A "Union of Their Dreams" Becomes a Nightmare: Has UFW
History Been Replayed in SEIU?
by Steve Early,
Jacobin, Spring 2011
http://jacobinmag.com/archive/issue2/early.html
No modern American union boasts a larger alumni association
or a bigger shelf of books about itself than the United Farm
Workers (UFW).
Even at its membership peak thirty years ago, this
relatively small labor organization never represented more
than 100,000 workers. Yet, in the 1960s and '70s, the UFW
commanded the loyalty of many hundreds of thousands of
strike and boycott supporters throughout the U.S. and
Canada. While the union is now a shell of its former self,
the UFW diaspora - from young organizers who flocked to
its banner to key farm worker activists shaped by its
struggles - remain an influential generational cohort in
many other fields: public interest law, liberal academia,
California politics, labor and community organizing, social
change philanthropy and the ministry. Like the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU) several decades later,
with its "Justice for Janitors" campaigns, the UFW generated
widespread public sympathy and support because it championed
low-paid, much-exploited workers - people of color
courageously struggling for dignity and respect on the job.
Its original multi-racial campaigns were inspiring and their
legacy is lasting.
Most other late 20th century labor organizations had an
inadequate social justice orientation and a far more insular
approach; at best, they tried to improve workplace
conditions for their own members, in a single occupation or
industrial sector, and helped secure protective labor
legislation for everyone else. Their appeals for solidarity
from non-labor groups tended to be few in number and
transactional in nature. Few unions, except during the
1930s, ever became such an important training ground for
future organizers of all kinds or built as many lasting ties
with far-flung community allies.
As San Francisco lawyer, journalist, and housing activist
Randy Shaw documents in Beyond The Fields, there is a strong
historical link between the UFW in its heyday and myriad
forms of progressive activism today. UFW alumni, ideas, and
strategies have influenced Latino political empowerment, the
immigrant rights movement, union membership growth, and on-
going coalitions between labor, community, campus, and
religious groups. During the 2008 presidential race, the
union's old rallying cry--"Yes, we can!"-- even became the
campaign theme of a former community organizer from Chicago
who now resides in the White House. The same determined
chant can still be heard, in its original Spanish, at
marches, rallies, and union events involving Latino workers
throughout the country.
Shaw's book, and those by Miriam Pawel and Marshall Ganz,
are not in the cheerleading tradition of earlier volumes
written during the UFW's glory days. Other writers about the
union, including John Gregory Dunne, Jacques Levy, and Peter
Matthiessen tended to be ardent admirers of its founder and
president, César Chávez. The latest literature about farm
worker unionism in California tries to explain, in more
complex ways, how the union achieved its remarkable early
success but then, ended up in a 30-year downward spiral.
Such questions are not just a matter of historical interest
to academics and journalists. And they're not just the
personal concern of the many people, once connected to the
union, who have contributed their own vivid memories and
postmortems to Leroy Chatfield's unusual online archive, the
Farmworker Movement Documentation Project.
In California and elsewhere over the last several years,
Farm Worker veterans have found themselves on opposite sides
of the barricades in the biggest inter and intra-union
conflicts since the UFW squared off against the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters, when it became an
agribusiness-ally four decades ago. These high-profile
fights have, ironically, involved the two unions - SEIU and
UNITE-HERE - which have the most UFW alumni in their
leadership and staff. The deep disagreements about union
structure and strategy that triggered recent civil warfare,
within labor's progressive wing, contain a distinct echo of
the internal tensions and struggles within the UFW recounted
by Shaw, Ganz, and Pawel. Controversy over the role of union
democracy, membership dissent, and charismatic leadership is
very much alive and still unresolved in the labor movement
today.
Even for authors less focused on the UFW's founding father,
it's hard to separate the UFW saga from the compelling
personal story of César Chávez. All the books under review
here recount, in different ways, his legendary career as a
trade unionist. No novice as an organizer, Chávez spent
nearly a decade knocking on doors in urban and rural barrios
to build community organization throughout California.
Before that, he had been a rebellious teenager, working in
the fields alongside his family and chafing at "Whites Only"
signs in restaurants and the "colored sections" in movie
theaters, where Mexican-Americans and Filipinos were
consigned, along with Blacks. In the 1940s and 50s, Chicanos
faced a humiliating system of discrimination in jobs,
schools, housing, and public accommodations that would have
been very familiar to African-Americans in the
segregationist South.
Chávez responded to these conditions by becoming a voting
rights activist. Under the tutelage of Fred Ross, an apostle
of Saul Alinsky-style grassroots organizing, Chávez
succeeded in mobilizing tens of thousands of Mexican-
Americans to register to vote and use their newly acquired
political clout to deal with issues ranging from potholes to
police brutality. In 1962, he set aside voter registration
and political agitation to organize farm workers. His
fledgling National Farm Workers Association (later to become
the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee and then the
UFW) faced competition from several other groups; at the
time, none seemed capable of breaking with California's long
history of failed unionization efforts in agriculture
throughout the first half of the 20th century.
Agribusiness didn't come to the bargaining table quickly or
easily. Powerful growers of fruits and vegetables had every
reason to believe they would never have to negotiate with
Chávez's organization, or any other. Farm workers lacked any
rights under the National Labor Relations Act, which covers
most non-agricultural workers in the private sector. Before
1975, this left them with no mechanism for securing union
recognition, other than conducting strikes and consumer
boycotts. Workers had no legal recourse if they were fired
for union activity, a penalty which also included eviction
and black-listing of entire families from grower-owned
migrant labor camps. When grape or lettuce pickers walked
off the job to join UFW picket lines, they faced court
injunctions, damage suits, mass arrests, deadly physical
attacks by hired guards, and the widespread hostility of
racist local cops.
How Chávez, his union, and their diverse allies overcame
such formidable obstacles was not only inspirational. As
Shaw and Ganz both note, the UFW provided useable models for
later campaigning by other unions, which have focused on
sectors of the economy where Spanish-speaking immigrants
migrated, in large numbers, when their employment options
were no longer limited to back-breaking agricultural labor.
More than any other union in the past half-century, the UFW
creatively employed recognition walk-outs, consumer
boycotts, hunger strikes, long distance marches, vigils, and
creative disruptions of all kinds to win its first
contracts.
Chávez's own public persona contributed much to the union's
appeal. Deeply religious, the UFW president was, like Martin
Luther King, Jr., a home-grown Ghandian frequently
criticized, as King was, for opposing the war in Vietnam. In
1968, as strike-related confrontations swirled around him,
Chávez embarked on the first of many widely-publicized fasts
to demonstrate the power of moral witness and non-violent
action. California farm workers became a national cause
célèbre that attracted college students, civil rights
activists, liberal clergy, and political figures like Robert
Kennedy, who conducted U. S. Senate hearings on working
conditions in the vineyards of Delano and visited Chávez
when he ended his fast.
Among the cross-over talents drawn to the union from a
background in campus and civil rights organizing was the
author of Why David Sometimes Wins. A Bakersfield native and
son of a local rabbi, Marshall Ganz participated in the
"Freedom Summer" campaign in Mississippi in 1964. He dropped
out of Harvard to work full-time for the civil rights
movement and had his first contact with unions during a
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) training
session at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. When he
returned home to California, Ganz observed, in Shaw's words,
"that the plight of California's rural farm workers involved
many of the same injustices he had witnessed being
perpetrated against black people in the South." Ganz played
a major role in building the UFW over the next sixteen
years, becoming its organizing director and an executive
board member before leaving in 1981.
Within the ranks of the UFW, many indigenous militants
emerged under the tutelage of Chávez, his co-worker Dolores
Huerta, and recruits from the outside like Ganz. Some, like
Eliseo Medina who is profiled in Pawel's book, went on to
careers in labor lasting far longer than Ganz's. When
Medina first showed up at a UFW hiring hall in 1966, he was
only 19-years old and seeking work as a grape picker.
Instead, he was recruited by Huerta to help win a hotly-
contested union representation vote at DiGiorgio
Corporation, an agricultural conglomerate then the largest
grape grower in the Delano area. As the target of a UFW
strike and boycott, DiGiorgio favored the management-
friendly Teamsters. IBT goons surrounded Medina in a UFW
sound-truck, smashing his face and sending him to the
hospital to get four stitches in his lip. Nevertheless, the
UFW beat the Teamsters by a margin of 528 to 328, in what
proved to be a crucial victory for the smaller union. It
also helped propel Medina into a multifaceted 44 year
organizing career. After his departure from the UFW
leadership in 1978, Medina spent time working for the
Communications Workers of America in Texas and then SEIU in
California. He later became an executive vice-president of
SEIU, its chief public advocate for immigration reform, and,
in the fall of 2010, national secretary-treasurer of the
union.
The UFW's initial gains were nearly swept away when growers
signed sweetheart contracts with the Teamsters to freeze out
the dreaded "Chavistas." Today, the 1.4 million IBT and the
6,000-member UFW are, ironically, fellow members of Change
To Win, the dwindling band of unions that broke away from
the AFL-CIO in 2005, under the leadership of SEIU. Back in
the 1960s and '70s, the Teamster bureaucracy was corrupt,
gangster-ridden, and very prone to the use of violence and
intimidation for a variety of purposes (including keeping
its own members in line). The conservative, Richard Nixon-
endorsing IBT was the personification of top-down "business
unionism" and thus, a handy, if brutal, foil for the UFW. As
Pawel, a former reporter for The Los Angeles Times, writes:
"The Teamsters were about money, not empowerment. As the
leader of the Western conference of Teamsters [Einar Mohn]
explained in an interview, he saw no point in having
membership meetings for farmworkers. `I'm not sure how
effective a union can be when it is composed of Mexican-
Americans and Mexican nationals with temporary visas . As
jobs become more attractive to whites, then we can build a
union that can have structure and that can negotiate from
strength and have membership participation."
The inter-union mayhem, between the UFW and IBT, finally
ended when California legislators were forced to act. After
UFW-backed Democrat Jerry Brown became governor (the first
time) in 1974, he created an Agricultural Labor Relations
Board (ALRB) to referee farm labor disputes. Before the
ALRB was eventually subverted by Brown's Republican
successors, UFW victories in government-run elections drove
the Teamsters out of the fields, while briefly stabilizing
job conditions in California's central valley. At long
last, some farm workers were finally getting a living wage,
health benefits, better housing, and protection against
dangerous pesticide use.
Unfortunately, the UFW fared worse than most unions during
the ensuing Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era. The steady erosion
of its membership and influence has stemmed from never-
ending grower opposition, the massive influx of undocumented
workers from Mexico, over-reliance on appeals to consumers,
and a related failure to link boycott activity to ongoing
organizing in the fields. The UFW also suffered, in rather
fatal fashion, from its own deeply flawed internal
structure. Virtually all power was concentrated in Chávez's
hands, leaving rank-and-file members with little ability to
curb his increasingly autocratic behavior when it began to
tarnish the union's reputation and make future gains
impossible.
This painful but important detail has been airbrushed out of
many glowing official portraits of Chávez. Since his death
at age 66 in 1995, the UFW founder has, as Shaw notes, been
posthumously transformed into "a national icon," while his
darker side has "been minimized or ignored." The aura of
secular sainthood that surrounds him obscures one major
reason for the terminal decay of a union once so dynamic and
respected. As Shaw, Pawel, and Ganz all confirm, Chávez was
not accountable to anyone within the UFW. Rank-and-file
critics of his charismatic leadership were purged, then
black-listed, and driven from the fields in truly
disgraceful fashion.
In The Union of Their Dreams, Pawel recounts this story most
poignantly by profiling Mario Bustamante, a lettuce strike
leader from Salinas. Bustamante bravely challenged Chávez
over the issue of elected ranch committee leaders, whose
role the union president wanted to curtail, lest they defy
his authority in their day-to-day dealings with employers.
Bustamante also sought to expand rank-and-file
representation on the staff-dominated UFW executive board.
His opposition slate, composed of working members, was ruled
ineligible to run at the UFW's 1981 convention. Bustamante,
his brother Chava, and their supporters walked out forever
to shouts of "Bajao los traidores" ("Down with the
traitors") and "Muerte a lost Bustamantes" ("Death to the
Bustamontes"). Chávez made sure his critics were
unemployable in the fields; he even sued nine of them for
libel and slander, seeking $25 million in damages. Mario
became a taxi driver and, later, was even denied a small UFW
pension.
Other potential rivals like Medina, a UFW vice-president,
and key staffers, like Ganz, had already left the union in
dismay (although neither aided the UFW rebels in 1981).
Medina's differences with Chávez prefigured disagreements,
thirty years later, about union priorities within Medina's
new home, SEIU. Just as the UFW was gaining greater traction
under the state's new farm labor law, Chávez began pushing
the idea that UFW should become a broader (but more
amorphous) "Poor Peoples Union." He was not happy, Pawel
reports, that UFW was now focusing on "issues he considered
more mundane - contracts, wages, benefits, and grievances."
If UFW organizers "did not embrace poor people in the
cities, Chávez warned, the movement would wither." Medina,
on the other hand, took the more pragmatic and sensible view
that fragile contract gains had to be consolidated first.
"Our business is take care of home base - our members, " he
wrote in a strategy memo. He argued that the union could not
"run off to do crusades, instead of service the membership,"
because UFW activists faced continuing opposition from their
employers and needed stronger backing at the local-level.
Over time, rational debate about such policy differences
became difficult, if not, impossible at La Paz, the union's
headquarters. Both Medina and Ganz were there when Chávez
began to consolidate his rule by employing a bizarre and
destructive group therapy exercise known as "the Game."
Chávez borrowed this tool of control from Synanon, a cultish
drug treatment program already controversial in California.
"The Game" required participants to "clear the air" by
launching personal attacks against one another, an
experience that created much anger, bitterness, and
emotional trauma. As former UFW research director Michael
Yates describes, with great vividness, in his recent memoir,
In and Out of the Working Class, these exercises were
manipulated by Chávez personally to humiliate, isolate, and
then cast out staff members he disliked or distrusted. In
1977, Yates saw "a screaming mob of 'Game' initiates" purge
'enemies of the union'" at La Paz. When one victim had the
audacity to ask for a formal hearing on the trumped-up
charges against him, Chávez called the police, had the
volunteer arrested for trespassing, and taken to jail.
Over time, Chávez further stifled "creative internal
deliberation" by replacing "experienced UFW leaders with a
new, younger cadre, for whom loyalty was the essential
qualification," Shaw reports. The result was a dysfunctional
personality cult. Since its founder's death, the UFW has
been tightly controlled by the Chávez clan, in the same
nepotistic North Korean fashion as some local affiliates of
the Teamsters or building trades unions. As UFW has shrunk
to only 5,000 members, various Chavez relatives have feuded
among themselves in court and in the press. As Pawel
recently told The New York Times, "it has become a family-
run organization that is sort of purposeless and does little
or nothing to help farm workers."
In Why David Sometimes Wins, Ganz describes how Chávez used
union centralization, quite systematically, to crowd out
constructive criticism and political pluralism. "Control
over resources at the top and the absence of any
intermediate levels of political accountability -
districts, locals, or regions - meant that potential
challengers could never organize, build a base, or mount a
real challenge to incumbents," Ganz writes. In an interview
with Shaw for Beyond The Fields, he recalls that "[T]he UFW
was not giving workers any real power or responsibilities in
setting the union's direction ... Chávez's decision that the
UFW would not have geographically distinct 'locals' left the
union without the vehicles traditionally used by organized
labor to obtain worker input. [As early as 1978] the UFW's
executive board had no farm worker representation, leaving
those working in the fields with no way to influence the
UFW's direction."
As former UFW member Frank Bardacke points out in his
forthcoming book from Verso, Trampling Out The Vintage, UFW
leaders and staff were even more detached from the
membership than in other, more labor organizations because
UFW "had its own source of income, separate from union
dues." Between 1970 and 1985, payments from workers
represented less than 50 percent of UFW income; the rest of
the union's money was generated by boycott-related direct
mail activity or from donations by wealthy individuals,
other unions, and church groups. The UFW established and
continues to operate, in the name of its dead founder, "a
network of organizations which receive money form private
foundations and government grants." The UFW was always a
combination of farm worker advocacy group and collective
bargaining organization. According to Bardacke, initial (but
hard to reproduce) UFW success with wine, table grape, and
lettuce boycotts convinced Chávez "that the essential power
of the union was among its supporters in the cities rather
than among workers in the fields."
As Pawel notes, a new generation of workers now toils in
those fields, under terrible conditions with little or no
UFW contract protection, and few active urban supporters.
Many are undocumented, indigenous Mexicans who arrive not
even speaking Spanish. They earn the minimum wage, lack
health care coverage, and "desperately need the kind of help
the union once offered." How UFW veterans have processed
this sad history and its present-day consequences varies
widely. Reconciling proud memories with the profound sadness
and political disillusionment that sometimes followed Farm
Worker duty is not easy, particularly amid contemporary
union conflicts that contain distinct echoes of the UFW's
troubled past.
Between 2008 and early 2010, the charismatic leader of SEIU,
Andy Stern, used his similarly unchecked powers as national
union president to unleash a series of Chávez-like attacks
on internal adversaries. The result was widespread turmoil
among SEIU-represented health care workers in California,
accompanied by 18 months of open warfare with UNITE HERE,
the garment and hotel workers union that was once Stern's
closest ally in Change to Win. Both conflicts were
triggered, in part, by major disagreements about union
structure, organizing and bargaining strategy. These were
eerily similar to the differences that emerged within the
UFW over its leadership, staff roles, and functioning.
Under Stern, who retired as president last year (and has
since joined the board of directors of a drug company), SEIU
turned away from strong contract enforcement for the benefit
of existing members. Smaller SEIU affiliates were
consolidated into multi-state "mega-locals," often under the
direction of national union officials who were appointed by
Stern, rather than elected by the membership. The role of
union stewards - the equivalent of elected UFW ranch
committee leaders - was increasingly undermined and
replaced by the use of corporate-style "customer service
centers" to handle member problems and complaints - an
experiment that has been a disaster. Greater union
centralization and top-down control was necessary in SEIU,
Stern argued, so more resources could be shifted to large-
scale, staff-run campaigns for membership growth and
political influence. Until recently - and the attacks on
public workers in Wisconsin, including SEIU members there -
the union tended to downplay battles over existing contract
standards and benefits, as a selfish defense of "just us,"
instead of a broader fight for "justice for all" (as if the
two were mutually exclusive).
Like the dissident Chavistas who raised the banner of
democracy and membership control in the UFW long ago - only
to be crushed and expelled - some west coast SEIU
activists organized a reform movement in 2008 that
challenged Andy Stern's autocratic rule and flawed political
vision. Led by Sal Rosselli, a longtime SEIU vice-president
(and one-time UFW grape boycott volunteer), these dissidents
sought greater membership participation in the union and a
strong rank-and-file voice in bargaining and new organizing.
In response, Stern spent tens of millions of dollars on a
military-style take-over of Rosselli's 150,000-member local,
the second largest in California. After this January, 2009
SEIU "trusteeship" over United Healthcare Workers-West
(UHW), hundreds of elected stewards were purged for
"disloyalty" and 16 ousted elected leaders (including
Rosselli) sued by SEIU for $1.5 million in damages. A rival
health care union was formed, and most organizing of the
unorganized in California health care ground to a halt while
the new National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) and SEIU
competed for bargaining rights among tens of thousands of
already unionized workers at Kaiser Permanente and other
hospital chains.
This now three-year old SEIU conflict is replete with ironic
role reversals from the old days. When Rosselli was removed
as UHW president, he was replaced by a team of Stern
loyalists that included Eliseo Medina. Mario Bustamante's
brother Chava, is now a SEIU trusteeship staffer and
personally removes stewards who favor the rival NUHW. Legal
work aimed at crushing the rebellion has been handled by a
California law firm headed by Glenn Rothner, a one-time UFW
lawyer. Among other prominent UFW alumni active on the SEIU
side were Scott Washburn and Stephen Lerner, architect of
SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaigns.
Meanwhile, Dolores Huerta, the still formidable 80-year old
founding mother of UFW, has become an outspoken champion of
worker dissent within SEIU - even though she sided with
Chávez when he pushed out the Bustamante brothers and helped
drive away Ganz and Medina. At an NUHW press conference last
year, Huerta accused SEIU staffers of 1970s Teamster-style
bullying when she tried to meet with health care workers at
Kaiser in Los Angles. Her fellow supporters of NUHW included
former UFW staffers Gary Guthman and Fred Ross, Jr. (the son
of Chávez's old mentor).
Mike Wilzoch is among those former UFW staffers who were
caught up in the carnage. He went on to spend 23 years
working for SEIU. In a May, 2008 to Andy Stern, Wilzoch
urged the then-SEIU president to end his "destructive
conflict with UHW" before it tarnished his personal legacy
and SEIU's own future prospects. "I remember all too well
what happened to the UFW in the 1970s after it devolved into
loyalty oaths and vicious personal attacks on anyone asking
pesky questions," Wilzoch wrote. "They burned their culture
and so many top flight organizers that it did permanent
internal and external damage to the union and the dreams of
the workers." Nine months, later Stern went ahead with his
costly take-over of UHW, ousting all of its elected leaders
and staffers, including Wilzoch.
In his letter to Stern, Wilzoch noted that "history is
replete with tales of radicals and reformers who became what
they once despised. Even the smartest and bravest fuck up
sometimes. Tragically, few had the raw courage to pull back
in time, find the best in themselves that had gotten
sidetracked somehow, and repair the damage." As Shaw, Pawel,
and Ganz all document, no course correction ever occurred in
the United Farm Workers under César Chávez. With that past
experience in mind, plus the sad condition of the UFW today,
one wonders what it will take to repair Andy Stern's once-
acclaimed union, after he helped shatter similar hopes and
dreams in California health care?
[Steve Early was a Boston-based organizer for the
Communications Workers of America for 27 years. This essay-
review, a version of which also appeared in Socialist
Worker, is drawn from his most recent book, The Civil Wars
in U.S. Labor from Haymarket.]
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