Chavez - source of UFW's success and decline

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/18/IN1B18NVA6.DTL

Eric Brazil

Sunday, July 19, 2009

What made the United Farm Workers Union the most successful farm labor movement in American history? What brought the union to its present sad state, with vastly diminished membership and a handful of contracts?

Marshall Ganz, a member of UFW's inner circle and a go-to guy for organization and strategy in its glory days of the 1960s and 1970s, contends that the union's iconic founder, Cesar Chavez, bears primary responsibility for wrecking it.


Ganz, 66, teaches organizing at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government to students who are interested in "change and renewal." He also helped design the basic organizing approach used in President Obama's election campaign and coached its field advisers. He is a rabbi's son from Bakersfield who joined Chavez in 1965, bringing the commitment and passion for grassroots organizing that prompted him to drop out of Harvard a year from graduation and volunteer for the Mississippi Summer Project, the 1964 civil rights project.

For the next 16 tumultuous years, he served on the union's front lines: as organizing director, director of the grape and lettuce boycotts, as field tactician for major strikes and, for nine years, as a member of its national executive board.

Throughout Ganz's densely written history of the farm labor movement initiated by Chavez runs the theme of what he calls "strategic capacity," an amalgam of motivation, creativity, enthusiasm, patience, commitment and a willingness to keep learning. UFW had it in spades. Its rival unions, the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO's Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, didn't.

The UFW organized attention-getting demonstrations, like the 300-mile Delano-to-Sacramento march, prosecuted boycotts of grapes and lettuce, engaged in civil disobedience, espoused nonviolence and drew nationwide support from churches and bewitched liberals and politicians such as Sens. Robert F. and Edward Kennedy. Its rival organizations possessed far greater resources but were inflexible and no match for "La Causa" with its ethnic and religious overtones. For the Teamsters, it was enough to sign up the growers, never mind organizing. AWOC, in pursuing a straight industrial union strategy, was tone deaf to the language, religion and culture of California"s principal pool of unorganized farmworkers, who are Mexican.

FULL story at link.