UFW pushes grape boycott as Chavez ends 36-day fast
1988Hayden Perry 1988-09Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 3 →
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SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1988 3 DELANO, Calif.—Agri-business in California is waging chemical warfare on farm workers and consumers. Their planes are spraying Captan, Parathion, Phosdrin, Dinoseb, and Methyl Bromide on table grapes and the workers who cultivate them.
The casualties are farm workers and their children, who die early from cancer, and deformed children born to women who have worked in the poisoned fields while pregnant.
These poisons are carried on the grapes into the markets, and onto the tables of unsuspecting consumers. Washing the grapes does not make them safe to eat. Only using safe methods of pesticide control can do that.
This is what the United Farm Workers (UFW) has been demanding for four years. The union calls for an immediate ban on these five deadly pesticides. It wants to set up a joint UFW/grower committee to check for poisonous residues on grapes sold in stores, with the results made public.
The growers have rejected any cooperation with the Farm Workers on this issue. Instead, they are permitting manufacturers to test yet another poison, Zolton, on human guinea pigs in their fields. They are testing the blood of selected workers each day, like laboratory animals, to see how they are standing up to this new pesticide.
The UFW is fighting back with the weapon that brought the growers to the bargaining table 20 years ago: a boycott of table grapes. The UFW hopes that the boycott of this crop will force the growers to stop using dangerous pesticides, and to start bargaining in good faith with the union.
Union is weaker
The growers have not signed a single contract with table-grape workers. When workers in the fields have voted for the union, the growers have refused to bargain with them.
The California Farm Labor Relations Act provides for a state agency to certify farm-worker elections. But progrower appointees on the board simply stall certification till after the harvest and the workers have moved on. These pro-grower tactics have reduced the UFW from a high of 60,000 members to about 25,000 today.
To dramatize this situation, UFW President Cesar Chavez has put his health, and possibly his life, on the line to bring the cause of the farm workers before the public. He embarked on a fast on July 16, which lasted for 36 days. His doctors say his health may be permanently destroyed.
On Sunday, Aug. 21, over 6000 farm workers and their families traveled to UFW headquarters in Delano to celebrate the end of Cesar's fast. Also in attendance were actors Martin Sheen and Robert Blake, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Mrs. Ethel Kennedy, and labor leaders from the United States and Canada.
It was a day-long celebration of Cesar surviving his fast, and a rededication to the boycott. Jesse Jackson, Martin Sheen, Robert Blake, and Emilio Estevez declared they would individually take up the fast for three-day increments where Chavez left off to keep the issue before the public.
A representative of AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland said letters were going out to all 90 union affiliates calling for support to the boycott. Members of Local 2 of the San Francisco restaurant workers, and Local 11 from Los Angeles traveled to Delano to show their support.
Boycott will continue
A Grape Boycott Committee has been set up in San Francisco, headed by Howard Wallace, a well-known gay rights activist and local organizer of the Coors boycott. Wallace will be organizing picketlines at supermarkets that refuse to take table grapes off their shelves. This will not be an easy task. It will take numerous picketlines outside many stores to make the boycott effective.
The Boycott Committee urges groups to adopt a store, call on the management, and, if need be, set up weekly picketlines outside the store. Only then will most store managers be persuaded it is not good business to sell table grapes that are not safe.
The highly successful rally in Delano should give a much needed public boost to this campaign.
For boycott kits or more information write to Cesar Chavez, P.O. Box 62, Keene, CA 98531-8899.