United Farm Workers Founded
The National Farm Workers Association, later the United Farm Workers, was founded by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta at a convention in Fresno in September 1962. Farm workers had been deliberately excluded from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, so they had no legal right to organise, no protected bargaining and no recourse against dismissal for trying. Wages in the California fields were around a dollar an hour, housing was squalid, and the short-handled hoe crippled backs. Chávez had been an organiser for the Community Service Organization and resigned when it refused to take on farm labour. He and Huerta built the new association slowly, house by house, on dues of $3.50 a month, offering a credit union, a burial insurance scheme and help with immigration paperwork before it ever called a strike. It joined a strike begun by Filipino grape pickers in Delano in September 1965 and stayed out for five years. Chávez's method was the consumer boycott, conducted with explicit non-violence drawn from Gandhi and from Catholic social teaching, including a 300-mile march to Sacramento in 1966 and a 25-day fast in 1968. An estimated 17 million Americans stopped buying table grapes, and the growers signed contracts in 1970. California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, the first law in the country giving farm workers collective bargaining rights. Membership peaked around 1972 and declined afterwards. The union's slogan, Sí, se puede, entered American politics permanently. Most California farm labour today is again largely unorganised. Chávez died in 1993 and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom the following year.
- Year: 1962 CE
- Category: Social
