Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Commentary: 40 Years Later, UFW's La Causa Lives

The United Farm Workers union … the UFW … is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the extraordinary grape strike that won worldwide support for California’s farmworkers in their struggle for the basic rights that had long been denied them, and denied the millions of other farmworkers across the country.

The farmworkers’ struggle is far from over. But the grape strike led by Cesar Chavez remains a great inspiration … and a source of important lessons … for those who are fighting today’s battles … and who could not fight those battles without help from the allies who originally joined them in response to the grape strike and the grape boycott that stemmed from it.

The strike erupted in the fall of 1965 in the hot, dusty vineyards around the small valley town of Delano, California, and spread quickly to the state’s other vineyards, where most of the country’s grapes are grown. The strike had relatively little impact, however, until strikers launched the grape boycott three years later.

The strike soon became a worldwide cause – “La Causa,” a compelling social movement that drew together a powerful coalition of unions and church, civil rights and other sympathetic organizations, liberal Democratic politicians, clergymen and women, young activists, old-line union members, socially conscious shoppers, and many others.

By 1970, just two years after it had begun , the boycott forced California’s grape growers to sign the country’s first farm union contracts.

Even more than that, the boycott led to enactment of the law that promises California’s farmworkers the legal right to bargain collectively with employers – the right that was granted to most of the country’s non-agricultural workers way back in the 1930s.

There’s never been anything quite like the grape boycott . It was led by farmworkers who had rarely been outside their small rural communities . They traveled in rickety buses to major cities all across the country, with the support -- financial and otherwise -- of their many and varied allies.

They picketed thousands of supermarkets and grocery stores, urging shoppers not to buy grapes until vineyard workers were guaranteed union contracts. They convinced schools and other public institutions to remove grapes from their menus. They got longshoremen to refuse to load grapes destined for foreign markets.

By the time the boycott ended, fully 12 percent of the country’s population had quit buying grapes, -- something like 17 million people.

But the victory was short-lived. Grape growers refused to renew their contracts with the farmworkers union when they expired three years later. And ever since then, they have rebuffed the UFW’s drives to renew the contracts.

Despite loss of the landmark contracts, the United Farm Workers union has won other important victories. That includes, most recently, a contract granted as a result of a nationwide boycott against the giant Gallo corporation, the country’s largest winery and a long-time foe of the UFW. There have been recent contract signings, too, by growers of a variety of crops in several states, as well as legislation strengthening farmworkers’ legal rights to health and safety protections.

The UFW’s efforts have inspired formation of other farmworker unions in several states, and the others use of the boycott and other UFW tactics to win contracts and to try to win laws granting them the bargaining rights won by the UFW in California.

Yet for all that, most farmworkers remain in poverty. Their working and living conditions are, as ever, a national disgrace.

Despite its ups and downs, the UFW still holds the farmworkers’ best hope for a better life … if not their only hope …. just as it has since that day four decades ago when vineyard workers in Delano, California, launched one of the most important and most hopeful campaigns in American labor history.

This is Dick Meister.