The Black Eagle Wins

Cesar Chavez had spent the evening of July 25 speaking to a group of striking typographers in San Rafael, Calif. He came home weary to Delano at midnight only to find a message from John Giumarra Jr. The largest producer of table grapes in the U.S., the Giumarra family's company was also one of the bitterest foes of Chavez's United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. After five years of Chavez's la huelga--the strike --against table-grape growers, and a few days of inconclusive confrontation the week before, Giumarra wanted to talk seriously. "No attorneys, just heart to heart," the message read.

Chavez called back and told Giumarra's father: "Gee, I'm so tired I can't even talk." John Giumarra Sr. replied: "Don't talk, just listen." Chavez agreed: "We've been waiting for this for five years, so if you are willing to talk, I guess I will." They met at 2 a.m. in a Delano motel and talked for six hours. That morning there were full-fledged negotiations between a six-man U.F.W.O.C. team and 26 major grape growers from the rich San Joaquin Valley. The meetings went on for three days and through much of three nights. By the middle of last week, one of the most anguished disputes in the history of the American labor movement was over.

Eroded Ground. It was in dusty, sweltering Delano that la huelga began. A small group of predominantly Mexican-American farm workers led by Chavez met in a Roman Catholic church hall and voted to strike the vineyards. La huelga divided California's farm communities, pitting townsman against townsman. It produced conflicts that did credit to neither side. While Chavez preached nonviolence with deeprooted conviction, some of his followers set fire to packing sheds, slashed the tires of growers' trucks and threatened foremen with physical punishment. Growers and their men bullied the strikers, roughing them up and sometimes arranging the "accidental" spraying of pickets with pesticides.

At first, Chavez's fledgling union seemed to have little chance of success. The growers had powerful political and financial allies in the state, and there was plenty of nonunion labor available to do the ill-paid, back-breaking vineyard work. But in 1968 Chavez applied what turned out to be a brilliant tactic: a nationwide boycott of table grapes. That move mustered wide support from urban liberals and succeeded in cutting the public demand for grapes--and thus the price the growers received--to the point where many producers suffered.

Like water slowly dripping onto limestone, Chavez's patient pressures finally eroded the ground beneath his opponents. A handful of employers, chiefly in the Coachella Valley to the south, yielded earlier this year. Boxes of their grapes, bearing the union's stylized black eagle, were exempt from the boycott. After the May harvest, the unionized growers found their grapes bringing 250 to $1 more per box than boycotted produce. That hard proof of the eagle's economic pull broke the deadlock with the larger group of growers.

Mutual Victory. Last week in Delano, representatives of 26 major vineyards --producers of 50% of the state's table-grape crop--filed into the modest headquarters of Chavez's United Farm Workers Organizing Committee to announce their agreement to contracts recognizing the U.F.W.O.C. They provide for wages of $1.80 per hour in the first year, plus 20-c- for each box of grapes; in the third year, the hourly wage will rise to $2.10. When la huelga began, the going rates were $1.10 per hour and 10-c- a box.

The growers' spokesman was the younger Giumarra, 29, an articulate Stanford law graduate. He expressed the relief felt by employers and workers alike. "We are happy that peace will come to this valley," he said. "It has been a mutual victory. With the power of the union, the power of the people and the ability of the men in this valley to grow the finest crops in the world, we can get these products into the marketplace where they can bring a higher return to the farmers, so that they can sit down at some future time and negotiate to give a higher return to the workers."

Giumarra's father remained combative to the end, though he put a genial face on it as the negotiations concluded. "I enjoyed the fight while it lasted," he told Chavez. "You got to admit we Sicilians gave you a lot of trouble." Chavez, splendid in the embroidered Filipino shirt that he wears only on special occasions, was conciliatory toward his old adversary. "He was so relieved it was all over, and so were we," Chavez said.

All-Out War. The agreements with the Delano growers represented a historic victory. Still, as Chavez admits, the Delano settlement is only "the end of the beginning." The U.F.W.O.C. succeeded he believes, "because we said we are going to stay with it if it takes a lifetime." It may yet. While Chavez plans to move next into melons and citrus fruit, he has a jurisdictional problem to deal with first. Despite a 1966 noraid pact between Chavez and the Teamsters, the Teamsters announced last week that they had reached agreements covering 5,000 farm workers in the Salinas Valley, mainly in lettuce, carrots, celery and strawberries. "This means all-out war," said Chavez.

He is dismayed by the Teamster challenge because it will divert him from more constructive ends. He wants to set up clinics, research programs on the effects of pesticide exposure, a library on the history of farm-worker organization, an experimental program of education for rural minority-group children. "All these dreams will have to wait for a while," he says regretfully. But even the Teamsters cannot distract Chavez from his basic goal. When he overhears his family complaining that the rival union challenged the U.F.W.O.C. first on grapes and now on lettuce, he tells them: "The fight is never about lettuce or grapes. It's always people."

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