Word: grapes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Such workers have never won collective bargaining rights, partially because they have not been highly motivated to organize and partially because their often itinerant lives have made them difficult to weld into a group that would have the clout of an industrial union. By trying to organize the grape pickers, Chavez hopes to inspire militancy among all farm laborers. Because most of the grape pickers are Mexican Americans, he also believes that he is fighting a battle on behalf of the entire Mexican-American community, which as a group constitutes the nation's second biggest deprived minority...
...conditions under which farm laborers toil have improved somewhat since the squalid Depression era so well evoked by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle; yet field work remains one of the most unpleasant of human occupations. It demands long hours of back-breaking labor, often in choking dust amid insects and under a flaming sun. The harvesttime wage for grape pickers averages $1.65 an hour, plus a 250 bonus for each box picked, while the current federal minimum wage...
That same spring, in the Coachella Valley east of Los Angeles, the largely Filipino grape pickers of the A.F.L.-. C.I.O.'s fledgling Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee won a brief strike for pay equal to that given field hands imported from Mexico. When the workers moved north to Delano at the end of the summer, grape growers there refused to make a similar agreement, and A.W.O.C. once more went on strike. On Sept. 16, which just happened to be Mexican Independence Day, Chavez's group held a tumultuous meeting and voted unanimously to join the walkout. The hall of the Roman...
...Table-grape growers are particularly vulnerable to strikes because their product requires continual attention through much of the year. Since the appearance of the fruit affects its value?unlike the case of wine grapes?the bunches must be carefully picked by hand. Because of their vulnerability, Chavez picked the table-grape growers as his first target. In 1966, after a strike, he got his first contract when Schenley Industries capitulated because it had a nationally known name at stake. Later that year he won the right to represent workers at the mammoth Di Giorgio ranch in an election monitored...
Chavez decided to resort to the boycott to keep pressure on the table-grape growers. He applied it first in 1967 to the Giumarra Vineyards Corp., the largest U.S. table-grape producer. Giumarra started using the labels of other growers?in violation of Food and Drug Administration rules?to circumvent the boycott. In retaliation, the Chavez people began to appeal to stores and consumers not to buy any California table grapes at all. The boycott has been extended overseas to Britain and Scandinavia...