When most people think of the United Farm Workers, two things come to mind: Cesar Chávez and the grape boycott. Regarding the former, Chávez distinguished himself as perhaps the best-known Mexican American labor and civil rights leader in the country through his advocacy for farm worker rights in California during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1970, the union he led forced growers to the bargaining table for the first farm labor contracts in the history of the Golden State. This achievement would not have been possible without Chávez's embrace of the boycott, a strategy that, until proven important to the struggle, had been regarded by labor leaders as supplemental to the main strategies of strikes and marches. In fact, when we evaluate the contributions of the United Farm Workers to the history of labor in the United States, the grape boycott might well be its most enduring legacy, even more so than Chávez's leadership.
This is one of my primary arguments in my book, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chávez and the Farm Worker Movement. In 1965, Jim Drake, a protestant minister who became an executive board member of the UFW, convinced Chávez that the boycott would be a useful activity for volunteers after the peak of the harvest. Gilbert Padilla, also a founding member of the UFW, conveyed the logic behind the action: “You don't organize people unless you have something for them to do; otherwise you lose them.”Footnote 1 From these humble beginnings, the grape boycott grew into the most successful consumer boycott in United States history.Footnote 2
The boycott, however, was not as simple as it appears to have been. What follows is an explanation of how the strategy evolved over a short period of time and how it became the effective tool that it was for approximately a ten-year period from 1965 until 1975, when the union shifted tactics toward state-sponsored farm worker justice under the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act. Critical to this evolution was the union's ability to adapt the boycott to the tactics of the growers—essentially moving it and changing it to meet the challenges volunteers confronted in the field, which is to say, the cities and docks where grapes were unloaded, distributed, and sold. In this respect, the union, for a time, disabused the growers of the notion that their profits could be a “moveable feast” like the feasts on the Christian calendar, in which dates change from year to year in relationship to Easter but remain a grand procession nonetheless.
A Strike is Not Enough
Although many birthdates have been offered, the grape strike on September 8, 1965, in Delano, California, began the multiethnic insurgency that was the farm worker movement.Footnote 3 The strike generated a good deal of publicity and support from Walter Reuther, the leader of the United Auto Workers, who famously joined the two main organizers, Larry Itliong and Cesar Chávez, in a march through Delano. Yet, for all of its success, by the time the harvest had concluded, the union ran the risk of being “out of sight, out of mind” of the public. This had been a problem in earlier struggles in the fields. Although many noble efforts had been made over the previous sixty years, no organization or leader had figured out the right approach to earning collective bargaining rights for farm workers. By the end of the harvest that year, growers showed their usual stubbornness in resisting negotiations and a confidence that they could outlast the poorly funded union.
The boycott made a difference. Early on, the union pursued a boycott in a manner familiar to labor organizations: appealing to allied unions to stop unloading and distributing the product in question. In 1965 and 1966, that product was not yet fresh table grapes, but rather processed grapes in the form of liquor and wine. Gilbert Padilla and Dolores Huerta, two of the most important leaders of the movement, established an effective boycott of Schenley Company's wine and liquor by appealing to people they knew in the labor unions in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Padilla recalled, “I went to the Central Labor Council, the restaurant and hotel labor union, the auto workers union; you name the union, we went to them.” By appealing to fellow union members, the United Farm Workers cultivated a beachhead for further growth. Padilla also brought in farm worker families from Delano in order to appeal to urban consumers who might contribute their time to the cause. The appeals worked, as a stream of students and urban liberals sympathetic to the farm workers began to leave their classes and jobs to serve the union.
In the case of Schenley, whose profits depended on the consumption of liquor in urban restaurants and hotels, the “jobbers,” or middlemen between the producers and the businesses that sold the product, became the key to the execution of the boycott. Padilla turned to a friend in the hotel and restaurant workers union, Herman “Blackey” Levitt, who served as the president of the joint council for labor unions in Los Angeles. Padilla recalled, “This guy Levitt said, ‘Let me tell you how to do this.’ And he got this book with all the jobbers. So we sent letters to all these jobbers we were going to boycott.” Padilla's appeal to the wholesalers, or “jobbers,” worked. By April 1966, Schenley experienced steep sales declines in Los Angeles and San Francisco, two key urban markets, forcing the company to increase wages on farms from which they derived their grapes. This success made the boycott a permanent fixture in the UFW arsenal.Footnote 4
The attempt to boycott table grapes presented both new opportunities and new challenges. The perishability of grapes placed growers in a precarious position since profits could be lost more quickly than with liquor or wine that could keep, and even improve, with time. On the other hand, table grape growers proved to be a much more stubborn, cliquey group that resisted agreements with the union at all cost. Unlike Schenley, the local ethnic and family-oriented growers refused to see the boycott as a business matter to be dealt with through negotiations. Of the corporate growers, Marshall Ganz, a key UFW organizer and member of the executive board, observed, “A lot of them had union contracts [in] other places; they weren't invested in their standing in the grower community; they weren't a part of that local scene; they didn't go to the Slav club and the Elk club and the same church.”Footnote 5 Local table grape growers, on the other hand, saw the union's campaign as a personal affront to their integrity that had to be resisted at all costs.
Buoyed by the UFW victory at Schenley, Chávez agreed to take the fight to table grape producers in 1968 rather than merely consolidate UFW gains in the wine industry.Footnote 6 Union leaders decided to start with a campaign against Giumarra Vineyards Corporation, the undisputed leader in table grape production.Footnote 7 This time, however, neither did the leading company concede defeat, nor did its peers show signs of weakening in the face of pressure from the boycott. Unlike the corporate growers who cared about labels, table grape growers rarely marketed their products by brand names that were conspicuous to customers in supermarkets, thus making the boycott difficult to enforce at the point of sale. Table grape growers frequently used multiple brands to market a variety of grapes at different moments in the season. When the union finally succeeded in distinguishing Giumarra's brands from other producers, fellow grape growers loaned Giumarra their labels to frustrate boycott organizers. As a consequence, rather than defeating the table grape growers during the 1968 season, the UFW found itself in a protracted war with the industry, no closer to winning the strikes on their farms or the boycott campaigns in the city. The union responded by declaring an industry-wide boycott of all table grapes, extending the ban to include Arizona grapes, but the growers did not budge from their position.Footnote 8
The growers remained intransigent, so to be successful, the UFW had to discover new cracks in the armor of their opponents. Indeed, the failure to bring ethnic and family-oriented growers to the negotiation table through either the strike or the boycott signaled the long battle ahead. The union leadership discovered, however, that the boycott had made growers more uncomfortable about their position than the strike. “The whole strategic premise,” Ganz remembered, “was … that you didn't have enough power in the local labor market to win.” The boycott shifted the battle away from the stronghold of the growers and into an arena that gave the union a better chance of winning. According to Ganz, “By shifting the turf [to the cities] … we could successfully fight them.”Footnote 9
Adaptation, Organization and Refinement
The appeal to consumers not to buy grapes at North American markets was a major turning point. Initially, the support from workers in allied unions helped propel the UFW campaign, but volunteers quickly found that these allies could not be counted on once growers took their complaints to court. In 1947 the Taft-Hartley Labor Act amended the National Labor Relations Act to restrict labor unions from running campaigns against companies that were not abusing workers but were selling products of companies that were. In 1959, the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act strengthened the restriction against this practice, which was known as a secondary boycott.Footnote 10 For farm workers who had been excluded from the NLRA, however, the secondary boycott remained a viable tool. These restrictions and exceptions necessitated shifts in the strategy by UFW organizers on the ground.
Dolores Huerta's handling of the challenges she encountered in New York City is illustrative of UFW organizers' capacity to adapt. During the spring of 1968, Huerta appealed to the Central Labor Council, the Meatcutter's Union, and the Seafarer's Union to establish a total blockade of California grapes. The unions agreed to cooperate in time to interrupt the annual trip the first grapes of the season were poised to make across the Hudson River by barge. As the grapes rotted in New Jersey, grape growers filed an injunction against the New York/New Jersey unions for violating federal regulations against secondary boycotts and demanded $25 million in compensation for lost sales. Although the Taft-Hartley Act did not apply to farm workers, it did restrict the Seafarer's Union from participating in such actions. The Seafarer's Union eventually released the grapes, but the pause in shipments had reduced the overall number of car lots for 1968 to a record low of 91, down from the industry norm of 418.Footnote 11
By mid-July, Huerta and the extremely efficient New York City boycott house shifted to consumer action, or the “secondary boycott,” picketing stores throughout the city. Huerta pursued the same logic in organizing against supermarkets that the union had used in the campaigns against the corporate producers: the larger the organization, the greater its vulnerability. In the case of the New York-area, the A&P grocery chain dominated the market, which made it the first target for the boycott. Huerta described her strategy in a letter to Delano headquarters:
In each of the five boroughs, we organized neighborhood coalitions of church, labor, liberal and student groups. Then we began picketing A&P, the biggest chain in the city. For several months we had picket lines on about 25 to 30 stores and turned thousands of shoppers away. A lot of the managers had come up through the unions and were very sympathetic to us. In response to consumer pressure, the store managers began to complain to their division heads, and soon they took the grapes out of all of their stores, 430 of them.Footnote 12
By knocking off A&P, the richest market chain in the United States, Huerta softened up their competitors—Bohack, Walbaum's, Hills, and Finast—for the kill. One by one, the stores became the exclusive target of the New York boycott house until all except one—Gristedes, an expensive delivery service market for wealthy clients—stopped selling grapes in the city. Boycott co-coordinator Jerry Brown later described this maneuver as the “tactic of the hostage stores” and ordered boycott houses to implement it in cities across North America. According to Brown, Huerta had built strong boycott committees in neighborhoods where union membership was high and volunteers were plentiful, enthusiastic, and committed to stopping the sale of grapes in nearby stores. “Once [these individual A&P markets] started to capitulate,” Brown explained, “[Dolores] wouldn't call off the picket lines until they agreed to take [grapes] off the entire division [of A&P markets].”
Brown also demonstrated his prowess as a major tactician and organizer of the boycott. He arrived in Delano in 1966 from Cornell University with the intent of writing a dissertation on the farm worker communities. Instead, Chávez redirected his energy in the service of the union. Within a short period of time, he applied his love of data analysis to the refinement of the boycott. Working closely with his wife, Juanita, and a former Catholic priest, LeRoy Chatfield, Jerry Brown made changes that brought the growers to the bargaining table. In 1968, they appealed to Chávez and the leadership for a much more systematic approach to the campaign. First, they argued for an approach that concentrated on building strong boycott houses in ten of the top forty-one cities where more than 50 percent of California table grapes were sold. Those cities included New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, Detroit, Montréal, and Cleveland. They replaced the anecdotal reports for judging the success of the boycott with a clear and measurable goal of reducing shipments in every city by 10 percent or more over 1966 totals.Footnote 13 Although growers had begun to show signs of redirecting shipments elsewhere to soften the blow of the boycott, Brown and Chatfield calculated that such a shift could not make up for the substantial losses in growers' traditional markets. As growers sent grapes to other ports, Jerry and Juanita would respond by working with volunteers in those cities to open up new boycott houses.
The game plan prepared by Jerry Brown and LeRoy Chatfield produced results as boycotters returned to houses across the country for the remainder of the 1968 season and through the 1969 harvest. For example, LeRoy Chatfield adapted the program to the conservative environment of Southern California. In October 1968, seventeen Los Angeles stores, led by Safeway, successfully sued to limit the number of picketers outside the entrance of their markets to four. Rather than resist the new laws with civil disobedience and loud boisterous protests, Chatfield chose a more labor-intensive approach that involved well-dressed union representatives working ten hours a day, six days a week. Each representative adopted a calm, businesslike demeanor and made appeals to shoppers on an individual basis. “It was grueling work, but it did the trick,” Chatfield reported to Brown. He added,
At first, people didn't pay much attention to us. But after they saw us several times, they'd stop to talk. Eventually, many of them agreed to shop elsewhere. The ones who did really understood the issue and would often talk to the manager and tell him why they were switching to another store.Footnote 14
Although Los Angeles continued to be a challenge, the boycott reduced overall shipments by a respectable 16 percent in 1969.Footnote 15
Elsewhere the boycott swept over the continent, garnering support from consumers and politicians alike. In Toronto, the mayor declared November 23, 1968, as “Grape Day” and announced the city government's decision not to buy grapes in recognition of the farm workers' struggle. In Chicago, Eliseo Medina organized a boycott campaign that persuaded the leading supermarket chain, Jewel, to stop carrying table grapes at every one of its 254 stores. Similarly, in Cleveland, Mayor Carl Burton Stokes, the first African American to be elected mayor of a major US city, ordered all government facilities to cease serving table grapes. Mack Lyons, the only African American on the National Executive Board of the UFW, made the appeal to Stokes and organized one of the strongest boycott houses in the network. In San Francisco, five major agribusiness organizations cancelled their annual meetings in the city in response to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors' endorsement of the boycott.Footnote 16
In a final, desperate attempt to outrun the boycott, growers redirected their shipments to Europe. There, Brown drew on the creativity of Elaine Elinson, a veteran of the New York City boycott house, who had moved to England to study Chinese history but was unhappy with her decision. When she wrote Brown in Delano to see if she could come back to the United States to work for the union, Brown instructed her to remain in England. “If necessary you could come back right away,” Brown responded to Elinson, but he added, “in as much as you are in London and we are trying to internationalize the boycott, Cesar asked if you couldn't hold on to your means of existence and do some groundwork for us there.”Footnote 17
Like Huerta before her, Elinson adapted to the environment around her. She quickly figured out that social justice for farm workers could flow more easily through the collective action of unionized laborers. Unlike in North America, where labor laws restricted allied unions from helping the UFW execute a blockade of shipments, in the United Kingdom unions had greater freedom to assist other workers. British labor leaders and union officials were particularly scandalized by the denial of collective bargaining rights to farm workers, a right guaranteed and defended by US law for most other American workers. Rather than pursue a consumer boycott, Elinson shifted to working with a powerful British union, the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), to block (or “black”) California table grapes. She described how it unfolded on the River Thames:
With the bill lading in hand, I went down to the London docks with Brian. We would approach the team of dockworkers working on that particular ship and that particular hold. The workers would put down their ominous looking dockers' hooks (a pointed piece of iron attached to a strong wooden grip, used to pull cargo off ships before containerization), and gather round this odd pair. Brian, a third-generation dockworker, 6′3″, in a thick sheepskin coat and cloth cap, orange sideburns, and a booming Cockney voice, would introduce me. I came up to his shoulder, had a ponytail and big mod glasses. They could hardly understand my American accent. We both wore red-and-black UFW buttons on our jackets.Footnote 18
This same scene played out in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Unable to unload the “blacked” grapes anywhere in Europe, they were finally left to rot on a dock in Hamburg, Germany, in late January 1970. By July 1970, the growers threw in the towel. The boycott drove twenty-six of them to the bargaining table where they finally signed collective bargaining contracts with the UFW that ended the five-year-long Delano grape strike.Footnote 19
The strategies and adaptations employed by veterans on the boycott provide an important example of what can be achieved by unions through consumer activism. Although most union leaders were dubious of its success, Chávez and his ragtag group of under-resourced, creative, and resilient volunteers proved that consumers could be encouraged to change their purchasing habits in the service of mostly Mexican and Filipino workers living in places far beyond their urban environments. That the union chose a luxury fruit regarded by most consumers as nonessential to their diets helped, but the organization applied to the effort must be appreciated. Equally important, the decisions made by individuals and teams within the boycott network to determine the correct approach made the union an effective tool for change. In the years following the contracts, the UFW produced less impressive results with the boycott but not for a lack of commitment from volunteers. The erosion of the UFW's momentum during the 1970s had much more to do with Chávez's mistakes and the changing nature of the battle as the state became a more active agent in the contest between growers and farm employees.Footnote 20
