The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (36 page)

Chavez had spent the day meeting with citrus workers near Oxnard, unaware of the machinations in Salinas. Emboldened by UFWOC’s success in the vineyards, lemon pickers had spontaneously walked out on strike and called the union for help. Chavez and Bill Kircher spoke at a rally at Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Santa Paula, promising support. “The workers will no longer make a few men rich by their sweat and suffering,” Chavez said. “Above all, the workers want
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to be treated with the respect and dignity that befits every man.”

Driving back to their hotel, Chavez and Kircher heard a radio report that the Teamsters had signed contracts with dozens of major lettuce growers in the Salinas Valley. Kircher was sure it was a mistake. Worried about wiretaps, they drove to a gas station and called Eric Brazil, a reporter for the Salinas newspaper, from a pay phone. Brazil confirmed the story. Chavez and Kircher drove straight to Salinas.

At a press conference the next morning, Chavez compared the Teamsters’ act to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and declared “all out economic war against the conspiracy by the Teamsters and the growers, who have signed a totally illegal contract.” From the beginning, Chavez made this fight about race, not missing an opportunity to point out the white leadership of the Teamster union: “Two Anglos got together
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maybe at the Taj Majal in Burlingame [Teamsters headquarters] or maybe at one of the grower association offices here and they are determining the life of the farm workers for the next five years and this besides being unethical, it is politically pretty stupid.”

Despite his tough talk, Chavez was despondent on the ride back to Delano. His mood finally brightened, not at the prospect of signing the historic grape contracts the following day, but as he brainstormed a plan of action for Salinas. Chavez relished the prospect of a good fight against a clear enemy.

Jacques Levy, Chavez’s biographer, drove him home from Salinas. Levy had become part of the core group, blending in unobtrusively as he collected notes and tape-recorded interviews. He helped draft press releases and handle media calls and often attended negotiations, taking notes. Levy noted
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the difference in the Salinas workers right away, particularly their response to Chavez. After the union leader met with workers in a labor camp, Levy noted: “The workers listened intensely. But there was not the furor or the adulation, at least it wasn’t as apparent as at some of the rallies.” He talked over the reaction with Kircher. “Kircher found that very significant . . . He said ‘Yes, well, it’s obvious that they support him . . . maybe this quiet attitude is stronger.’”

They quickly discovered Kircher was right. The workers wanted to know how they would support their families, but they were prepared to strike without hesitation. They felt sold out by the growers and Teamsters, whose weak contracts contained only a half-penny increase over five years. Fred Ross and Marshall Ganz set up headquarters in an old post office and helped farmworkers organize committees at each ranch, elect strike captains, and prepare to walk out.

In an impressive display of strength, thousands of workers from the four corners of the valley marched toward the center of Salinas on August 2, each group carrying a homemade banner that identified their ranch. To counter the Teamsters’ flag-waving patriotism, the UFW bought all the red-white-and-blue banners within miles, and American flags mixed with huelga flags as proud workers paraded through the streets shouting “Viva Chavez!” Addressing the cheering crowd that converged at Hartnell College, Chavez talked again about race. “The time has passed
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when a couple of white men can sit down together and write the destinies of all the Chicano and Filipino workers,” he said. The farmworkers took a strike vote by loud acclamation. Union organizers circulated membership cards during the rally, collecting more than 650.

In the next few days, workers streamed into the UFW office with hundreds more cards. They also offered accounts that bolstered the union’s legal claim as the legitimate representative of the people. Workers at Mann Packing, the largest broccoli grower, swore they knew nothing of the Teamsters until a supervisor informed them one morning that the company had signed a five-year contract and all workers must join within ten days or lose their jobs. “Three days later, UFW organizers came and we all signed cards,”
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the Mann workers wrote in an affidavit. When the supervisor told them they must sign with the Teamsters, “we told him we had already signed with the union of Cesar Chavez. We all shouted ‘Viva Chavez, viva la union’ and went to work.”

Chavez announced he would call the first strike against a few large growers. He estimated a general strike would cost $125,000 a week and asked Chris Hartmire to tap religious supporters and raise enough money for six weeks.
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If they could not win by then, the union would switch to a boycott. Chavez had already chosen the first target, United Fruit, which had recently bought out seven small growers in Salinas and formed Interharvest, the largest lettuce grower in the valley. United Fruit also owned Chiquita, whose bananas would be an attractive product to boycott.

The strike deadline coincided with the wedding of Cesar’s third-eldest daughter, Eloise. Helen, running the household in Delano while Cesar spent most of his time in Salinas, had been leaving notes for her husband to remind him of the date. Before the church ceremony began on August 8, Jerry Cohen caught Chavez’s attention and motioned with his eyes that he needed to talk. Chavez went and kneeled by Cohen. Cohen told him the leaders of the Teamsters wanted to talk immediately. Talk or deal? asked Chavez. Cohen made a phone call and returned with word that they wanted to negotiate a truce. National leaders of the union were interested in rejoining the AFL-CIO and not eager to antagonize labor leaders. They pressured the Teamsters organization in California to negotiate with Chavez. Cesar went to the wedding reception
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at Filipino Hall, called Helen aside to explain, and took the second dance with his daughter. Then he left with Cohen, Dolores Huerta, and Manuel Chavez and sped a hundred miles to the Black Oak Inn in Paso Robles, halfway between Delano and Salinas.

At 2:15 a.m. Chavez called Monsignor Roger Mahony
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to say the two parties had reached a verbal agreement. To give both unions cover, Chavez asked the bishops’ committee to issue a statement calling for negotiations. Mahony headed to Salinas to set up a meeting.

By the time Monsignor George Higgins arrived from Washington—his thirteenth trip in six months to mediate farmworker disputes—talks had broken down. Higgins and Mahony found Chavez in bed with back pain. He revived sufficiently to hold a press conference at the union office to denounce a temporary restraining order against the strike, issued by a local judge at the request of growers. Chavez announced he had begun to fast and would go to jail rather than obey the order. Mahony and Higgins shuttled between Chavez and the Teamsters, and talks went on till dawn. By 5:00 a.m. they had hammered out an agreement that averted the strike. The Teamsters agreed to relinquish the contracts, and both unions granted the growers six days to acknowledge the UFW and begin negotiations. At Higgins’s discretion,
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the deadline could be extended four days.

Unlike the early days of the grape strike, Chavez now headed an established union, and his church and labor allies urged him to make peace. Chavez had to balance his instinct to stay at war and hold out for all he wanted with his need to appease his financial and political supporters. Chavez fasted at an undisclosed location (the apartment of a friend), conveniently unavailable to speak with Higgins, Kircher, or anyone else who wanted to exhort him to be more reasonable. When Higgins agreed to extend the peace treaty for the extra four days, Chavez was upset. He sent Cohen and Huerta banging on the priest’s hotel room door late at night to convey his displeasure at a decision he knew the workers would not like.

Chavez’s secret weapon turned out to be the intransigence of the growers. They held some general discussions with the union but had no intention of letting the Teamsters renege on their deal. The growers were confident about prevailing in a court system heavily weighted in their favor. Their argument was simple: they were victims of a jurisdictional dispute between two unions, and California law forbade strikes in such a situation.

Only the two companies threatened with boycotts—Interharvest and Freshpict, a subsidiary of Purex—expressed interest in negotiations with the UFW. As the ten-day moratorium expired, Interharvest agreed to allow Monsignor Higgins to conduct a card check election so workers could choose between the Teamsters and the UFW. As Higgins counted almost a thousand cards, an Interharvest official hovered nearby. Finally he beseeched the priest to make sure the UFW won. The company wanted to avoid a boycott, but Interharvest would be ostracized if the company betrayed the industry and signed with the UFW. They needed a UFW victory for cover. Higgins obliged. He never announced the vote
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totals, and only years later acknowledged that the union had fallen short of a majority.

The ten-day truce expired, with no agreement other than that with Interharvest. Thousands of workers rallied again at Hartnell College and enthusiastically approved a general strike. Chavez was recovering from his fast and declined to attend. He had lost seventeen pounds and gained some time to himself, but failed to achieve the peace of mind he sought. “That fast was not like a spiritual fast,”
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he said later, “it was mostly because I was distressed and because I needed strength. And I had been going very fast, you know, from negotiating the [grape] contracts and all right on thru the other . . . It was really like a rest more than anything else.”

On Monday morning, August 24, some five thousand workers picketed the fields, shutting down the Salinas lettuce industry in the largest strike of its kind. Production the following week plummeted to a quarter of normal. The price of lettuce doubled.

The growers were stunned. “It took everybody several days to catch on that it was a totally new ball game,
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that the workers were into it 100 percent,” Tom Driscoll, a large strawberry grower, told Jacques Levy a few weeks later. “The second shock was that the workers stayed out, they didn’t go back in two days like everybody thought they would.”

The vice president of the Grower-Shipper Association wrote an article called “How to Handle Your UFWOC Problem” in which he recommended that each grower form a “citizens committee,” set up a public relations department and a legal team, obtain a temporary restraining order, prepare to evict workers from company housing, procure a heavy convoy to transport workers in and out of fields, play loud music to drown out pickets, take down license plates of pickets, and decide on “combat pay.”

During the first week of the strike, judges issued fifteen restraining orders against the pickets, covering thirty-six growers. The union quickly exhausted its appeals, and arrests began. By September, legal sanctions started to mount. “I would have to be in a monastery in Tibet
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not to know that neither Cesar Chavez nor his union intend to obey any court order,” commented San Mateo County judge Melvin Cohn.

Chavez was running out of money, growers were bringing in scabs, and the injunctions that limited or restrained pickets multiplied daily. “I have to call a boycott,”
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Chavez told his staff. “See, that’s the only card that we have that we haven’t played.”

Chavez knew that people who had been out in the cities for years on the grape boycott had looked forward to coming home once the contracts were signed. He had called all the boycotters to Salinas, ostensibly to help in the strike. He knew the action would likely be short-lived, and he needed to persuade them to reenlist. Eliseo Medina had driven from Chicago, eager to help with the strike and then return home to Delano and the grape contracts. Jessica Govea had driven from Montreal, equally glad to be back in California, reunited with her boyfriend, Marshall Ganz. Both Govea and Medina noticed the difference in the Salinas workers immediately. “These were young men—rough-and-tumble guys who worked piece rate, who had a work life expectancy of 10 years, who lived in labor camps in the growers’ land, who worked hard, lived hard and partied hard,” Govea wrote in her journal. “They were unafraid.”
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Chavez broke the news to the boycotters gradually. On September 8, he met with them in a church hall and spoke about the power of the boycott. He told them the union could afford two more weeks of the strike at most. They had spent more than $300,000, paying $15 a week to single strikers and $25 to families. Gas cost another $1,500–$1,800 a week. Hartmire had arranged a $125,000 loan from the Franciscans and was working to come up with more.

On September 16, State Superior Court judge Anthony Brazil declared that a jurisdictional dispute existed and issued a permanent injunction against the strike. Chavez called the boycotters to a beach picnic that afternoon to celebrate Mexican Independence Day, the fifth anniversary of the historic meeting in the Delano church that launched the grape strike. He used all his charm to persuade the tired boycotters to go out into the cities again. Medina wanted badly to stay in California and help his own people, the grape workers. But he decided that as long as he worked for the union, he had to go where he was most needed. He told Chavez he would return to Chicago.

Few vegetable workers volunteered to join the boycott. They did not want to leave their jobs and lose their livelihoods. Many had families living in the Imperial Valley or in Mexicali, just across the border. Disappointed in their lack of interest, Chavez attributed the reluctance to their concerns about money.