Word: chavez
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Chavez called back and told Giumarra's father: "Gee, I'm so tired I can't even talk." John Giumarra Sr. replied: "Don't talk, just listen." Chavez agreed: "We've been waiting for this for five years, so if you are willing to talk, I guess I will." They met at 2 a.m. in a Delano motel and talked for six hours. That morning there were full-fledged negotiations between a six-man U.F.W.O.C. team and 26 major grape growers from the rich San Joaquin Valley. The meetings went on for three days...
Eroded Ground. It was in dusty, sweltering Delano that la huelga began. A small group of predominantly Mexican-American farm workers led by Chavez met in a Roman Catholic church hall and voted to strike the vineyards. La huelga divided California's farm communities, pitting townsman against townsman. It produced conflicts that did credit to neither side. While Chavez preached nonviolence with deeprooted conviction, some of his followers set fire to packing sheds, slashed the tires of growers' trucks and threatened foremen with physical punishment. Growers and their men bullied the strikers, roughing them up and sometimes arranging...
...first, Chavez's fledgling union seemed to have little chance of success. The growers had powerful political and financial allies in the state, and there was plenty of nonunion labor available to do the ill-paid, back-breaking vineyard work. But in 1968 Chavez applied what turned out to be a brilliant tactic: a nationwide boycott of table grapes. That move mustered wide support from urban liberals and succeeded in cutting the public demand for grapes-and thus the price the growers received-to the point where many producers suffered...
Like water slowly dripping onto limestone, Chavez's patient pressures finally eroded the ground beneath his opponents. A handful of employers, chiefly in the Coachella Valley to the south, yielded earlier this year. Boxes of their grapes, bearing the union's stylized black eagle, were exempt from the boycott. After the May harvest, the unionized growers found their grapes bringing 250 to $1 more per box than boycotted produce. That hard proof of the eagle's economic pull broke the deadlock with the larger group of growers...
Simple Amenities. Though Coke has owned the groves since 1960, Austin said, he awakened to the migrant workers' plight only in 1968, after he had begun reading about Cesar Chavez's drive to organize California grape pickers (see THE NATION). Austin sent J. Lucian Smith, president of Coke's food division, to inspect the Florida groves. Smith reported back to him that the workers' living conditions "could not in conscience be tolerated by the Coca-Cola...