The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (67 page)

Since his first forays into the Salinas Valley, Chavez had regarded the vegetable workers with a mixture of admiration and wariness. He respected their courage and willingness to engage in militant action. He boasted about “liberated ranches” where the
tortuga
forced recalcitrant supervisors to honor the contracts. He marveled at meetings where workers whipped copies of the UFW constitution out of their back pocket and quoted passages verbatim.
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But he also recognized that independence made the vegetable workers harder to control, and he understood the danger.

The lettuce workers, Chavez counseled the negotiation students at La Paz, were sharper and more likely than the grape workers to challenge authority. Most lechugueros were Mexican citizens with green cards. “Anybody with a green card—that’s just an indication how on the ball they are. If you see a green card, rest assured they had to really hustle,” Chavez advised. “Keep your eyes open, because they’ll try to hustle you.
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If you don’t know when to stand up, they’ll get you. If you stand up too quickly, they’ll get you.”

In the fall of 1978, the UFW had thirty-one contracts covering roughly ten thousand vegetable workers. They were about one-third of the union’s membership, and among the most highly paid. As the contracts neared expiration at the end of the year, the vegetable workers were not happy with their union.

The flash point for frustration was the UFW’s Robert F. Kennedy health insurance plan, managed out of La Paz by volunteers with little training and minimal computer skills. They struggled to administer a complex medical plan for tens of thousands of workers. The union’s eligibility lists were full of errors. Reimbursement checks arrived months late or never at all. Workers who took pride in managing their affairs found they had become credit risks. A report to Chavez by one of his chief negotiators in advance of contract talks called the RFK plan a “ticking time bomb.”
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Chavez dispatched Dolores Huerta and Richard Chavez to Salinas to scout out the situation in preparation for negotiations. They returned in alarm. Reimbursement checks for hundreds of dollars, issued more than a year earlier, gathered dust in an inch-thick pile of unopened envelopes. Two staff people struggled to service twenty contracts. Grievances piled up, unaddressed. The mood was ugly. “We are in serious trouble,”
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Huerta reported. The only workers who showed up at union meetings were the most loyal Chavistas—and they came to yell at union leaders and plead for support. “We have very, very, big problems,” Richard Chavez told his brother. At several ranches, they heard rumblings about moves to vote the union out.

Just as he had been impatient with grape workers’ complaints about the hiring hall and back dues six years earlier, Chavez did not want to hear the vegetable workers’ gripes. He first blamed the “assholes,” left-wingers who he argued had infiltrated the union intent on sabotage. Even Huerta rejected that explanation. “You’re very mistaken,” Richard chimed in angrily. “We created the fucking problem. It’s our problem . . . We had the same problem in Delano in ’72. The same fucking problem.” The militancy of the vegetable workers, Huerta added, made the situation in Salinas even worse.

Chavez tried to reassure them. The problem could never be as bad as in 1973, when the Teamsters took away all the UFW contracts. “If we lose contracts by decertification elections, that’s going to be a bigger problem,” Huerta responded. Under the ALRA, workers could decertify the union during the last year of a contract. Growers had already been capitalizing on the discontent by bringing unhappy workers from UFW companies to talk to workers during election campaigns. Of twenty-two elections held between June and September 1978, the UFW had lost two-thirds.
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Chavez agreed to send a team to Salinas to iron out problems and soothe the ranch committees. What was the goal? asked Chavez. “The goal is to save those contracts,”
⁶
his brother answered. Cesar wanted to name the project. They decided on “
Plan de Flote
.” The goal was to stay afloat.

With no negotiating team in place and the contracts expiring at year’s end, Chavez stalled for time. Marshall Ganz had returned from the Brown campaign, and Chavez assigned Ganz to do an economic study of the vegetable industry. What he discovered gave Chavez hope and reignited his fighting spirit. During the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, profits for the growers had soared: Salinas lettuce growers cleared $71 million in 1978, a jump of 975 percent in eight years. During the same period, farmworkers’ wages increased only 85 percent, to an average of $3.70 an hour. Farmworkers also lagged other employees of the lettuce companies, who had received much larger percentage increases.

Chavez seized on the statistics as a way to placate the angry vegetable workers. The numbers justified demands for major wage increases. He had long condemned the lechugueros for caring too much about money; now he hoped to turn that materialism to his advantage. He relished the impending showdown, a fight that would win back the workers’ loyalty. In the past, Chavez had approached strikes with trepidation. Now he saw a strike as the only worthwhile gamble: “If they beat us,
⁷
they beat us. We don’t have a union. If we beat them, we have a union.”

Board members cautioned that the medical plan caused the most complaints, not wages. Chavez insisted that large salary increases would solve all problems. A strike was the only route. “We’re not going to get the money we need from those bastards unless we get into a big fight,” he said. “I’m not going to settle for anything that’s not going to give the workers some goddamn real money . . . Otherwise we’re not going to have a union.”

The UFW presented its economic demands on January 5, 1979, days after the contracts had expired. The opening package contained over-the-moon demands—an increase in the hourly wage to $5.25, higher salaries for specialty workers, overtime after eight hours, and dozens of other costly provisions. Chavez also insisted on full-time union representatives, paid by the company, a provision modeled on the UAW contracts.

Growers were taken aback. Their early meetings with Chavez had been amicable. Andrew Church, a Salinas attorney representing many of the more moderate growers, had assured Chavez the industry wanted a contract and would negotiate hard but in good faith. The vegetable growers split into factions, along geographic and philosophical lines. The moderate faction
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warned that the hardliners, who did not trust Chavez, would dominate the negotiations “if the Union comes in with a mau-mau” approach, reported Tom Dalzell, one of the last attorneys left in Salinas. In January, the union splashed its demands across the pages of a Mexicali newspaper. The hardliners crowed.

The industry countered with a proposal for a 7 percent raise, citing guidelines promulgated by President Jimmy Carter to stem the rampant inflation of the past decade. Union negotiators responded that Carter’s guidelines did not apply to the lowest wage earners. On January 18, the two sides sat down for the first serious negotiation. The seventeen grower representatives arrived perplexed by the union’s gambit but expecting to negotiate. As they watched Chavez talk past them, they realized he had other plans.

The strike began the next morning. The union called out one company each day—Cal Coastal, then Vessey, then Mario Saikhon, and then Sun Harvest, the giant company formerly known as Interharvest. Thousands of ripe heads of lettuce wilted in the fields. The price of lettuce soared. Growers brought in students, housewives, and even winos in a desperate attempt to salvage the crops. They deployed armed guards and dogs to protect the fields. Ganz estimated losses totaled $2 million
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during the first two weeks of the strike.

When Chavez visited the picket lines on February 1, 1979, about three thousand workers had shut down eight companies that normally supplied one-third of the nation’s winter lettuce. He spoke to thousands of cheering workers and called the strike a “dream realized,
¹⁰
a dream that at one time we thought impossible.” The days “when people used to laugh at us” are over, he declared. The strike was the most organized he had ever seen. “I feel the way I never felt before. We have thirty years of struggle behind us, but I am spirited and encouraged. I feel I can fight for another hundred years.”

Nine days later, Chavez sat down for the first one-on-one negotiations with Sun Harvest, with which the union held its largest and oldest vegetable contract. Talks had just begun in a Los Angeles church basement when word came that a farmworker had been fatally shot.

Strikers had rushed into the Mario Saikhon company fields, trespassing in an effort to drive out the scabs. The tactic was not officially sanctioned but widely used. A foreman and two other employees had opened fire. Rufino Contreras, twenty-eight, was struck in the head and collapsed facedown in the lettuce field. His father and brother watched him die.

Chavez prevailed upon angry workers to refrain from violence, just as he had after the deaths of Juan de la Cruz and Nagi Daifullah in 1973. Chavez eulogized Contreras that evening in front of more than a thousand workers. The next night, Chavez and Contreras’s father led a silent three-mile candlelight procession. On Valentine’s Day, more than seven thousand people walked for miles along rural roads in the funeral procession. Gov. Jerry Brown sat beside Chavez at the service. “Mi papi! Mi papi!”
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sobbed Contreras’s five-year-old son.

The funeral was one of Chavez’s last visits to the picket lines. His role, he told the strikers, was to raise money and outside support. “My job is in the cities,”
¹²
he said. “The large churches, labor unions and student groups in Los Angeles already are being contacted. We need to bring food and money in here, medical aid, all the things people need.”

The union was spending between $300,000 and $400,000 a month on the strike. Two fund-raising appeals had generated minimal response. “Money’s not coming in
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like it used to,” Chavez told the board. He headed east on a fund-raising tour. He also began to lay the groundwork for a boycott of Chiquita bananas. Sun Harvest was owned by United Brands, which also owned Chiquita. Chavez was convinced a boycott would force Sun Harvest to settle.

At a fund-raiser at the New York apartment of Bob Denison, the investment banker who handled the union’s funds, Chavez explained the difficulty of striking the most powerful industry in California. He sounded much as he had when people in the room first met him a decade earlier. “We’ve got to go out and use the boycott as a means of counteracting the pressure that comes because they have total control of the political life in the community,” he said. “When you strike the growers, you strike the school board, you strike the water board, you strike the board of supervisors, the city police.”

Denison acknowledged that generating interest in the farmworkers’ cause had become difficult, even among New Yorkers who had supported the union for years. “Cesar Chavez and the grape strike and the farmworker union is a very old story,” he told his guests. “And it’s very difficult with a lot of people, unfortunately, to get them to feel as they did ten years ago, when people were more prone to become active. It’s very difficult to stir people up now about anything.”

Denison went further. He addressed the growing criticism that Chavez did not operate the union efficiently. Chavez rejected the life of a labor leader and the goals of the middle class, Denison said:
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“If the only way to be entirely efficient was to bring in a lot of outsiders who have a lot of special managerial skills and put them in charge of everything so the people involved in the union and the cause couldn’t control their own destiny, that was too high a price to pay. So I’m not sympathetic to complaints.” Then he handed Chavez a $1,000 check and told everyone else to donate before they walked out the door.

Back home, Chavez faced more problems. His dream strike had begun to disintegrate. Growers recruited scabs. Discipline on the picket lines broke down. Gambling and drinking increased. Ganz had started the strike with a structure that relied on captains at each company and a strike council that met twice a day to plan strategy. Chavez had replaced Ganz with a trusted friend from his teenage years in Delano, Frank Ortiz. Ortiz was close to Manuel Chavez. Ortiz refused to meet with the workers. His allegiance was to Manuel; the workers’ allegiance was to Ganz. Friction between the factions deepened.

Manuel Chavez had been absent for several years from the union’s official roster. In the fall of 1975, as election campaigns began, Manuel had disappeared, leaving behind large unpaid bills and a reported stolen car,
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with a loan cosigned by his cousin Cesar. “Dear Manuel,”
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Cesar wrote in October 1975. “After some 20 telephone calls and various other ways of getting ahold of you, I finally decided to come and see you in Calexico. As expected I was not able to see you and I have given up hope of trying to reach you . . . For all intents and purposes, you have given up organizing for the Union, and God knows whatever it is you are doing. Therefore, I am replacing you of your duties with the Union.” For years, Chavez would point to this as evidence that he was willing to fire anyone—even his own cousin.

By the time the 1979 strike began, Manuel had resurfaced in the Imperial Valley in an unofficial but significant role. “There are two cliques,
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two groups there,” Chavez said. “They’re there because we encourage them, because we allow them to happen.” Chavez needed both. He relied on Manuel for intelligence, and he depended on Ganz for organizational assignments no one else could handle. To different degrees, Chavez had emotional bonds with both men, and he tolerated behavior from each that he would not have countenanced from others. But under the pressure of the strike, tension worsened. Jessica Govea was in charge of administering strike benefits; by March, two months into the strike, she and Ortiz were barely on speaking terms. Chavez called an emergency board meeting.