Word: chavez
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...idea was to spark a boycott of iceberg lettuce-the kind that looks like a head of cabbage-in support of Cesar Chavez's two-year-old strike against growers in California. Chavez, grateful for the Democratic boost, believes that the boycott is beginning to take hold and in fact is doing as well as the grape boycott did at a comparable time in its history. But the evidence is not so reassuring. For a while after the convention, many sympathizers gave up lettuce. The growers were shipping only 300,000 cartons a day out of Salinas Valley instead...
...spent, appetites increased and people started munching the greenery again. The wilting lettuce cause pointed up a dilemma larger than lettuce: in the current climate, it is hard to turn a labor issue into a liberal cause. Labor is in bad odor with liberals these days, and even a Chavez suffers from the apathy...
After a five-year battle supported by sympathetic liberals round the country, Chavez in 1970 won a stunning victory over the grape growers, who were forced to recognize his United Farm Workers Union. From there, Chavez looked for new fields of crops to conquer. He chose lettuce. At once, the panicky growers signed up with the Teamsters Union, hoping that it would prove more malleable than the militant U.F.W. Chavez, who felt that he had been betrayed by a brother union, was able to organize only a few growers. Many court battles and union confrontations later, the dust has still...
...boycott. He cannot boycott the lettuce on the grounds that it is nonunion, since most of it comes courtesy of the Teamsters. If he wants to determine whether it is picked by the U.F.W., he has to examine the carton it came in to see if it bears Chavez's black eagle emblem. On the shelf, one head of lettuce looks much like another. While most shoppers go on blissfully buying lettuce with no idea that a boycott is under way, those who care are treated to conflicting advice. Some militants instruct them to keep things simple...
...other troubles, the U.F.W. finds its very existence under attack. In Arizona, Kansas and Idaho, laws have been passed that would cripple Chavez's organizing activities; they prohibit boycotts by farm workers, require farm-union elections before strikes can be called and hinder strikes at harvest time. Similar measures are included in an initiative that has been put on the California ballot by a combination of growers, shippers and the California Farm Bureau Federation. If a lettuce boycott can succeed under these circumstances, it may be that only Cesar Chavez can bring...