Word: chavez
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
These results are consistent with the history of the California farm labor battle. When Chavez first began organizing grape and then lettuce workers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he found bitter opposition to his union from many workers and little support from most others. Many farmworkers felt they could do better on their own rather than through the union and resented Chavez's plan to impose a tyrannical hiring hall on them. The threatening, intimidating and often violent tactics employed by UFW organizers against recalcitrant workers only served to strengthen this opposition...
...Whenever Chavez failed to get adequate worker support, he turned to the boycott to force workers into his union by intimidating growers into signing contracts regardless of their employees' wishes. Throughout the last decade he and his organizers have repeatedly lied to the public about everything from the grape and lettuce workers' wages to their bathrooms to gain popular support. This campaign of misrepresentation eventually won enough public backing to force many workers into the UFW in 1970 as pressured growers signed their employees over to Chavez without asking their consent...
...workers's distrust of Chavez's union was proven well-justified. Suffering losses of both dignity and income, the workers were cheated and abused through the dictatorial and corrupt hiring hall and inept, incompetent, union policies. In many cases, workers and growers turned to the Teamsters for relief and by 1973 the UFW had lost most of its contracts. Chavez attempted to regain the lost contracts by trying to use the public again through boycotts which have yet to be called off despite the elections...
With about half of the farmworkers choosing either the Teamsters or no union, the overall returns from the fields reveal this strong current of worker opposition to Chavez and the coercive nature of the boycotts. But the boycotts' insidious purpose can be seen even more clearly by noting the results in the areas to which they were aimed. One remembers the famous Gallo boycott and the screeching tirades on how Gallo, with a few hundred workers, was the key to the farm labor market. Not much is heard about Gallo anymore. Why? Because although the election is still disputed, Chavez...
Overall the election results hardly represent a victory for the UFW. Even where Chavez has won, the combined Teamster and no union vote has often outpolled the UFW total. Moreover, the Teamsters continue to hold contracts representing almost 45,000 workers, more than twice the UFW total, while there remain 150,000 farmworkers in California under no union that the UFW has as yet been unable to bring to election. Clearly Chavez is not the overwhelmingly popular folkhero or Christ figure among farmworkers that his supporters have claimed...