Why Cesar Chavez Led a Movement as Well as a Union (2011)

Today's farm worker movement continues along a different and, to some, a controversial path fulfilling Cesar E. Chavez's legacy by battling to improve lives of farm workers and other Latino working people. We do that as both a union doggedly organizing poorest among us and as a movement tackling broader challenges confronting our people outside workplace. With all homage and recognition afforded Chavez since his passing in 1993, it is easy to forget how controversial a figure he was during his lifetime. Chavez and movement have often been attacked, both then and now. So this look at past and present is timely. There is a passage from Book of Joel in Bible that former U.S. President John F. Kennedy was fond of quoting: Your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. When Chavez began building what became United Farm Workers (UFW) of America on his birthday, March 31, 1962, he had a different vision of what a union movement could be. Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and many others who would join him did a lot of research, studying why all attempts to organize farm workers over previous one-hundred years had failed. Chavez was convinced things had to be done differently if there was any hope of success. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A big part of his strategy was understanding and recognizing that workers are not just workers. Of course, Chavez knew it would take a union to address economic injustices farm workers suffer at workplace. Yet in a letter Chavez sent to head of California Table Grape Commission in 1969, he cited crippling obstacles farm workers faced: The color of our skins, languages of our cultural and native origins, lack of formal education, exclusion from democratic process, numbers of our slain in recent wars--all these burdens generation after generation have sought to demoralize us, to break our human spirit. THE MAKINGS OF A MOVEMENT Chavez knew it would take more than a union to overcome these burdens; it would take a movement. So work began. But even work of union had to be different, although it closely followed social unionism that marked labor movement during early part of last century. Then, like today, many workers were also poor immigrants--mostly from Europe--who didn't speak language, suffered discrimination, and had many needs outside workplace. Chavez's version of trade unionism was forged by consuming books by and about figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Sidney Hillman, head of then Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, which during 1920s established low-cost cooperative housing, unemployment insurance, and a bank for union members. Before he won union contracts, Chavez started organizing by providing services to people. There was a death benefit, a credit union, and a cooperative gas station. When he first talked about forming a union, Chavez realized what was really holding him back was financial Therefore, in 1962, as he was about to found UFW, he took stock of himself. He was thirty-five. As staff director of Community Service Organization (CSO), most effective Latino civil rights group of its day, which Chavez helped build, Cesar was experiencing his first steady job and paycheck since being a migrant farm worker. Cesar and his wife, Helen, knew risks and long odds against success. Helen worried about their eight young children. But Chavez saw what he called the trap most people get themselves into--tying themselves to a job for security. So Chavez quit his CSO post and moved to Delano, CA, with Helen and their eight children, ages thirteen to three-and-a-half. On weekends, Helen worked in fields, along with Cesar and their children, to support family. Cesar babysat youngest children as he drove to agricultural towns, recruiting farm workers into his infant union. …