The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  Chavez’s new enemy was California governor George Deukmejian, a Republican elected with support from the agricultural industry. When he took office in 1983, Deukmejian moved quickly to correct what he called an imbalance on the Agricultural Labor Relations Board and the ALRB. He restaffed the agency to favor the growers, cut the budget for investigations, and vetoed an appropriation to help clear a backlog of grievances. The political shift came as the union’s power in the fields had eroded. The UFW had little ability to fight back by mobilizing workers who had once exerted pressure, even on friendly politicians such as Jerry Brown.

  “If growers and their government close off the laws to us, let us take up arms again,”12 Chavez said in his opening address to the 1983 UFW convention. He unveiled the high-tech boycott and asked consumers to boycott grapes and Red Coach lettuce, produced by the largest vegetable company that had refused to sign a contract, Bruce Church. The only contract that remained in table grapes was with Lionel Steinberg in Coachella, the first grower who had signed with the union in 1970.

  “Today we are going back to where we left off13 in 1975,” Chavez declared. “It’s time for us to place our faith in the court of last resort once again.” The union had given up hope of receiving a fair deal from the ALRB: “The governor can do whatever he likes to the ALRB, but he can’t protect the growers from the boycott! . . . We built the union without the ALRB, and we can survive now without the ALRB.”

  In addition to targeting Hispanic consumers with a direct mail campaign, Chavez aimed the new boycott at the group he called the “Big Chill” generation, referring to the popular movie released in the fall of 1983 about a fifteen-year reunion of college friends. Chavez modulated his message to reflect the changing times and told the board the union must use different language. “Yesterday it was all right14 to talk about a union for farm workers and the right to organize,” he said. “After all, with the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam, everyone was organizing. We could win the boycott by picketing stores because all our friends were in the streets anyway fighting the ‘good fights.’” Now unions had fallen out of favor. President Reagan had broken the air traffic controllers union in 1981, a major blow to the labor movement. Chavez sought ways to cast the farmworkers’ struggle in the rhetoric of the 1980s: Sexual harassment, a recent legal term that had become a focus of national attention and study, was rampant in the fields. Toxic chemicals, the new target of the environmental movement, poisoned farmworkers. The “gender gap,” which had emerged for the first time in the 1980 presidential election when Democrat Jimmy Carter ran significantly better among women than men, offered “a sensational opportunity” for the UFW because women did most of the food shopping.

  At La Paz, Chavez shuffled his staff yet again to accommodate the new priorities. Chris Hartmire became head of a new social marketing department, which included an expanded print shop with two high-speed presses, each able to print 80,000 four-color pieces per hour. The union began sending a small monthly magazine, Food and Justice, to financial supporters. Chavez also charged Hartmire with overseeing the design and purchase of a larger, sophisticated computer system for the union and its related entities.

  Though he had announced the boycott months earlier, Chavez waited to get past the 1984 presidential election and the summer Olympics in Los Angeles before launching a full-scale campaign. By early 1985, the ribbon was cut on the new Sperry computer system and the print shop was complete. The UFW had filmed thirty-six different television spots,15 which consultant Ross grouped in three categories: “history,” “didactic,” and “emotional.” The union bought $250,000 worth of time for 2,019 television commercials over fourteen weeks. The campaign commercials carried the tagline “Como Siempre” (as always)—a play for the sympathetic baby boomers of the early boycott years.

  Chavez said the new boycott was aimed not at specific growers but at the ALRB. The commercials helped the union raise money. But Chavez never articulated a convincing connection between the boycott and forcing the state agency to act on farmworker concerns. In San Francisco, a bastion of support for the UFW, Mayor Dianne Feinstein vetoed a city council resolution in support of the boycott. She estimated the city had lost $17.5 million in convention business from the agricultural industry in the last five years because of support for the UFW. “If there is a problem with the ALRB, that is where the issue should be addressed,” she wrote in a veto message,16 “not through a boycott which unwittingly hurts this city’s number one industry [tourism] and largest employer.”

  The computer and printing presses also offered Chavez new options in the political arena. Politicians increasingly sought the endorsement of the preeminent Latino organization and the blessing of its founder. After his misstep in the Assembly speakership fight, Chavez had rebuilt the union’s political clout, largely through substantial campaign contributions. In 1982, the UFW Political Action Committee handed out $780,000. The poorest workers in the state had become the second-largest political contributors17, only a few hundred dollars behind the American Medical Association.

  In the 1970s, the UFW had created a political fund by building into all contracts a holiday called Citizen Participation Day (CPD). Workers had the day off, usually a weekday in June, at the height of the season. But their salaries for that day went into a special union fund earmarked for political action. At first the donation was optional; at the 1977 convention the practice was made mandatory. “CPD is the farm workers’ most powerful weapon18 at the present time,” Chavez said at the time. “CPD stands as the only protection against these agribusiness interests determined to halt our progress and oppose justice.”

  After the record contracts signed with the vegetable workers at the end of the 1979 strike, the CPD funds soared. A worker earning $5 an hour would contribute approximately $40; under some of the 1981 contracts, the average payment per worker was more than $50.19 About thirty thousand workers under contract sent $1.2 million into the union’s political campaign fund.

  Chavez used the money to repair the breach with Willie Brown, whose support became crucial once Jerry Brown left the governor’s office at the end of 1982. Without the backing of the Assembly Speaker, Chavez would be shut out. Over the course of two years, the UFW contributed $750,00020 to Willie Brown’s campaign committees. Brown protected the union’s interests.

  The extent of the union’s donations to various candidates was hidden until long past the elections. For two years, the UFW filed sporadic and incomplete reports and ignored repeated warnings from the state agency that oversaw campaign disclosure. An early fine was waived based on an explanation from Dolores Huerta that the form had been sent by mistake to the Fair Employment and Housing office instead of the Fair Political Practices Commission because of “all the dumb clerical stuff we were doing wrong.” Eventually the state commission concluded21 the union had “displayed a persistent unwillingness to comply with the laws” and had committed twenty-six violations.

  “We are undeniably guilty22 of most, if not all, of the alleged violations,” wrote UFW attorney Ellen Eggers. The fine was eventually reduced to $25,000, from a maximum of $52,000.

  The violations involved more than sloppy paperwork. The union deliberately funneled money through intermediary committees to conceal the source of contributions. In three instances, the union secretly bankrolled the campaign of a candidate running against Assemblyman Art Torres, the Democrat who had provided a key vote for Willie Brown in the speakership contest. Despite Torres’s long history as a UFW supporter and full-time staff member, Chavez attempted to extract vengeance for Torres’s decision to switch support from Howard Berman. “We are very loyal to the people we support,” Chavez said. “But also, when we get double-crossed,23 we can be pretty mean.” Torres withstood the challenge, with the aid of Jessica Govea, who helped run his campaign, and the victory was widely reported as a blow to the UFW’s prestige. Torres and Chavez never spoke again.24

  As the union lost more contracts and members, CPD
contributions decreased. Richie Ross stepped in again to help. Ross had met his wife, a farmworker, in the Philadelphia boycott house during the first grape boycott. He had risen in Sacramento to become Willie Brown’s top aide and had been dubbed Brown’s “warlord” by a California magazine. Ross told Chavez that the UFW did not realize its own political strength. Rather than buying access with contributions, the union could trade on Chavez’s prestige.

  With its new $2 million print shop, the UFW could produce literature for candidates at half the commercial rate. The union should ask Democratic leaders for a list of priority campaigns and develop a “dirty dozen of supporters” who would be beholden to the union25 for its support, Ross advised. The UFW would gain a broader base of support, a bloc that could fend off harmful legislation. By printing campaign literature, the UFW would have candidates’ mailing lists, Ross pointed out, “an implicit threat” that could be used to punish anyone who betrayed the cause.

  Chavez implemented the Ross strategy. Instead of donating money, the UFW made money: the print shop produced campaign mailers, lawn signs, and posters. The UFW’s political action committee (PAC) bought the material from the union and then reported the payment as an in-kind contribution for political candidates.

  Politicians courting Latino voters came begging for the union’s endorsement. Many were eager to purchase printing services from the union. As the UFW PAC ran low on funds because the deductions from union contracts evaporated, candidates paid the PAC for services. The PAC paid the union. The loss of contracts did not diminish Chavez’s political clout.

  In La Paz, a generational change began to take place. Paul Chavez, Cesar’s middle son, became increasingly involved in the political operation. He worked during the early 1980s in Sacramento, and then took over running the print shop. His sisters Linda and Liz also worked at La Paz, as did their husbands. Richard Chavez’s son Federico became a lawyer and worked for the union.

  Richard Chavez resigned from the executive board at the end of his term in 1984. He had often talked of wanting to return to civilian life. When the time came, he found tears streaming down his face as soon as he drove through the gate at La Paz. He cried all the way26 to Mojave, he wrote to Huerta: “I guess when one puts 18 years of his life into something it does mean something.”

  On November 9, 1984, Chavez delivered a speech at the Commonwealth Club of California, the oldest public affairs forum in the country. He joined the ranks of presidents and foreign dignitaries who had addressed the political, social, and literary elite of San Francisco—“a different kind of audience27 than I am used to facing,” he wrote Shirley Temple Black, the club president, in accepting the invitation. Chavez spoke of the miseries and exploitation of farmworkers, children working in the fields, and workers living in caves. Those injustices, he said, had driven him to his life’s work.

  Much of the address was upbeat. The number of workers under contract, the health of the UFW, even its very existence—those were not the most important issues, he said. The union by its presence forced growers to improve wages and conditions. The historic significance of the farm worker movement had been established. He took satisfaction in the changes spreading from California across the country. He delivered a prophetic vision of the future and an eloquent epitaph28 for the union he had created:

  I’ve traveled through every part of this nation. I have met and spoken with thousands of Hispanics from every walk of life, from every social and economic class. And one thing I hear most often from Hispanics, regardless of age or position, and from many non-Hispanics as well, is that the farm workers gave them the hope that they could succeed and the inspiration to work for change . . .

  Tens of thousands of children and grandchildren of farm workers and the children and grandchildren of poor Hispanics are moving out of the fields and out of the barrios and into the professions and into business and into politics, and that movement cannot be reversed. Our union will forever exist as an empowering force among Chicanos in the Southwest. That means our power and our influence will grow and not diminish . . .

  We have looked into the future and the future is ours. History and inevitability are on our side. The farm workers and their children and the Hispanics and their children are the future in California, and corporate growers are the past. Those politicians who ally themselves with the corporate growers and against farm workers and the Hispanics are in for a big surprise. They want to make their careers in politics; they want to hold power 20 and 30 years from now. But 20 and 30 years from now, in Modesto, in Salinas, in Fresno, in Bakersfield, in the Imperial Valley and in many of the great cities of California, those communities will be dominated by farm workers and not by growers, by the children and grandchildren of farm workers and not by the children and grandchildren of growers.

  Regardless of what the future holds for the union, regardless of what the future holds for farm workers, our accomplishments cannot be undone. La causa, our cause, doesn’t have to be experienced twice. The consciousness and pride that were raised by our union are alive and thriving inside millions of young Hispanics who will never work on a farm.

  Chapter 38

  Selling the Brand

  A company can make a social contribution only if it is highly profitable.

  At the end of the 1980s, Cesar Chavez asked a familiar question: what is our business? This time the query was largely rhetorical. There were no deep thinkers like Jim Drake around to draft passionate responses, and no soul-searching discussions about the merits of putting resources into organizing versus negotiating. Chavez answered himself with one word: “entrepreneurial.”

  “The purpose of a business: to create a customer,” he wrote in longhand notes1 from a meeting to form yet another subsidiary, the Farm Workers Corporation. “A company can make a social contribution only if it is highly profitable.”

  Much of Chavez’s attention was directed to raising money through commercial activities along with the union’s more traditional routes. He explored radio and the increasingly popular market of cable television. He dabbled in real estate investments. He modeled experiments after his success in politics, pitching to the growing community of Latino professionals. The UFW sold its brand on T-shirts and mugs, at wine-and-cheese parties, and on scores of college campuses across the country. Cesar Chavez had become a marketable commodity.

  His entrepreneurial ventures offered outlets for Chavez’s curiosity. The projects also compensated for a precipitous decline in dues. From a high of $2.99 million in 1982, dues had fallen2 to $1 million just three years later. Contracts vanished, and those that remained covered fewer workers. Companies went out of business, stalled on renegotiations, or found loopholes to move employees out of the bargaining unit. At some ranches, workers voted to decertify the UFW. Sun Harvest, the giant vegetable grower, had shut down at the end of the 1983 season; officials said the company never recovered from losses suffered during the 1979 strike.

  Three years after Gov. George Deukmejian took office in January 1983, the number of jobs covered by UFW contracts3 had dropped from thirty thousand to fifteen thousand. Over the next six months, the union lost fifteen more contracts,4 leaving about seventy-five. Chavez railed against Deukmejian for destroying the ALRB and painted the union as a victim of an alliance between Republicans and growers. His former counsel, Jerry Cohen, saw things differently.

  Cohen acknowledged that the Deukmejian administration had gutted the board that administered the best labor law in the country. But the attorney held Chavez responsible for his failure to continue organizing. The union achieved some of its greatest victories in the era of hostile politicians such as Nixon and Reagan, Cohen pointed out in an op-ed piece5 in the Los Angeles Times. “Junk mail doesn’t organize people; people organize people,” Cohen wrote. “Unions that do not organize, die.”

  Chavez tried to expand the membership6 outside the fields. The UFW created categories of associate membership in a project he dubbed “Crunch Bird.” Anyone could join
the “Community Union” for $5 a month and receive discounts at drugstores, travel deals, and real estate advice. The union targeted former farmworkers and consumers with the goal of signing up five thousand. A broader definition of membership, Chavez told farmworkers, would “open the doors of your union to everyone.”

  More members were badly needed to increase the pool of clients for struggling services, such as his beloved credit union. At the end of 1987, the credit union had only 1,063 members7 out of a potential of 3,500 (probably a more accurate figure of the UFW’s membership than the higher numbers the union reported). Since the bank opened, it had handed out almost six thousand loans worth more than $7.7 million.

  The print shop built on its political success by spinning off a commercial venture called El Taller Grafico Specialty Advertising Corporation (ETG), with Chavez as chair and Huerta as vice chair. ETG marketed UFW merchandise to the public and also sold T-shirts and specialty items for labor unions to distribute at conventions, a variation on Synanon’s old distribution network. “When you order promotional items through us, it’s a victory for all the unions,” said a magazine ad for ETG that featured an Olympic gold medal emblazoned with the UFW eagle. By 1988, sales topped half a million8 dollars. ETG added children’s clothes, polo shirts, jewelry, buttons, and posters.

  Chavez’s most ambitious commercial venture took him far from the fields: he became a housing developer. The union’s foray into housing grew out of a partnership with a Fresno businessman named Celestino Aguilar, who had approached Chavez in the early 1980s with a proposal. As a real estate appraiser, Aguilar heard about foreclosures in advance. If the union put up money to buy houses, Aguilar would oversee renovations and flip the house at substantial profit. He would take a commission, and he promised the union a return of 25 to 50 percent9 on its investment.