On April 3, 2016, Millahcayotl and Urban Campesinos co-hosted a vegan tamale skill share and food justice discussion in celebration of the legacy of Cesar Chavez. Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) was a farm worker, labor leader, civil rights activist and outspoken vegan. His work as a labor organizer was primarily focused on improving working conditions and increasing wages for farm workers. As a labor leader, Chavez employed nonviolent means to bring attention to the plight of farm workers. He led marches, called for boycotts and went on several hunger strikes. He also brought the national awareness to the dangers of pesticides to workers’ health.
After working as a community and labor organizer in the 1950s, when he was in his twenties, Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962. This union joined with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in its first strike against grape growers in California in 1965, which was known as the Delano Grape Strike.
A year later (1966), the two unions merged, and the resulting union was renamed the United Farm Workers in 1972.
In early 1968, two years after the merger, Chavez called for a national boycott of California table grape growers. Chavez’s battle with the grape growers for improved compensation and labor conditions would last for years. At the end, Chavez and his union won several victories for the workers when many growers signed contracts with the union.
The UFW spent five years on strike and boycotting to win their original contracts with the table grape industry. Before the Union’s victory, base wage in grapes was $1.20 an hour with a ten to 20¢ kickback to the labor contractor. The 1970 union agreement started at $2.05 and created the first hiring hall in grape-growing history. It also forced the growers to accept pesticide regulations much stiffer than the state of California’s, an employer-financed health plan, banning workers under 16, and no firing without just cause.
In Salinas, CA, 6,000 driving and packing workers represented by the Teamsters, a rival union, took this opportunity to go on strike themselves, disrupting the lettuce supply. An agreement resulted from this weeklong strike in which the Teamsters— but not the NFWA— were given access to farms and the right to organize into unions. Chavez went on a hunger strike to protest this development, and about a month later two large companies broke ranks with the rest of the lettuce industry and signed contracts with NFWA.
This agreement ultimately collapsed, however, and within weeks the largest US farm worker strike in history took place: The Salad Bowl Strike. By September 1970, Chavez was calling on all Americans to boycott any lettuce that was not picked by NFWA workers. He was arrested in November, released in December, and immediately instigated a boycott once again, this time of six additional lettuce growers.
Finally, in March 1971, The Teamsters and the NFWA signed an agreement which reaffirmed the latter’s right to organize.
“We know we cannot be kind to animals until we stop exploiting them — exploiting animals in the name of science, exploiting animals in the name of sport, exploiting animals in the name of fashion, and yes, exploiting animals in the name of food.
The contract’s bottom wage rate was $5.25 per hour. At the time, the minimum wage was $2.90. If the same ratio existed today, with a state minimum of $9.00, farm workers would be earning the equivalent of $16.30 per hour. At the end of the 70s workers under union contracts in lettuce and wine grapes were earning even more.
Today farm workers don’t make anywhere near $16.00 an hour.
In 2008, demographer Rick Mines conducted a survey of 120,000 migrant farm workers in California from indigenous communities in Mexico – Mixtecos, Triquis, Purepechas and others. “One third of the workers earned above the minimum wage, one third reported earning exactly the minimum and one third reported earning below the minimum,” he found.
In other words, growers potentially were paying an illegal wage to tens of thousands of farm workers.
To raise wages absolutely, workers need to increase the share of the money paid at the supermarket checkout stand that goes into their paychecks. In recent years the price paid to workers for picking a flat of strawberries, for instance, has hovered around $1.50. Each flat contains eight plastic clamshell boxes, so a worker is paid about 20 cents to fill each one. That same box sells in a supermarket for about $3.00 — the people picking the fruit get about 6% of the price.
According to UC Davis professor Philip Martin, about 28% of what consumers pay goes to the grower. Produce sales from Monterey County alone, one of two counties where strawberries are concentrated, total $4.4 billion.
If the price of a clamshell box increased by 5 cents (a suggestion made by the UFW during the Watsonville strawberry organizing drive of the late 1990s), the wages of the workers would increase by 25%. Most consumers wouldn’t even notice, since the retail price normally fluctuates far more than that. Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers has used this idea to negotiate an increase in the price paid for tomatoes bought by fast food chains, which then goes to the worker in the field.
vances be addressed in good faith.
While boycotts and consumer action can help with punctual successes, buying differently within the system will not fundamentally change the system. So while campaigns such as that against Sakuma Brothers Farms are important in raising awareness about the issues and achieving higher wages for one group of laborers, they alone will not result in a much-needed systemic change.
As large conglomerates come to dominate our foodscapes, farmers, farm workers and consumers all face terrible consequences. Through our work as Millahcayotl, we encourage people to disengage from the corporate food system and to support and build true alternatives. We can start doing this by buying food from small farmers and patronizing farmers markets instead of supermarkets. We can also participate in local efforts to claim space and grow more of our food at a community level.
The Bay Area has a thriving scene of community gardens and urban farms working towards food justice and local food sovereignty. There are many ways to get involved, and through events such as our Cesar Chavez Day Celebration, we aim to share the awareness and tools to do so. Millahcayotl also works for the recognition, within this movement, of the rights of nonhuman animals not to be killed and commodified as “food.” Individuals like Cesar Chavez continue to inspire us on this path.