The Nixon plan was strongly criticized by Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, who had taken over from Senator Harrison Williams as head of the Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, and by Senator Edward Kennedy, who had inherited a vested interest in la causa from his brothers. Mondale and Kennedy led the dignitaries who assembled, on May 18, to greet a company of strikers who had trudged one hundred miles in a 100-degree heat from Coachella to Calexico, to dramatize their protest against the unrestrained importation of poor Mexicans to swamp their own efforts to better their lot. Cesar Chavez addressed the rally in Calexico, and so did Senator Kennedy: a country that could spend $30 billion every year on a senseless war, send men to the moon and present rich farmers with millions of dollars in subsidies for crops they do not grow, Kennedy said, could afford to raise the standard of living of the poor who fed the nation. Both Kennedy and Mondale pledged themselves to a fight for new green-card legislation.
The strike in Coachella began ten days later, on May 28. Over one hundred local workers manned the picket lines, and though the harvest had scarcely started, another two hundred walked out in the first two days. Many signed affidavits of the sort required to certify a strike, and thereby make illegal the importation of scab labor into that field, but this year the two observers from Mr. Schultz’s Department of Labor refused to interview striking workers or inspect their affidavits. When David Averbuck, the Union attorney, protested to the department’s regional director, he was told that “orders from Washington” forbade the Labor officials to investigate or certify strikes: unless the strikes are decreed official, there is no legal recourse against the wholesale importation of Mexican strikebreakers. Since an estimated fifty thousand workers are available in this border region, with only three thousand needed to harvest the grapes, the strikers would be giving up their jobs for nothing.
Averbuck was also told that the federal men would make no investigations whatever but would base all decisions on the reports of inspectors sent by Governor Reagan. One of the latter declared frankly that the state men would not interview the strikers either. They were willing to accept signed affidavits, which would then be made available to the growers; if the growers used the affidavits to compose a blacklist, that was no concern of theirs.
Averbuck, a cynical young man not easily surprised by perfidy, was stunned. “It’s a Nixon-Reagan conspiracy to screw the farm workers and to help the growers recruit workers illegally,” he said. “It’s so blatant it’s unbelievable.”
In any case, the Coachella strike got off to a slow start, and the growers, emboldened by open federal and state support, were making the same old arguments. “If my workers wanted me to sit down at the negotiating table, I would,” said a Coachella grower interviewed by a New York Times reporter in early June. “But my workers don’t want Union recognition. If they did, they would have walked out and joined the strike.”
But one of his workers, interviewed in the same report, refuted him. “I belong to the Union but I’m working here because I have bills to pay. The Union can’t pay them and I can’t work anywhere else. A lot of people like me are forced to do this. How can you stand on a picket line when your family is hungry! It’s hard for me to work here when the Union is out there picketing, but I can’t help it.”
By the time I returned to Delano in late July 1969, the strikers were back from the Coachella Valley and were preparing for the harvest in Lamont. Dave Averbuck was convinced that the campaign in Coachella had been a great success, whereas Jim Drake, while acknowledging progress on all fronts (including fair treatment from the Riverside County police, who did much to prevent the violence of the previous year’s campaign), was sorry to come back without a contract. Everyone agreed, however, that most or all of the Coachella Valley would be under Union contract before a single grape was harvested in 1970, and although much the same thing was said last year, the evidence for this year’s confidence is much better. Grape sales were off 15 percent, and even those chain stores that were still selling grapes have used the boycott as an excuse for paying the growers so little that many grapes were left unharvested. As a group, the Coachella growers were admitting that they had been badly hurt, though a few still refused to be led from the burning barn. “The Union’s boycott has failed,” Mike “Bozo” Bozick declared manfully on July 11, the day after the local agricultural commissioner estimated that 750,000 boxes of Coachella grapes had been left in the fields to rot, and one week after eighty-one of his fellow grape growers filed suit against UFWOC, claiming boycott damages of $25 million.
A turning point, not only in the Coachella campaign but in the four-year strike, was a sit-in, in early June, by Filipino strikers at Bozick’s Bagdasarian Grape Company’s labor camp Number 2 that led to a wave of sit-ins at other ranches. By the time Bozick had the last holdouts evicted and arrested a few days later, the Union had won its most significant victory since the Schenley capitulation in 1966, and Dolores Huerta gave much credit for this to the Filipinos of Bagdasarian. “Their courage, their actions, may have been the final straw that scared the growers into opening discussions,” she said.
On Friday the thirteenth of June, ten growers, who claimed to represent 15 percent of the state’s table-grape production, held a press conference at Indio at which they declared willingness to negotiate with the Union. Their spokesman was Lionel Steinberg, whose Douglas Freedman Ranch is the biggest in Coachella. Steinberg, acknowledging publicly that the boycott had been costly, said, “If we have a conference and discussions with the Union and we see that there is a give-and-take attitude on their part, there is no question that we are prepared to recognize UFWOC as the collective-bargaining agent.”
Five of the growers were from Arvin-Lamont, the next area to be harvested, and the spokesman for the Arvin group was John J. Kovacevich, who had been holding private talks with Jerry Cohen ever since March. Publicly Kovacevich was still fulminating about the “illegal and immoral boycott,” but this did not spare him the damnation of the Delano growers, led by Martin Zaninovich and Jack Pandol, who said that the 93 percent of the table-grape industry that they spoke for would fight Chavez to the end rather than sell out the consumer. The actions of the ten, according to Pandol, were “un-American and un-Christian,” an opinion apparently shared by the Christians unknown who attempted to gouge out the eye of one of the ten, William Mosesian, in a night attack outside his house, and burned a stack of wooden grape boxes belonging to another, Milton Karahadian, in the Coachella Valley. Grower Howard Marguleas was warned not to set foot in Delano, John Kovacevich was snubbed by friends in Top’s Coffee Shop in Lamont, and Lionel Steinberg, after years of membership, resigned from the California Grape and Tree Fruit League due to the viciousness of the League’s attempts to defame the ten growers and sabotage the negotiations.
The Union, of course, had welcomed the meetings, which began on June 20 in the Federal Building in Los Angeles; the negotiations were supervised by three officials of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service of the Department of Labor, whose job it was to keep them from breaking down. Most of the ten growers were present at most of the meetings, which continued until July 3; the Union was represented by Jerry Cohen, Dolores Huerta, Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz, and by Irwin de Shettler, an observer for the AFL-CIO. At the last conference, on July 3, the ten were joined by Bruno Dispoto of Delano. Dispoto had been hurt that spring in Arizona, but many Union people felt that he had been sent in by other Delano growers to find out what was going on. Bruno, introduced to Dolores before the meeting, said, “I haven’t seen you since the old days on the picket line.”
The talks were recessed for the Fourth of July and have not been resumed. There had been inevitable differences (wage scales, Union hiring halls, jurisdiction of workers, safety clauses, and other matters), but the one that derailed the talks was the matter of pesticides. The growers agreed to abide by the lax state and federal laws regarding the use of dangerous chemicals so long as the Union did “not embark on any p
rogram which will in any way harm the industry to which the employer is a member.” This clause, which also gave immunity to the non-negotiating growers, would stifle all campaigns by the Union against pesticide abuses, including the matter of chemical residues on grapes; it was presented in the form of an ultimatum by the growers’ negotiator, a fruit wholesaler named Al Kaplan, and was promptly rejected by the Union. The growers retired to think things over. At a press conference a week later, they denounced the Union for its bad faith and demanded a new “fact-finding commission,” to be appointed by President Nixon. (The growers’ charges were excited, but it is true that the Union was not overly accommodating: except on very favorable terms, a settlement with a small part of the industry was simply not worth the inevitable weakening of the boycott.)
The bad news was received in the Union offices with a certain levity—“We were very upset,” Cesar says, “but what could we do? We just made jokes.” The growers’ demand seemed to bear out certain people in the Union who suspected that the breakdown of negotiations had been planned from the start as an excuse to go to the Nixon Administration for help. But Dolores Huerta was convinced that most of the ten growers were serious, and so was Jerry Cohen. “One night, you know, like it was maybe two in the morning, and everybody was worn out, and Kaplan was still abusing us with all this bullshit, and there was this popcorn on the table, so I started to eat popcorn. And finally the things he was saying got so stupid that I started to crunch the popcorn, and the stupider he got, the louder I crunched, you know, just to bug him. Well, our side was trying like hell not to laugh, especially Dolores, and Kaplan was beginning to get sore, and finally this grower named Howard Marguleas couldn’t stand it any more—he flipped. He said, ‘How can you be so rude! Here we are trying to settle something which is very serious, and you sit there eating popcorn that way, and all you Union people smirking!’ So there was this silence for a minute, I was sitting there like I had lockjaw, and then I said, ‘Can I swallow, Howard?’ Well, this just about broke Dolores up, and the meeting too, but anyway, Howard is usually a pretty calm guy, and the incident told me a lot about the strain they were under and about how serious they were about finding a solution.”
In mid-July, as the negotiations broke down, Senator Mondale’s subcommittee was advised in Washington that the Department of Defense, by its own estimate, would ship eight times as many grapes to Vietnam in 1969 as in any previous year. Like the chain stores, the Defense Department was getting a bargain on the grapes, but in the opinion of the Union, this was no more the reason for the incredible jump in grape consumption than the dehumanized excuse of “increased troop acceptance” that issued like a machine chit from the Pentagon. Claiming the usual collusion within the military-industrial establishment, the Union filed suit against the Defense Department for taking sides in a labor dispute in contravention of its own stated policies: in effect, using public funds to offer a “market of last resort” to a special-interest group.
The Mondale hearings, which continued until August 1, later heard testimony from Jerry Cohen that the growers were using dangerous chemicals in dangerous ways and in dangerous amounts, among them Thiodan, which caused the recent fish kill in the Rhine, and Amino Triazole, residues of which, ten years before in New Jersey, caused the confiscation of wholesale lots of cranberries. By common estimate, it had taken the cranberry industry nine years to recover from the public scare, and the Union did not introduce this evidence without having given the growers a chance to regulate their own practices and come to some satisfactory arrangement about pesticides without being committed to a Union contract. But the growers had not bothered to respond to this offer from Chavez in January, and when, after negotiations had fallen apart on the pesticide issue, Cohen called John Kovacevich to advise him of his intention to bring up the use of Amino Triazole at the Senate hearings, Kovacevich thanked him for the warning but could not bring the growers to act on it. As Averbuck says, “Sometimes they seem to want us to do exactly what we don’t want to do, which is to put them out of business.”
Cohen told the senators about reports from Micronesia of decreased cannibal acceptance of American missionaries; the poisonous residues in American bodies had become so great, he said, pointing a finger at Senator Henry Bellmon of Oklahoma, that “you are no longer fit for human consumption.” Subsequently, an official of the FDA testified that Mr. Cohen’s remarks were accurate enough, but that his agency was ready and able to protect the public against grapes with chemical residues that exceeded the federal tolerance level. Asked by Senator Mondale for the tolerance level on the pesticide known as aldrin, he said, “One tenth of a part per million.” The senator then submitted a laboratory report obtained by the Union on two batches of grapes purchased the day before at a Safeway store in Washington, D.C. One batch, carrying the label of Bozo Bozick’s Bagdasarian Fruit Company, contained aldrin residues of 1.4 parts per million, or fourteen times the permissible amount; another batch from Bianco Fruit Company carried eighteen parts, or one hundred and eighty times the federal tolerance level.
“They won’t understand that we will not compromise on the pesticide issue, that we will give up wage increases first,” Chavez said. “They’re just not ready yet to negotiate seriously; they need more pressure, and they’re going to get it. But I think some of them were serious. Jerry and John Kovacevich were able to talk like human beings, right from the start; if Kovacevich had done their negotiating for them, we might have hammered out a contract in two days.”
Like all his people, Chavez was upset by the damage that the growers’ recalcitrance is doing to the industry. “The longer the boycott continues, the more damage will be done. We still hear of people boycotting Schenley, you know, even after they are told that the Schenley boycott has been over for two and half years.”
As of early August, Union people agree that a meaningful settlement of the California grape strike is unlikely in 1969, since contracts could not be written in time to help the growers; even the ones most likely to sign would probably prefer to hold out until the spring of 1970, in the hope of legislative help from the Nixon Administration. If that help is not forthcoming, however, the Coachella growers will probably give in, and once Coachella falls, the Arvin-Lamont area will fall too. The Delano growers have a longer season and are better equipped with cold-storage sheds, but it seems doubtful, even so, that they could compete indefinitely with Union competitors who are not harassed by the boycott (although how the boycott will be made selective without losing its impact remains a problem). And if Delano falls, so will all the ranches to the north, because Delano is the heart of the resistance to its own foremost citizen, Cesar Chavez.
Even if the present talks remain suspended, their implications are momentous for the Union. The precedent for negotiation is a gaping crack in the monolithic wall that the growers have shored up for four years, and that crack can only erode faster and faster. Hay más tiempo que vida, as Chavez says, and time is on his side.
Cesar, though still based in bed, was sitting in a chair most of the day. He looked much better than he had eight months before; the pain lines and grayness were gone from his face, and the gaiety had returned to it, and he had taken up photography again. His therapy of massage and exercises was working; also, he was using a shoe correction and a pillow under his hip to adjust the imbalance of his weight. He hoped to be fully active by the end of the year. Meanwhile he was working twelve hours a day, talking to aides and visitors, directing strategies, discussing plans; he ate the regular meals that Helen prepared for him in the bungalow kitchen, but he did not stop talking or listening. By his side was a young German shepherd named Boycott, who was very uneasy when more than a few feet from Cesar and already extremely protective of him. There was another dog outside. “That one is mean,” Cesar said. “He can’t seem to learn who are my friends. But Boycott is really very nice.” He paused a moment to scratch the ears and neck of the first dog he has ever owned. “The one thing that really bothers
him is a stranger coming in with something in his hand—you know, a swinging purse or something—he doesn’t like that. It’s instinct, I think. And even when he sleeps, he wakes right up when something changes in the room; when I’m in my chair, he lies against it, so that he will wake up if I move.”
Cesar was out of bed almost all the next day, running a series of meetings with his board. When the meetings were finished, he sat still for a liver-extract shot from Marion Moses, who was now his nurse. As Marion finished, I looked up from an article that concluded “ . . . the involvement of Soviet agents (and their dupes) in the Chavez operation deserves our attention—before they succeed, not after,” and said, “I didn’t realize how dangerous you were.” Cesar, arms extended, had begun a slow painful kneebend, his pajama bottoms poking out from beneath his trousers and Boycott’s leash draped around his neck. “Extreme-ly dangerous,” he said, scowling dangerously. Watching the man, I could appreciate the feelings that Marion has when she administers to him: “How often I’ve thought,” she says, “that this whole thing is held together by this small piece of skin and these few bones.” Yet this small man is very, very tough.
Cesar’s son Babo came in to play with Boycott, and soon after that, Fernando, or “Polly.” In the past year Polly’s face had matured, and so had his whole manner. This spring, after refusing induction into the Army, he had gone with Manuel to Arizona and worked there as an organizer. “One morning,” Cesar said, “he just announced, ‘I don’t think I’ll go,’ and he meant it.” Father Mark Day, who accompanied Polly to the induction office in Fresno, said that the boy had given the matter a lot of thought before he decided that he was a conscientious objector. He had been influenced by his father’s fast, and said that any kind of violence made him sick. A mass for nonviolence, given by Father Day outside the induction office, was duly photographed by FBI agents attracted to this subversive event by a newspaper report on Chavez’s son’s decision. “I got some awful letters,” Cesar said, “even from some of the membership. But I believed in him, and I couldn’t forsake him out of expedience. Finally, I held a meeting about it. ‘When we started this union,” I said, ‘I told you you were welcome to everything I had, even my life. Well, now I am going to take something back. You are welcome to my life, but not to my principles.’”
Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can) Page 36