Word: ufw
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...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...
...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...
Even more interesting are the results from Delano, the center of UFW activities for most of the last decade. The table grape capital is where thousands of farmworkers supposedly went on strike in 1965. For ten years people were supposed to boycott grapes for these workers. But in Delano, the Teamsters have won 18 victories covering 4008 workers and the UFW has won seven covering 569 workers...
Lettuce was the target of another major boycott, and the results of elections among these workers are not much different. Only partial results are available, but in the lettuce fields of Salinas where elections have been held the Teamsters have won 25 contests covering about 4500 workers and the UFW has won 16 covering about 3500 workers...
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...