Week 9: UFW

Because I took Professor Knapp’s English 1A class last semester, I am very familiar with the United Farm Workers and the movements that they inspired. Our final term paper in English 1A was a research paper where we had to research a topic related with farm workers and/or the fight for equality in general. I chose to research and write about Dolores Huerta, the influential activist who worked alongside the likes Cesar Chavez and Robert F. Kennedy in the fight for equality not only for farm workers, but for anyone who has been subjected to the horrors of inequality. Generally speaking, I learned about the Bracero Program, the strikes, and the resulting rights that came with being able to collectively bargain with the employers. The bracero program was an agreement between the United States and Mexico that was negotiated by President Franklin Roosevelt (U.S.) and President Manuel Camacho (Mexico) during World War II. It basically imported temporary Mexican laborers to harvest crops because there was a shortage of people to do these tasks. The Bracero Program was supposed to end after the war, but it was made into Public Law 78 in 1951. Led by the efforts of Cesar Chavez, the farm workers were able to end the Bracero Program in 1964 through Congressional legislation. The fight was long from being over however. They had to fight for better treatment of farm workers. They had to fight for better wages. The official website of the UFW provided a statistic that said in the mid 1960s, the average wage of a farm worker was $0.90 per hour, plus $0.10 for every filled basket. Not only that, they had to pay around $2.00 a day to stay in a filthy, mosquito infested shack that had plumbing or cooking capabilities. These were truly inhumane conditions that sorely needed to change. The Delano Grape Strike helped in getting legislation passed for farm workers rights. It started when grape pickers demanded a pay increase to $1.25 an hour, resulting in the growers denying their request and bringing in scab workers. Previously, growers were able to quell strikes by eventually agreeing to slight wage increase. They finally relented and raised wages. However, to the shocked horror of the growers, the strikers became even more inspired! The strikers demanded the right to unionize. Cesar Chavez asked the public to refrain from buying grapes that did not have a union label. Because this was happening during the height of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the strikers benefited from a heightened awareness from the public of the negative effects of racism and discrimination. As a result, Cesar Chavez’s plea to not purchase grapes without a union label was extremely successful as millions of people stopped buying certain grapes.

This picture is of a group of protesting a bill in Wisconsin that eliminated collective bargaining rights from nearly all public employees. 60 years after Cesar Chavez struggled to get the right to collectively bargain fair working conditions for one group of workers, a conservative state government is trying to eliminate that progress. I chose this because it best represents the continuing struggle in the volatile 21st century.