by Miriam Pawel
The union’s center of gravity shifted inexorably away from La Paz and Delano, toward the coastal regions of Salinas and Oxnard where the bulk of the new members worked, and the Imperial and Coachella Valleys. Chavez resisted the message in the early election results, which would become increasingly clear: The union’s greatest strength was among the vegetable and citrus workers. He clung to a sentimental attachment to the Delano area and a determination to win in the vineyards where he had begun his quest. “It’s in the valley towns where we have our strength,” he insisted. “People will sacrifice16 . . . They’ve been in the union longer . . . They have less love for money than the others. That’s the difference.”
Organizers in the field pressed to consolidate their victories with contracts. “What kind of time schedule17 are we looking at for negotiations and who’s going to be doing it?” Medina asked at the fall 1975 board meeting. “I don’t have it quite worked out in my mind,” Chavez replied. In the meantime, he said, organizers should work with ranch committees to form negotiating committees, compile seniority lists, and preliminary lists of demands. Medina and Ganz said they had already done that.
“I think it’s important for us to go out there and get a contract so that we can show some concrete results,” Medina said. “Not just winning an election and then sitting there and sitting there and sitting there with nothing happening.” Inaction would hand the Teamsters a campaign issue: the UFW didn’t deliver. “It sounds to me, we’re talking about a month or more. And I think waiting can be very harmful.”
“No not a month,” Chavez said. “We’re talking about doing it right away.”
Medina persisted: “What do you mean by right away?”
Chavez said they needed to discuss strategy before he could answer that question and promised the timetable would be clear by the end of the night.
But nothing was clear by the time they adjourned. Medina had developed a strategic plan for Oxnard and targeted dozens more companies for elections. A month later, Chavez decided the priority was fighting the Teamsters. He moved Medina to Coachella, one of the most difficult areas for the union because of the short season, the transitory nature of the workforce, and resentment among grape growers who had chafed under the 1970 contracts.
Even in Coachella, Medina and his troops found moments to savor. John Gardner, one of Medina’s strongest organizers, wrote to Fred Ross in late December, describing election night at Valdora Produce Company. David Valdora got very drunk, bet thousands of dollars that his workers would reject the UFW, then watched in astonishment as ballots were counted and the union triumphed. “You deserve a Christmas present,”18 Gardner wrote, “and maybe one of the best ones is the reassurance that everything is proceeding smoothly, at least for the moment, without your presence for impending emergencies and general directions.”
Perhaps if Chavez had been in the middle of campaigns instead of isolated at La Paz, he might have shared in the excitement and found a way to direct his talent for organizational jujitsu toward winning elections and gaining converts. Instead, he grew frustrated at the welter of deadlines and pressures imposed by the state law and competing requests from organizers around the state. Separate power bases developed, harder for Chavez to control from La Paz. He had always been able to aim the union machinery at one goal—the boycott, No on Proposition 22, the Teamsters. Now different demands had to be juggled, under tight deadlines.
“You know what made the movement?”19 he asked rhetorically in a pensive moment. “The one thing that helped us all the time is that we’ve had all the time we needed, and more. We’ve never had any deadline. The moment we get into deadline things, like [publishing] the Malcriado, like having the reports on time—we screw up. But when we have all the time in the world . . . See, the difference here is that time is not going to be as good a friend as it’s been in other cases.”
At the beginning of 1976, Chavez caught a break. The initial appropriation for the ALRB had been $1.3 million. The board blew through that quickly and received a $1.25 million emergency appropriation. Over five months, the board had conducted 423 elections. Preliminary results gave the UFW 192 victories,20 while the Teamsters won 119. Twice as many workers voted for the UFW as chose the Teamsters. In only 25 contests did workers reject both unions.
When the board’s funds ran low again at the end of 1975, growers prevailed on the legislature not to authorize more money. On February 6, 1976, the ALRB shut down. The closure looked like a defeat and handed the UFW another public campaign issue. In reality, Chavez welcomed the breathing room. Time was on his side again, for a while.
Chapter 28
The Crosby Era
We need help. It’s like somebody growing up in the Depression. All of a sudden, the Depression ends. But he’s attuned to being in the Depression, and pretty soon it’s prosperity, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it.
Chavez took advantage of the respite from elections to focus on the administration of the union that had grown so large, so fast. He needed to consolidate, much as Saul Alinsky had urged back in the CSO days. Just as in San Jose in 1956, Chavez struggled with the “staying organized” phase. He recognized he had no expertise in organizational structure. “We’re people people,”1 he said. “We know how to deal with people and organize people. When it comes to shuffling papers . . . we’re lost.”
Determined to conquer this new world, Chavez made an unusual move. In early 1976, he turned to a stranger for help. Crosby Milne, a retired navy man and self-taught management consultant, had been drawn into the UFW by his son, who dropped out of college to join the boycott.
Chavez and Milne shared certain bonds. Milne had grown up poor in rural Canada, in a house without indoor plumbing. He was deeply religious and largely self-educated. He had joined the navy as a mechanic, discovered a knack for devising systems to straighten out troubled situations, and became a systems expert. His outsider’s perspective and homespun comments appealed to Chavez. Every person is a creator, Milne often preached. He had learned three principles from an admiral, which he said would guarantee control and success: never take yourself too seriously, don’t get into a pissing match with a skunk, and never let an SOB know you know he’s an SOB. Chavez loved that line and prompted Milne to repeat it often.
During the summer of 1975, Milne had gone to visit his son, hoping to persuade him to finish college. Milne attended a rally along the 1,000 mile march and watched as Chavez climbed on a park table, then realized that half the crowd was behind him no matter which direction he faced. As the crowd good-naturedly chanted the union slogan “Which side are you on?” Chavez jumped down and moved the table back so that no one else need move. Milne was sold.2 He offered his services to the union for a year, which he viewed as a gift to his adopted country during its bicentennial.
To introduce Milne to the executive board, Chavez called a special meeting at the Mission San Antonio de Padua, toward the southern end of the Salinas Valley. Chavez explained that he had invited Milne to the retreat to help figure out a structure to make the union work. Over the next four days, Chavez raised logistical and philosophical issues that would become flash points over the next two years: his wish that the leadership move to La Paz, his desire to train young Chicanos in disciplines like the law, the need for a process that allowed union staff members to air grievances before they became festering problems, the difficulty in finding the right person to restart El Malcriado, and above all the need for more contracts so the union might become financially stable. “Members aren’t paying for it,” Chavez told the board.3 “And as long as that’s the case, we can’t really say we have a union.”
At the outset of the retreat, Medina asked Chavez how they knew they could trust Milne with the most intimate workings of their organization. Ganz questioned his military background. Chavez verbally shrugged. He said he trusted Milne but could not vouch for him unreservedly. He thought, however, that they had no choice. Milne might turn out to be a spy, Chavez said, but h
e definitely knew his stuff.
“We need help,” he told the board. “It’s like somebody growing up in the Depression. All of a sudden, the Depression ends. But he’s attuned to being in the Depression, and pretty soon it’s prosperity, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it . . . We grew up under tremendous stress. Everything we did was like fire drills. We ran from one fire drill to another. All of a sudden, either actually or because the press began to say that we’re successful . . . we’re successful. Yet, we’re not successful.”
The executive board voted unanimously to accept Milne’s help and spent four days immersed in flow charts and lists. The heart of Milne’s program was what he called SAMS—specific, attainable, measurable goals. Milne used his favorite example to explain goals and objectives: President Kennedy had a goal to explore outer space, and he set an objective to land a man on the moon. Under Milne’s tutelage, Chavez told the board, he had become convinced that to meet objectives, the union must centralize power. Officers should have broad statewide functions rather than regional responsibilities. Chavez announced new assignments: Ganz to run the organizing department, Medina to head contract administration, Padilla for financial management, and Richard Chavez to direct the Service Center. Huerta was assigned temporarily to the Personnel Department. The executive board enthusiastically endorsed the new structure.
Chavez’s insistence that union leaders should live at La Paz met with a decidedly less warm response. He persisted, pressing an issue that would take on increasing importance. Few were swayed when Chavez prompted a testimonial from Padilla, who said he had never been happier living anywhere else. “Everybody’s moving to La Paz, it’s going to be so crowded, I’m willing to give up my happiness to somebody else,” Richard Chavez said, arguing that an assignment should not require officers to live in the compound. People who lived on the outside were ostracized, Cesar responded, because they were rejecting the community.
“Being honest about it, some of us just don’t want to be at La Paz,” said Jerry Cohen. Chavez had recently acquiesced to Cohen’s personal considerations and allowed him to move the legal department to Salinas, hundreds of miles from union headquarters. Chavez was having second thoughts. “We’re having one hell of a problem,” he told the board. “We’re going to work it back.”
Milne showed no reluctance about La Paz and moved there with his wife. He spent many hours with Chavez, who discussed his dream for a broader Poor Peoples Union and his determination to avoid the failures of the CSO. They shared meals and attended mass. On Easter, Chavez washed Milne’s feet. Over several months, the two men held a dozen conferences, each lasting several days, with every department—legal, boycott, contract administration, political action, data processing, security, financial management, even the National Farm Worker Ministry. They charted goals and objectives for each department and for the union as a whole, so that people could see how their work fit into the larger picture.
“God, we never knew we would have to go into all these things: law, initiative, politics, SAMs, goals, budgets . . . If I’d known that I would have said, ‘Screw it,’” Chavez said at the Organizing Department conference. “But it was essentially the organizing which I loved and I still like, but I can’t do it these days. It’s like candy behind a glass counter.” They sketched out short- and long-term goals. “We must be missionary,”4 Chavez said. “If we are missionary and visionary, in ten years we will be in Asia, Latin America, Africa . . . organizing farmworkers of the world.”
At the moment, however, the union had only fifteen contracts5 and a few thousand members. The UFW had won 207 elections and been certified by the state board at half those ranches but had yet to start negotiations in most places. In Delano, for example, the union had one contract that covered fifty-three jobs; five thousand other workers had voted for the UFW and now clamored for attention. Chavez latched on to Milne’s system as a solution to propel the union out of a morass that threatened to become overwhelming.
Chavez confronted a paradox. The more elections the UFW won, the more resources had to be diverted toward serving new members, and the less expansion they could afford—delaying his dreams of a broader movement. He did not want to stagnate like other unions. He needed contracts to stabilize the union’s finances, but contracts imposed new demands. “Once you get a contract, you get a string around your neck,”6 Chavez warned a young farmworker organizer from Ohio who wanted to affiliate with the UFW. “Right now, we have a clear shot at California, and goddamn it, we’re being held back by our own success. We got to go into all kinds of other things. Servicing, negotiating, getting involved in guarding our right flank and our left flank and the rear flank. When other unions used to tell us that, we didn’t believe them.”
Chavez embraced Milne’s boxes and charts and began to implement change, in a somewhat stilted fashion that clashed with the union’s freewheeling style and prompted parodies. Chavez set up a numbered system for administrative divisions and sent out memos creating a Personnel Relations Department, code 40000. He issued directives, beginning with Instruction 1:0001, which he promised would codify the policies of the union. He instructed staff members to place the directives in a loose-leaf binder, filed by code and subject; they eventually totaled more than a hundred pages.
Milne asked Chavez to list all the people who reported to him. They stopped when he hit fifty. Chavez headed a labor union, a Service Center, a pension trust, a health insurance program, a credit union, two political action committees, a death benefit insurance program, and several other nonprofit entities. More than a hundred people lived and worked at La Paz. Hundreds more worked in the union’s two dozen field offices and thirty boycott offices—and most reported directly to Chavez. Milne told Chavez that would have to change.
The new structure established clear lines of authority. Department heads would have decision-making power. “This is what’s going to save you,” Chavez told his staff. “You have to delegate more7 and more things to your people, and hold them accountable. The big thing is that you have to be able to let go.”
Chavez had trouble following his own advice. He accepted the trade-off in theory: he could delegate more authority and maintain control by demanding accountability. In practice, Chavez gave subordinates full authority—provided, as he spelled out in Instruction 1:0003, that they “cut in” the president on any decisions involving the budget, priorities, programs, policies, schedules, personnel, and procedures. That language covered virtually all decisions that a department head might make, leaving Chavez free to overrule at any time. Sometimes he intervened on significant policy issues. Other times he chastised subordinates over petty matters. He monitored use of phone lines to determine who made the most calls. He still wanted to know, as his brother Richard had said a few years back, when anyone needed a new battery for a car.
A dispute with West Foods,8 a major mushroom grower in Oxnard, illustrated both the potential strength of the union and Chavez’s difficulty adapting to the new management system. That tension would only increase as the union expanded.
From the start, West Foods had defied Chavez’s predictions. By his calculation the union should never have won the election—about 80 percent of the 220 workers lacked legal papers. But Medina had successfully organized the workers he called visitantes (visitors) during his stint in Oxnard in 1975. When the border patrol raided the mushroom grower a few days before the election, Medina denounced the action and UFW lawyers made sure the workers were able to stay and vote. The UFW won a resounding victory, taking an important contract away from the Teamsters. The win was one of Medina’s most satisfying because his campaign had focused on the contrast: the Teamster organizers are labor leaders, he told the workers; we are farmworkers, like you.
Now in the summer of 1976, Medina was head of contract administration and his staff had been trying to negotiate a contract with West Foods. When talks stalled, he called a press conference to announce that workers intended to escalate their protest. He
had routinely taken similar steps as a boycott leader.
“A large banner on a wall in the administration building reads, ‘Let there be no surprises,’”9 Chavez chastised Medina in a note complaining he had not been informed of the press conference. “You surprised the hell out of me . . . You must clear with me on these matters before you act.”
West Foods workers voted to go on strike, and Medina kept Chavez informed. All but ten workers walked picket lines in two 12-hour shifts that began at 4:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. Community supporters delivered more food than the pickets could eat. When Chavez returned to his old stomping grounds for a rally, arriving late on a foggy night, “the first thing we saw was the outline of a flag,” he recalled happily.10 Then he heard the singing. “All these guys with serapes, and hats. The moment we got there they were passing around a big basket with tacos, steaming hot burritos.”
West Foods lost nineteen tons of overripe mushrooms during the strike. After a twenty-hour marathon negotiation, the company and union reached agreement. “The first contract11 we’ve gotten by a strike!” Richard Chavez exclaimed.
To workers like those at West Foods, immigrants without legal papers who harvested mushrooms in dark, stiflingly hot rooms that smelled of manure, with no clean drinking water or adequate ventilation, the victory of la union de Cesar Chavez was nothing short of miraculous. “Nuestro Moises,” workers in the fields began to call Chavez—our Moses.
Chavez continued to enjoy widespread popularity outside the fields as well. In a Harris poll,12 seventeen million people—12 percent of all adults in the United States—said they had boycotted grapes. The public favored Chavez over the Teamsters by a margin of six to one, and supported Chavez over the growers as well, by a narrower 34 to 29 percent split.