Join The Boycott

IN THE CURRENT dispute over Gallo wine sales, all Americans should support the United Farm Workers of American; in fact, they have a responsibility to do so. Specifically, residents of Cambridge should join the UFW's boycott of the Harvard Provision Company, until the store follows other Harvard Square liquor stores in promising to discontinue sale of Gallo wines.

The Gallo issue is not a three- or four-sided issue. It is a two-sided one: The UFW faces a united front of California's growers, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Nixon-Ford administration. In December 1972, the California Supreme Court had to halt an attempt by the Teamsters and the growers, working in collusion, to keep the UFW and its organizers out of the fields. The Teamsters made large and illegal contributions to the Nixon re-election fund; Charles Colson wrote memos instructing the National Labor Relations Board, the Justice Department and the Labor Department to stay out of the dispute unless they could harass the UFW. Nixon made a point of publicly eating non-UFW grapes.

If you consider the unusual coalition of powerful forces the UFW faces, it becomes easier to understand why it needs to resort to a secondary boycott. The way the Teamsters, Gallo and their local distributors mobilize lawyers and ad-men to fight the UFW, and the amount they are willing to spend, gives even the uninformed some idea of how much is at stake for them.

The choice between the Teamsters and the UFW is clear, not because of the methods the two sides use, but because of what each side stands for. The labor struggle in the California fields has been a long and bitter one. The last decade has seen little relief from the violence, corruption and broken promises of the past from all sides. The intensity and duration of the struggle indicates the depth of workers' need for a union, a need that has been apparent at least since the 1930s. But not all unions are alike. The Teamsters are a stand-pat union, a co-opted reactionary force whose interest in organizing farmworkers is dubious at best.

Thus, the long-run implications of the current dispute must be weighed even more heavily than immediate wage gains. Many argue that the Teamsters now offer a better deal to the farmworker than the UFW. The Teamsters are rich, well-established and cozy with management, and in the short run they may well offer higher wages and better benefits than the UFW can. But the Teamsters Union already includes in its ranks cannery and packing-shed workers as well as truckers. Adding the field worker to this network would give the Teamsters virtual control of labor from the fields to the supermarkets. The Teamsters' base lies with the other workers in the network--though the depth of the Teamsters leaders' committment even to them is suggested by the frequency with which they're prosecuted for embezzlement. The Teamsters--assuming they retain any interest in farm workers at all, once the UFW is crushed--would be unlikely to lead strikes that threatened the immediate interests of their other members.

THE UFW, on the other hand, is a union built by workers and for workers. While the union has apparently sometimes used tactics like the Teamsters'--it has been accused of burning the houses of workers who wouldn't strike, for example--it has made a serious effort to organize American farmworkers into a militant force over the last decade. Even more important, the UFW has come to symbolize a national movement, a movement trying to revive the idea of workers' control over their labor--an idea most American unions long ago abandoned in a single-minded pursuit of higher wages. This movement represents a clear and present danger to corporate growers, reactionary labor groups, conservative California legislators, and their entire pack of sympathizers and apologists who have this country in a stranglehold.

Most American consumers of Gallo products--which include all wines bottled in Modesto, California--would like to see a quick and fair resolution to the struggle for labor representation. One deceptively simple solution is a "free," secret-ballot election. Elections are certainly desirable, but merely calling for them now is not enough. This proposal fails to take into account the context in which any elections would now take place. In widely different cases, General Nguyen van Thieu and Mayor Richard Daley have shown that elections are not the be-all and end-all they are sometimes thought to be, even where formal safeguards for democracy exist. Considering the long history of bought loyalties, misrepresentation, well-documented corruption and open violence in the California labor struggle, truly free and representative elections seem a remote possibility in the near future.

Of primary interest in any decision on how best to break the current stranglehold--just as in the decision that it needs to be broken--are the interests of the workers. They are the ones who have borne the brunt of this dispute; they deserve the best from the country which has literally feasted on the fruits of their labor. Unfortunately, in the current dispute, the workers and the UFW have no leverage with the growers except through a boycott of their products. That any boycott of stores carrying Gallo wines hurts not just Gallo but also small store-owners is unfortunate, but until and unless the heads of major corporations are willing to talk seriously with the UFW, a boycott is the only effective way to resist them. Stores like Harvard Pro aren't forced to ally themselves with Gallo--even though their distributors reportedly bring pressure on them to do so. When Harvard Pro--because of the picketers' pressure or because of a simple change of heart--decides to go over to the other side of the struggle over workers' rights, the boycott will end. It should not end before then.