Cesar Chavez

Question:  During the three years you had contracts here, what were some of the changes you were able to start?

Chavez:  Oh well, the right to have bathrooms in the fields, especially for women; the whole idea of having clean portable ice cold water with individual drinking cups; ten minute rest periods; no more mass firings.

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION FILES

APPROXIMATELY FIFTEEN INDIVIDUALS PARTICIPATED IN A DEMONSTRATION AT THE FEDERAL BUILDING IN DOWNTOWN PITTSBURGH, P.A., SPONSORED BY THE UNITED FARM WORKERS ORGANIZING COMMITTEE (UFWOC).

SOURCE FURTHER ADVISED DEMONSTRATION WAS HELD TO PROTEST THE PROCUREMENT OF BOYCOTTED LETTUCE BY THE U.S. ARMY. THE U.S. ARMY, IT IS NOTED, MAINTAINS OFFICES IN THE FEDERAL BUILDING.

PARTICIPANTS CARRIED SIGNS AND DISTRIBUTED LEAFLETS DENOUNCING THE PURCHASE OF SCAB LETTUCE BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT FOR CONSUMPTION BY MILITARY PERSONNEL....

PITTSBURGH POLICE DEPARTMENT COGNIZANT. ABOVE INFORMATION FURNISHED TO ARMY INTELLIGENCE, SECRET SERVICE, OSI, AND USA, ALL PITTSBURGH, P.A.; AND NISO, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA.

On January fourteen instant [1971-dwd], a representative of the one hundred fifteenth military intelligence group, Fort Lawton, Washington, reported about thirty hippie-type individuals, some of whom were carrying picket signs, appeared at main gate of Fort Lewis, Washington. They were refused and told to disperse.

Some of the signs indicated the group represented the United Farm Workers. They urged that 'scab' lettuce be removed from the mess halls. Following their failure to disperse, demonstrators were temporarily detained by military police for identification purposes. Names and identifying data not available at time of this communication.

Above furnished to U.S. Attorney, Secret Service, and Military Intelligence Agencies covering the Seattle-Fort Lewis area.

2014 POSTSCRIPT

LINKS

Eight years ago, a struggling Farm Workers Association joined the Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in a strike against the grape growers in Delano, California. Together they called themselves the United Farm Workers and their five years of striking and boycotting won the original contracts with the table grape industry. The 1970 union agreement raised base pay from $1.20 an hour to $2.05 and ended the ten to twenty cent kickback to the labor contractor by creating the first hiring hall in grape growing history.

The three-year contracts expired early this year, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America moved in to sign contracts with the growers covering the grape workers. None of the field workers had been consulted in advance by the Teamsters or by the growers about the new contracts. As soon as it became clear that the growers had signed "sweetheart" agreements with the Teamsters, Cesar Chavez, United Farm Workers Union national chairman, responded by calling a strike.

Thousands left the fields as the strike and harvest moved northward from the Coachella Valley to Arvin, Lamont, Delano, and the San Joaquin Valley. The growers responded with court injunctions severely limiting picketing and strike activity, while the Teamsters simply hired what reporter Harry Bernstein called "thugs who ride herd on workers threatening to strike much as cowboys ride herd on restless cattle."
.....
"By our position of nonviolence, the Teamsters stood out like a sore thumb," Bill Encinas explained. Bill, a United Farm Worker Union organizer, was referring to Teamster attacks on the UFW picket lines in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. The UFW is engaged in a fight for survival. After a five-year struggle and a national grape boycott, the 1970 contracts the UFW signed with grape growers, now expiring, are going to the Teamsters.

Before embarking on the story of the present battle, it's important to place the whole Farm Worker vs. Teamster struggle in its real national perspective. Consider the following chronology.

In late November, 1972, less than a month after his re-election, [President Richard] Nixon met with Teamster President Frank Fitzsimmons at the San Clemente White House. Present at the meeting was Charles Colson, who, besides leading the Administration’s "dirty tricks" department, was the chief architect of Nixon's labor policies.

On December 9, the Teamsters announced they were switching their $100,000-a-year legal business from the Democratic Party-related Washington law firm of Williams, Connolly and Califano to the Republican-related firm of Morin, Dickstein, Shapiro, and Galligan. That same day, it was disclosed that Charles Colson would join the Morin firm soon after he left the White House in March, 1973.

On December 12, Fitzsimmons spoke before the American Farm Bureau Federation's annual convention in Los Angeles, stating that he would "welcome an alliance" with agribusiness interests. Fitzsimmons acknowledged that his appearance at the convention of American agribusiness' primary lobbying body had been arranged by Laurence Sibelman, Nixon's Undersecretary of Labor.

Several days later, the Western Conference of Teamsters announced that it had renegotiated with lettuce growers un-expired 1970 lettuce contracts which covered almost 30,000 workers in California and Arizona. Later in December, the California Supreme Court upheld the UFW contention that those 1970 lettuce contracts between growers and Teamsters were "sweetheart contracts" which did not represent the workers.

Whether or not it was in December, 1972, when Teamster officials began meeting with California grape growers as well, the contracts began soon. By mid-April, 1973, the Teamsters and the grape growers of the Coachella Valley announced the signing of contracts covering nearly 80% of the valley’s grape workers, this within just 12 hours of the expiration of the 3-year UFW contracts. This signing began in earnest the joint effort of agribusiness, the Teamsters and the Nixon administration to destroy Cesar Chavez's 40,000-member union. At the time, the base of the UFW's strength -- and 30,000 of its members -- was in California's table grape vineyards.

That's how the current battle was joined, a battle between the Teamsters (led by Fitzsimmons, paid $125,000 a year plus expenses and a private jet by his union) and the UFW (led by Chavez, paid $5,144 in 1972 by his union, including $1,904 for medical expenses resulting from his Arizona fast). And unless the UFW can muster the nationwide public support it has won in the past, this is a battle which will dramatically cut back the gains of the farm workers over the last eight years in wages, working conditions and protection against pesticides.


Priest Beaten

When Cesar Chavez and the union membership -- charging collusion between the growers and the Teamsters that has now resulted in a grand jury inquiry -- called a strike, the Teamsters responded by hiring (at $67 a day plus expenses) quite a number of short-fused, anger-oriented "guards." For three months, a daily drama was re-enacted between hundreds of UFW strikers, clinging to nonviolence, and Teamster guards who have often moved quickly from threats and taunts to physical attack.

F[athe]r John Bank, whose nose is presently hidden under a mass of bandages, was beaten badly by Teamster employees in a Coachella restaurant. He described to me 40 separate minor Teamster attacks -- mostly in June -- in which arrests were made by police, as well as one major Teamster attack. The latter assault resulted in the injury of more than two dozen UFW strikers. "The union leadership was nonviolent in every instance," Fr. Bank commented, despite the use of iron pipes, bat-sized wooden stakes and even iron chains by the Teamster "guards."

Most of these "guards" were recruited from Teamster locals in the Los Angeles area. Bud Novinn, of LA Teamster Local #208, told me that an International Teamster Union official (identified by Carlos Valdez, business representative of #208, as Ray Griego) "Offered to give me $100 a day to go down there (Coachella) against the farm workers." According to Novinn, Griego "recruited men who were broke and needed the money," telling them they were going to Coachella to protect the Teamsters working there. "Most of us didn't even realize there was a strike going on," Novinn recalls, adding that many of his fellow Teamsters left Coachella as soon as they learned what was really happening.

Unfortunately, not all Griego's recruits returned to Los Angeles, and the UFW has charged that their "guards" were engaged in a systematic reign of terror aimed at intimidating both the strikers and the strike-breakers -- and at attempting to provoke the UFW supporters to retaliatory violence.

"In one memorable scene," writes Harry Bernstein, LA Times labor reporter, "a Catholic priest was leading a large crowd of Mexican-American workers in prayer. The workers were kneeling in the dust. Facing them, standing, was a line of a dozen beefy Anglos, several with dark glasses, staring contemptuously at the praying workers. The Teamsters 'muscle,' in white T-shirts, hard hats, and blue jackets with 'Teamsters' emblazoned on the back, had been hired for $50 a day, plus expenses. Most were armed with bats, hoe handles, sharpened grape stakes, and other weapons which were later confiscated by sheriff's deputies. With such enforcers, growers felt workers would stay in the field, and many did."

.....From June 19-26, the following events occurred in Coachella: a UFW member's car was blown up by a home-made bomb; a strike-breaker, mistakenly identified as UFW, was kidnapped, beaten and stabbed six times with an ice pick; Cesar Chavez's car was stoned by "guards," a striker's trailer house was burned down; several strikers' cars were forced off the roads and their occupants attacked by Teamster "guards." The most serious attack that week took place June 23 when almost 200 Teamsters attacked a UFW picket line of 100-150 men, women and children with lead pipes, knives and clubs, injuring 35, hospitalizing four. Still, the strike continued. According to Fr. Bank, "There were more than 1,400 registered strikers who picketed daily. With the 900 workers at the two ranches under UFW contract, that means that we had 2,300 workers who directly supported the union in Coachella out of a total work force of 3,800."

Chavez's goal in Coachella was to block picking or shipping, through the strike, of as many as possible of the normal table grape shipment of 3,000,000 boxes from the Coachella Valley, and to go for a massive consumer boycott on those which slip through. Already, Fr. Bank claims a partial success, saying that because of the strike much of Coachella's grape harvest hasn't met the federal sweetness standards, and the price for grapes has generally dropped below the growers' break-even profit point of $7.50/box.


"We're going to send you all home today..."

After Coachella in early June, the next front was the Arvin-Lamont region (near Bakersfield) where grape ranchers also abandoned their expiring UFW contracts in favor of new Teamster pacts. Here, in the San Joaquin Valley, the UFW is up against both the Teamsters and some agribusiness giants with potent political connections. Roberts Farms, one of the largest grape growers in the Lamont to Delano area, is managed by Hollis Roberts, whose chief financial backer is C. Arnholt Smith. Smith, a San Diego businessman and close personal friend of Nixon, recently made the news when his financial empire was attacked by the SEC, the IRS and the Justice Department for a variety of alleged improprieties. Also in the area is Tenneco, the huge conglomerate which ranks #26 on the Fortune magazine list of the top 500 U.S. corporations.

The Lamont signings with the Teamsters brought on an instant replay of Coachella: UFW strike, pickets, injunctions, Teamster "guards" and subsequent violence. On June 28, just five days after a similar attack in Coachella, there was large-scale violence at the Kovacavich ranch near Lamont. More than 90 people were injured when some 40 Teamster "guards" charged a UFW picket line.

...Unlike the Coachella attack, in Lamont sheriff's deputies intervened and arrested 30 of the Teamster "guards" on charges ranging from assault with a deadly weapon, assault and battery, to disturbing the peace. But later, on July 12, the Kern County DA's office told UFW lawyer Jerry Cohen that the felony charges would be dropped, and only the disturbing the peace charge was to be pressed.


"Rural California is like Mississippi."

Shortly after the June 28 attack in Lamont, William Grami, director of organizing for the Western Conference of Teamsters, announced that the "guards" were being removed, but defended their use. "Law enforcement in those areas," he claimed, "was not adequate to protect workers from intimidation, harassment and physical violence by UFW supporters." He went on to say the Teamsters were now satisfied with local law enforcement, and called on the UFW leaders to "enforce their policy of nonviolence." This is the same William Grami who whimsically told Harry Bernstein that "Sometimes I feel like one of those hired gunslingers you see in old Western cowboy movies." ("But," adds Bernstein, "the men who hired the Teamsters are not hapless ranchers [in need of a gunslinger]. They are corporate owners who are faced with the prospect of losing control of work force which for decades has accepted backbreaking jobs in almost stolid silence at below-poverty wages.")

In the words of UFW lawyer Jerry Cohen: "The whole power of the county is lined up against us to break our strike. Sheriffs act like a private army of the growers. Most people don't realize that it's like the South during the early '60's around here. Rural California is like Mississippi."

The departure of the "guards" didn't end the Lamont violence. On July 10, for example, a man (later identified by a local bar owner as a Teamster organizer) smashed the windows of the Lamont UFW storefront office. And on July 13 an employee of the Sabovich ranch near Lamont sprayed a UFW picket line of some 150 people with a chemical pesticide.

According to picketers at the scene, the employee, Marle Pace, drove a tractor out of a vineyard onto a highway in front of the picket line and started spraying. More than a dozen people immediately began vomiting; 18 women and two men were sufficiently affected to be taken to the Delano UFW clinic, and two were kept there for several days. UFW striker Maria Saenz described for me what happened next: "Two of the cops stopped him and talked to him for about five minutes, and then he took off without being arrested or anything."

By mid-July, with the grape harvest at hand, Lamont growers went to court to strengthen their position. And on July 12 Kern County Judge John N. Naim tightened the restrictions on strikers, restricting picket lines to 25 people, each person at least 100 feet from the next, and prohibiting use of the bullhorn (the primary way of communicating with strike-breakers in the field) more than one hour a day. Faced with these restrictions, the UFW strikers defied the injunction and the mass arrests began -- more than 2,000 between July 18-21 alone. "We're out picketing to convince the strike-breakers to come out of the fields," argues John Ganza, one of the arrested workers. "If you read the injunction, all we can do is to stand out there with a flag."

Cesar Chavez, who has faced this kind of odds many times before, retains a strong public optimism: "We have more support now than at any time in the history of our movement," he's quick to proclaim. And in the strike area itself, the support is in fact becoming visible, particularly from the Catholic church and several liberal Protestant denominations.