Has Chavez Fooled Harvard?

Last week four House masters announced that they were joining a boycott against Harvard Provision Co., a liquor store in the Square. The store has committed the crime of offering Gallo wine to its customers even though Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers Union (UFW) has called for a boycott of the product. Harvard Pro is the major liquor supplier for House masters and Yard proctors, and the four masters made the decision after two weeks of picketing and petition drives against Harvard Pro by student groups.

For many years, Cesar Chavez has asked consumers to boycott grapes and lettuce, and more recently Gallo wine, to help farmworkers unionize. Harvard students and much of the entire Boston community have always given substantial support to the boycott effort. The success of the drive against Harvard Pro is yet another example of this support.

But the truth is that Chavez has won most of this support by mere factual misrepresentation. He and his organizers have misrepresented to the public the working and living conditions of the farmworkers, their wages, the role of the growers and the degree of Chavez support among farmworkers. These misrepresentations have been more successful the farther Chavez's boycott organizers got from the fields.

For example, most people believe America's farmworkers are migrants, following harvests from state to state. Chavez and his supporters have continually repeated this to the public. "Most farmworkers are members of families who scrape together marginal livings by following the crops around the U.S.," reads a pamphlet distributed by Chavez boycott organizers in Phoenix.

But the truth is that very few farmworkers are migrants. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that migrant workers comprise less than 8 per cent of all farm-workers in the country. In California, where Chavez has concentrated his unionizing efforts, less than 9 per cent of the work force is migrant and less than 4 per cent comes from out-of-state.

A California Housing Commission found as early as 1963 that 90 per cent of the state's farmworkers live regularly at the same residence, owning or renting their own homes. The Commission reported that "California's agricultural labor force no longer fits the classic picture of the migrant following the crops from town to town with no fixed place of residence."

The commission's conclusions are valid for the entire United States. The farm labor force is overwhelmingly non-migrant.

Most full time workers who are migrants are single males. They actually make more money than residential farmworkers because their traveling enables them to work peak harvests all year long. A nationwide study by the Wisconsin Employment Service in 1970 found that full time migrant workers averaged $12,000 in annual wages.

Another source of misrepresentations by Chavez and his supporters has been the subject of farmworkers' wages. In 1972, UFW vice president Dolores Huerta reported on public television, "The average earnings of a farmworker in the U.S. are only $1400 a year."

But the truth is that most farmworkers' wages are far from substandard. Agricultural workers usually earn a base-pay hourly wage plus a piece rate for the amount of work they do. Payroll records on file with the California Department of Employment show that farmworkers were averaging from $4.50 to $ 5.50 an hour with piece rates before there was any farmworkers union.

A study in 1972 by the Arizona Ecumenical Council, a group of Protestant churches, found that grape pickers in California and Arizona averaged $8000 in annual wages with some as high as $15,000. Today, most grape pickers in California are under Teamster contract and earn $2.52 an hour plus piece rates.

Payroll records on file with the Internal Revenue Service and Federal Wage and Hour Commission show that lettuce averaged $6.44 an hour in 1972. The Washington Post reported in August 1972 that lettuce workers earn as much as $12,000 a year.

One problem with discussing farmworkers wages is that the term "farmworker" can cover such a wide variety of people. The figures here show that full-time, professional workers earn decent annual incomes and many earn a lot more.

In addition to these, there are many people who find seasonal part-time work in the fields, as a second job to supplement their income. Also, over a million students find part-time and seasonal summer employment as farmworkers and more than a quarter million housewives work in agriculture for short periods for supplemental income. These three groups account for more than two-thirds of all farmworkers and they earn substantial hourly wages, as the above figures show.

But if you average the annual farm income of all these types--of seasonal, part-time and temporary workers--with full-time workers, you will get a distorted, meaningless figure for annual incomes. Averaging the annual farm income of some one who works two weeks in the fields with someone who works all year would hardly give you an accurate picture of their wages. But this is precisely how Dolores Huerta and Chavez's supporters get their figures for annual farm incomes.

This is not to deny that there is some poverty among farmworkers, but the poor workers are a small minority, not the starving masses Chavez has depicted. It is particularly interesting to note that Chavez has not sought to unionize these poor workers, most of whom are in the South, but the well-paid $8000 to $12,000 a year workers in California instead.

The villain in the eyes of most Chavez supporters is the grower, but the growers have also been victims of Chavez's misrepresentations. On the Johnny Carson show, Chavez supporter Gloria Steinem told a national audience, "This (California's San Joaquin Valley) is the heart of the agri-business, which is an enormous industry. This is not just farmers or anything. This is land owned by the railroads and rich banks and corporations, land that is the size of many European countries."

But the truth is that rich corporations and conglomerates are only a very small part of the agricultural industry. The Department of Agriculture reported in 1970 that corporations owned less than 1 per cent of all farms and 7 per cent of all farm acreage, and many of these were family or single-person corporations.

A look at the facts also reveals that the growers certainly haven't been keeping anything from the workers. The return on agricultural investments in recent years has been a meager 2 to 3 per cent. In some years, many small growers have earned less than half the annual pay of their farmworkers.

Chavez's most vicious misrepresentation, however, has been his claim of worker support. In 1965, Chavez called his first strike in Delano, California. Delano is the center of the nation's table grape industry, and in the surrounding fields close to 7000 workers make a living. They work 11 months a year growing, pruning and harvesting grapes.

Ninety per cent of these workers owned or rented their own homes and most drove their own cars. They earned from $7000 to $9000 a year.

Press releases from UFW headquarters in Delano announced that the strike was the largest in agricultural history, with 5000 workers walking off the job. But later, under oath, the director of the California Department of Employment, Albert Tieburg, reported that only 55 workers had gone on strike.

But Chavez maintained the appearance of a strike by gathering outside volunteers to man the picket lines. Most of these were college students belonging to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Students for a Democratic Society. The farmworkers, however, continued working.

"In the picket lines there is none of us workers, none of us people," Dolores Mendoza, Delano grape picker, told nationally syndicated columnist Ralph DeToledano. "They got the hippies from San Francisco, they got people from Mexico who never worked here before, but not us."

Another grape picker, Shirley Fetalvero, testified before a California Senate fact-finding committee. "The union's massive propaganda machine has led the public to believe that there are thousands of desperate, ragged, starving farmworkers on strike here. This is not true. The picket lines are being manned by outside organizations such as the SDS. We resent the invention of an ignorant, downtrodden class of farmworkers where none exists."

The truth is that Chavez's strike was a complete hoax. There was no strike and there was no more than a handful of workers in his United Farmworkers Union.

Some Chavez supporters have attempted to explain the strike's failure by saying the workers feared the growers would replace them with migrants. But both California and Arizona, where Chavez has called his strikes, have laws granting the workers unionizing privileges. As soon as the workers strike the state moves in to arbitrate negotiations and the growers must recognize the union. The California Conciliation Service offered to do just this when Chavez first called his strikes, but Chavez declined the offer because the agency would require substantiation of his support among workers.

There is other evidence that the workers do not support Chavez. In the spring of 1970, 8000 Coachella Valley farmworkers paid for a full-page signed ad in the Riverside paper asking growers not to sign with the UFW.

In Washington, 1200 farmworkers have petitioned the governor and the legislature for protection that would keep Chavez out of the state.

The 2000-member Agricultural Workers for Democratic Action in Delano has petitioned the Teamsters Union for a pledge that they would not return farmworkers to the jurisdiction of the UFW.

The Arizona Ecumenical Council interviewed 71 non-union grape pickers in 1972. Sixty-five said they did not want to join the UFW and bitterly opposed Chavez, although many said they would like some union.

Public sympathy against Chavez and the UFW in Delano is so strong that Mayor Frank Herrara and Assemblyman Bill Ketchum have been elected decisively in recent years while they have openly and bitterly opposed the UFW.

The farmworkers did not support Chavez and his strikes for many reasons. For one, he was not a farmworker himself. Also, he did not offer a substantial increase in wages (the contracts he finally signed in 1970 raised base pay ten cents an hour).

But the most important reason for Chavez's lack of support is that the workers did not want to allow anyone to gain absolute power over their jobs. Under the contracts Chavez sought, the growers would not be able to hire the workers. A grower would have to ask the UFW to send him men when he needed them and the UFW would then assign workers to job.

Because Chavez's strike was a massive failure, he turned to the boycott. If he had the support of the workers, there would be no need for a boycott. The workers would go on strike and there would be no harvested grapes or lettuce for consumers to worry about.

The reason for the boycott, therefore, was that Chavez did not have the support of the farmworkers. The purpose, however, was to force workers into a union they didn't want to join. The strategy was to fool consumers into boycotting grapes and lettuce by misrepresenting the conditions of the farmworkers. The boycott would then force growers to sign with Chavez, and if the farmworkers wanted to work, they would have to join the UFW.

The strategy eventually brought limited success. In the summer of 1970, 26 major grape growers signed contracts with Chavez. They were signed only by Chavez and the growers but they made the workers members of the UFW.

If they wanted to work, the workers had to accept UFW membership because the growers could no longer hire them. Chavez also now had the power to determine which of these workers would work and when. As a result, the growers got an end to the boycott, Chavez got the workers, and the workers got screwed.

The act was a major violation of the civil rights of thousands of farmworkers. The common justice of the idea that no contract signed between two parties shall be binding on a third was disregarded. Without an election, without their consent, and without their signatures, the farmworkers found themselves paying dues to the UFW.

For the farmworkers this was only the beginning. After Chavez got them in his UFW he hurt them both personally and financially, and actually caused their living standards to decline.

So it seems that those who have supported the boycott and are supporting the drive against Harvard Pro are being used to hurt the very people they are trying to help. Misguided public support has been Chavez's only weapon against the farmworkers and those who have given this support are really responsible for screwing the workers.