The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (41 page)

When the Oregon state legislature passed an anti-farmworker bill, Chavez dispatched Cohen to persuade the governor to veto the measure. Cohen disregarded advice from liberals who urged him to gently approach Gov. Tom McCall, a moderate Republican. Hardball was more Cohen’s style, and he drew on tactics he had learned from Chavez. Cohen orchestrated a prayer vigil on the Capitol steps and bombarded the governor with letters and calls. “If you work with Cesar for a while you get a pretty realistic view
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of politicians,” Cohen said. “No matter if they’re liberal Republicans or liberal Democrats, if there’s an issue they don’t feel any pressure on, and it’s a little hard for them to make a political decision, they’re going to make the easiest political decision.” McCall vetoed the bill.

Cohen hoped the union could break through outside California “We are at a crossroads
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—could become a national union,” he wrote. But he worried the expansion had come at the expense of organizing in California. In 1972, a year of near-record dues, the union spent $230,000—about half its income—on political campaigns. When Cohen looked for plaintiffs
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in a suit against Bud Antle, he had trouble finding a farmworker because the union had pulled everyone out of Salinas. Fred Ross shared Cohen’s concern, and the lawyer urged Ross to talk to Chavez.

“Oh hell, he won’t listen to me,” Ross said.

“He’ll pretend not to listen to you, but he’ll listen to you,” Cohen responded. “I mean it’ll be in his head, and then in about a week he’ll come up with the idea.”

The Salinas situation remained a stalemate; the UFW had only a handful of contracts and the Teamsters held the rest. At the request of the AFL-CIO, Chavez had suspended the lettuce boycott to see if a settlement could be negotiated with the growers. After eight months of meetings, Cohen reported, “they agreed to the bulletin board clause,”
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the most minor provision in the contract. Chavez declared an impasse and prepared to relaunch the lettuce boycott, a decision that would bring the farmworkers into conflict with the AFL-CIO.

AFL-CIO president George Meany felt liable for the actions of the farmworkers as long as their union remained an organizing committee under the federation’s umbrella, rather than an independently chartered union. The rest of the labor federation was covered by the National Labor Relations Act, which barred secondary boycotts. Meany was concerned the AFL-CIO would be accused of violating the law if the farmworkers boycotted supermarket chains.

Chavez was displeased about the prospect of losing the $10,000-a-month subsidy from the AFL-CIO that came with the organizing committee status. But he needed the boycott, so he made a pragmatic decision and formally requested a charter. “When a guy named Nixon
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came into office, he began to change the labor board,” Chavez explained. “He is going to do anything and everything he can to screw unions. We’re one of their big targets . . . In order to keep boycotting, we have to get a charter to save the AFL-CIO the headache they think they’re going to have.”

Then a new crisis derailed not only the boycott, but all other plans, and drew Chavez away from his national expansion plans and back to California. The most serious legislative fight came on home turf, where growers qualified an initiative on the November 1972 ballot that would effectively ban the boycott in California and cripple the union. Chavez summoned all the California volunteers to La Paz in late summer to launch the campaign against Proposition 22.

“The only time we come together is when we’re in trouble,”
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Chavez said as he opened the conference. He told them the union faced a life-or-death fight, and the boycotters responded. Ellen Eggers had just graduated from college and was on her way home to Indiana after a summer internship arranged through the National Farm Worker Ministry. She had heard about Chavez all summer and had recited the details of his life dozens of times as she asked people not to buy lettuce. When she finally visited La Paz and saw him in person, she was starstruck. His speech was rambling, his manner alternately funny and stern, but his presence was utterly compelling. Eggers gave up her plans for graduate school and her boyfriend back home and joined the fight against Prop 22. She cried as she tried to explain to her mother that she would always regret it if she abandoned the union in its time of need.

“The minute you meet him, you know he’s special,”
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said Margie Coons, a twenty-three-year-old boycotter in Los Angeles, struggling to find words to explain her feelings about Chavez to a reporter. “He’s so patient and forceful at the same time.”

Chavez tapped Chatfield to run the campaign against Prop 22 and Chatfield recruited Hartmire to help in Los Angeles, where they set up headquarters in the office of the National Farm Worker Ministry. Chatfield’s wife, Bonnie, discovered the opposition had collected signatures for the initiative under false pretenses and in some cases had forged names. Dozens of volunteers scoured the petitions, interviewed signers, and collected affidavits. Chavez and Chatfield appealed to Secretary of State Jerry Brown, son of former governor Pat Brown, to throw the initiative off the ballot. Brown declined, but launched investigations that provided ammunition for the farmworkers’ campaign. More significant, the meetings forged a tie between Chavez and Brown and drew the Democratic politician into a cause with which he would soon become closely identified.

Chatfield masterminded a brilliant “No on 22” campaign that featured human billboards at key intersections across Los Angeles, along with radio and television ads, newspaper endorsements, and a massive get-out-the-vote campaign. On election eve, exhausted, he sat with Chavez in the Los Angeles campaign headquarters late at night. Both men were nervous.

“Cesar spoke very softly
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and with a friendly but nervous edge to his voice,” Chatfield wrote.

He simply explained to me that if we lost the election tomorrow, I would have to take the blame. I couldn’t answer. I was totally silenced by the harsh reality of what he had said. I was completely helpless. My closest friend, almost 9 years now, had just explained the political facts of life to me. I had worked on this “life and death” campaign full time since July, barely had any time to even see Bonnie and the girls unless she was in the office working, working late into the nights on the telephone plotting strategy with my staff directors in other California cities and then worrying half to death about everything because of the stakes involved for Cesar and the union. And now, to top it all off, I had been reduced to a fall guy. I didn’t answer Cesar. I just nodded and gave sort of a shrug of the shoulders.

Prop 22 lost overwhelmingly, 58 percent to 42 percent. Chavez threw a victory party and heaped praise on Chatfield. Chatfield left the union some months later for a combination of personal and professional reasons. But his departure was clearly influenced by the election eve conversation.

Only a few years earlier, Chavez had told Jacques Levy there were five people he demanded more from than anyone else because he knew they could take it: Helen and Richard Chavez first, then LeRoy Chatfield, Marion Moses, and Jerry Cohen. By the time Chatfield had his November 6, 1972, conversation, Moses was gone, too. Chavez had quarreled with her over her interest in attending medical school and kicked her out. She left immediately, without saying any goodbyes. Chavez soon made amends, and they stayed in close touch. But her abrupt departure shocked people throughout the union and served as a warning. No one was immune from Chavez’s displeasure.

His increased profile, the higher stakes, and the competing pressures combined to make Chavez more openly ruthless in his drive to be the one and only farm labor leader. As a national figure, Chavez felt he could not afford to make mistakes.

Chavez sometimes used a juggling analogy to explain his work:

When you start organizing, it’s like a guy who starts juggling
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one ball. You start, you have one ball. You go at your own speed. You’re doing your own thing, you know, nobody is after you. After a little while, you got to get two balls, and you start juggling two balls. Your own speed. Because even up to that point, you’ve got everything under control. Then after a little while, more people come in, you’ve got to take three balls. And then four and then five and then six. And pretty soon you can’t deal with it. And the organization breaks because the guy who’s supposed to be leading wants to juggle a lot of balls and he can’t do it. So he’s got to make up his mind he’s going to let some of the balls drop. But even more important, he’s going to multiply himself to have more jugglers to handle all the balls that are coming at him.

The union had expanded so quickly in so many directions, and Chavez had great difficulty delegating. He struggled with the prospect of passing off to more jugglers. But as his talk with Chatfield showed, if a ball dropped, someone else would take the blame.

Chapter 22

Brother Against Brother

This will create more criticism but we must not be afraid of it. Workers have to handle their own problems—we have to organize, they have to put in their share of sacrifice.

When the Teamster fight erupted in the vegetable fields and the leadership decamped to Salinas, Richard Chavez was left in Delano to administer the dozens of grape contracts his brother had triumphantly signed.

Richard’s first job was to get workers to ratify the contract that had already been approved, a formality required under the terms of the agreement. None of the workers had voted for the union. Many were suspicious. Richard needed signed cards from a majority at each ranch. His helpers were a college professor and twenty young interns from Los Angeles sent by Chris Hartmire.

At first they summoned crews to the hiring hall to sign union cards, but with only two windows the workers had to wait on line for hours. Richard ended up with thousands of cards stacked all over the room and little idea which cards matched what ranch. Richard tried taking his staff into the fields instead. Some of the interns gave cards to the foremen to have the workers sign. Richard had to go back and get them signed all over. At the Giumarra ranch, drunken workers threw beer cans at him. Both sides knew the contracts would be ratified one way or another. But the process did nothing to help the union’s image. A few years later, Richard shuddered at the memory: “It was the most terrible two weeks
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in my whole life.”

Richard was kindhearted, practical, and a natural entertainer. Where Cesar strained to tell jokes, Richard was genuinely funny and loved to tell stories. He shared his brother’s commitment to the movement, but Richard did not share the commitment to material sacrifice. He enjoyed playing golf, and his family was the first in the neighborhood to have a color television. Yet time after time, Richard gamely took on whatever task his older brother called on him to perform.

With everyone else absorbed in the Salinas fight, Richard struggled to bring order to a tense and chaotic situation in Delano. Skeptical workers now had to pay monthly dues. Hostile foremen tried to sabotage the agreements, which deprived them of their power to hire and fire, practice favoritism, and demand bribes and sexual favors in exchange for employment. The union had not been terribly efficient at managing only a handful of wine grape contracts; now tens of thousands of members expected service and dozens of growers expected competent laborers. With a skeleton staff, Richard struggled to administer about two hundred contracts covering fifty-five thousand jobs. He kept appealing to his brother for help, to no avail.

The centerpiece of the contracts was the hiring hall, designed to be the only source of job referrals and eliminate the labor contractors, who had so often cheated and exploited workers. Growers now requested workers and the union dispatched them in seniority order. This required the union to keep accurate seniority lists and to quickly muster workers to meet each grower’s demand. Both tasks proved difficult.

On top of the normal growing pains, the union had adopted several policies that generated confusion and animosity. Rules crafted in La Paz by Cesar, in consultation with LeRoy Chatfield and Marshall Ganz, were intended to transfer the workers’ loyalty to the union. The plan backfired badly.

No worker could be employed on a union ranch without an up-to-date membership card, and members were required to pay the monthly dues year-round, regardless of whether or where they worked. A migrant family returning to Coachella for the harvest season after eight months in Mexico or Texas or other parts of California might owe hundreds of dollars in back dues. To secure their experienced workers, employers often lent families money to pay the dues.

The union’s seniority rule caused further outrage. In an attempt to reward longtime supporters, seniority was measured by number of years as a union member, rather than the length of time worked for a particular employer. That meant workers returning for the grape harvest might be denied jobs at a vineyard where they had worked for years. The seniority rule also affected families whose members had different tenures and found themselves split up. They often had only one car and no way to get to jobs on different ranches. “What a mess it was,” Richard said. “What a mess. I think about those times and I just . . . bad times.”

By the second season of the contracts, in the summer of 1971, the hiring hall problems were well known. Jerry Cohen, who was resisting Chavez’s entreaties to move to La Paz, attributed some of the difficulty to the isolation of the new headquarters. Cohen explained to Jacques Levy during a break in the Salinas negotiations that everyone knew the hiring hall rules worked badly but were afraid to confront Chavez. Among the board members, only Huerta tried to argue with Chavez, and their fights became so personal that they produced only recriminations and hurt feelings. “Cesar is a gentle intimidator,”
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Cohen wrote in his diary. “He can change a man’s report for example with a slight change of expression. The man noting displeasure will anticipate what is wanted and deliver it. This is bad. Some do not like to be the bearers of bad news.”