2000 Gather for Demonstration Backing Farm Workers' Boycott

Over 2000 supporters of the United Farm Workers (UFW) rallied at Government Center Saturday and heard Richard Chavez, a UFW vice president, call for a more stringent boycott of Gallo wines and and supermarkets that retail non-UFW lettuce and grapes.

The noontime rally was preceded by three separate marches, including one that began from the Cambridge Common. Nearly 300 Cambridge marchers joined demonstrators from Brigham Circle and South Station in Boston after a two-hour trek that blocked east-bound traffic on Mass Ave.

Chavez told the Government Center gathering that Gallo--which produces 40 per cent of California wine and recently signed a contract with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters--is "in trouble" because of the UFW-organized boycott of liquor stores selling its wines. He said Gallo has had to cut back from three daily working shifts to two since the boycott began.

Supporters of the boycott maintain that Gallo's agreement with the Teamsters is a "sweetheart" contract--a contract signed with an unrepresentative union to try to head off more militant organizing.

Chavez charged that growers of California table grapes, also under pressure from a UFW boycott, have begun to put phony UFW labels on non-UFW grapes in order to make them salable.

The brother of UFW president Cesar Chavez said dockworkers in England, Norway, Sweden and Denmark recently vowed not to unload non-UFW table grapes, severely weakening what he characterized as a growing effort to evade the boycott by exporting grapes to Europe.

Chavez said the boycott has achieved greater success in Boston than in any other city.

Remember the Dead

Virginia Jones, a UFW organizer, told the ralliers to remember 19 farmworkers she said were recently killed when an unsafe company bus drove into an irrigation ditch.

Jones, the leader of a demonstration at A&P's central office last year, also called for volunteers to man picket lines outside A&P stores on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. A&P sells Teamsters grapes.

Demonstrators in the Cambridge march carried signs denouncing California grape and lettuce growers, and calling President Nixon an eater of non-UFW grapes. They also chanted slogans, including "Viva la Huelga," "Hey hey whaddaya say, don't shop A&P today," and "Same struggle, same fight, working people must unite."

The chants became especially loud when the marchers passed the A&P store on Mass Ave near Central Square.

The marchers--some of them members of AFL-CIO locals, the United Electrical Workers, and other labor unions supporting the UFW--periodically broke into "Solidarity Forever," "Union Maid," and other songs made popular by the labor movements of the 1930s.