Word: chavez
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UNION REPRESENTATION elections have been held for just over 35,000 farmworkers in California under a new state law which went into effect August 28. The results lend strong support to the contention that the purpose of Cesar Chavez's decade-long boycotts was to force farmworkers into the UFW who didn't want to join...
Prior to the elections Chavez predicted that farmworkers given a choice would vote 95 per cent in favor of the UFW. But the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board (CALRB), the agency in charge of the voting, reports that in elections with both unions on the ballot the Teamsters have won 59 contests covering about 10,500 workers and the UFW has won 46 covering about 6000 workers. Including elections where only one union and the no union alternatives were on the ballot, the Teamsters have 96 wins covering about 12,000 workers and the UFW has 154 covering about...
DURING THAT TIME, he kept scrupulous notes and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with Chavez, the other leaders of the movement, state legislators, Teamster organizers, and even "growers"--the term used in California for the captains of agribusiness. He has written a long sympathetic book describing Chavez's early childhood in Arizona, his family's deprivation during the Depression and flight to California, and Chavez's adult life as a union organizer...
...sometimes insightful story of a man and his union. As historical reportage, the book fails because of its lack of critical distance and inattention to detail. As biography it fails because only small sections of the book are written by Levy himself. The book is closest to autobiography although Chavez had no say over what to include. Form should, of course, be wedded to function; the ambiguity in the form of Levy's book reveals a certain confusion on the author's part over just what his book is really about. The constant switching of focus, from one interviewee...
...left with the suspicion that Levy rushed the book out to aid the UFW in the crucial farm worker elections now underway in the California fields. The story of the election struggle would have been a more logical stopping point for a book about Chavez and the union since the results may determine the fate of the movement. But what's worse is that Levy has thrown five years of impressive research into a book designed to promote Chavez rather than explain...