
- Cesar's Ghost: Rise and Fall of the UFW, The Nation., July 26th, 1993
[edit] External links
- Official Website
- Farmworker Movement Documentation Project
- United Farm Workers Union: 1965 Grape Boycott Case Study - University of California, Berkeley
- California UFW collective bargaining agreements - A searchable and browseable collection from the UC Davis Library.
- Unite Farm Workers Union Entry, Encyclopedia of Texas Online Edition
- University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections - Vietnam War Era Ephemera This collection contains leaflets and newspapers that were distributed on the University of Washington campus during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Includes ephemera from the United Farm Workers.
- http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/exhibits/fw/ufw1.html
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