Features » November 11, 2008 » Web Only

Origins of the Obama Machine (cont’d)

While the UFW was running grassroots electoral campaigns, other unions focused on 'writing checks to political candidates and party organizations'

Knowing that Latino voters would strongly oppose Prop 22, the UFW targeted this constituency by establishing precinct operations in East Los Angeles and other Latino communities across the state. In East L.A.’s Lincoln Park, the union set up a tent city to house the hundreds of farmworkers coming from the fields to help the campaign in the month before the election. Boycott staff across the nation had also been redirected to the campaign.

Although Chavez was still recovering from his Arizona fast, he toured the state attacking Prop 22 as a “fraud which would destroy the farmworkers union in California.” The UFW had strong backing from the Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO, California’s Catholic bishops and Secretary of State Brown. Growers spent nearly $500,000 (a large sum by 1972 standards) on television ads supporting Prop 22, but they were outmatched by the UFW’s massive grassroots effort. The initiative was defeated by over 1 million votes, 8 percent to 42 percent, despite California voters’ strong support for pro-grower Republican Richard Nixon over pro-UFW Democrat George McGovern on the same ballot.

The UFW’s defeat of Prop 22 in 1972, its key role in the election of Jerry Brown in 1974, and the enactment of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975 enhanced Cesar Chavez’s confidence in the union’s ability to win California elections. This led him to promote a farm labor initiative on the November 1976 ballot primarily aimed at preventing legislative interference with the funding of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board. Although some of the issues the initiative addressed were quite technical, Chavez was so confident that the voters who had backed the UFW in 1972 would do so again that he vowed, “We’re going to teach the growers a lesson they’ll never forget once and for all.”

The union collected 720,000 signatures on initiative petitions in just 29 days, a remarkable show of strength for an all-volunteer effort. Most California initiatives reach the ballot by partially or entirely relying on paid signature gatherers. Growers were so impressed by the UFW’s display of grassroots mobilizing that they soon agreed to most of the provisions included in the ballot measure. Nevertheless, Chavez was tired of having to fight over implementation of the 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act, and Proposition 14 proceeded to the ballot.

In many ways, the campaign was a remarkable tribute to the grassroots political machine Chavez and the UFW had built. Prop 14 volunteers were seemingly everywhere, and the campaign exceeded the successful Prop 22 effort in money raised and volunteer hours spent. Prop 14 volunteer Larry Tramutola, who had worked for the UFW for years and later became a leading California campaign consultant, described the effort as “probably the best statewide grassroots campaign you can imagine.”

Marshall Ganz, by now recognized as one of the nation’s leading political strategists, managed the campaign. Prop 14 brought virtually the entire nationwide staff together for the first time, and the national UFW boycott structure was transformed into a statewide political operation. The campaign also built working relationships among boycott staff that would later benefit the labor movement.

Although the Prop 14 campaign enhanced activists’ electoral skills and established long-term working relationships among UFW veterans, the measure suffered a landslide defeat. Some voters were simply unwilling to make changes only a year after the ALRA’s passage. But Prop 14 was hurt most by a provision granting labor organizers a constitutional right to enter fields to meet workers. Opponents ran television commercials in which a farmer and homeowner expressed fear for his daughter’s privacy and safety if union organizers—assumed to be nonwhite—had unrestricted access to their property.

Even more effective were statewide newspaper ads offering the passionate testimony of a Japanese-American farmer who had been sent to an internment camp during World War II. The farmer, whose photo appeared in the ad, linked his wartime deprivations to the battle against Prop 14: “I was 20 years old and I gave up my personal rights without a fight,” he said. “Never again.”

Despite Prop 14’s defeat, Chavez and the UEW in the decade from 1966 to 1976 developed a model for labor and Latino political involvement that laid the framework for today’s grassroots campaigns. The farmworkers movement brought community organizing tactics and strategies—voter registration drives, mass petition drives, intensive door-to-door and street outreach, public visibility events to catch the attention of voters and the media, and election-day voter outreach efforts—into the electoral and legislative arena.

In contrast, mainstream labor unions did little to mobilize their rank-and-file members. As one union member described it, while the UFW was running grassroots electoral campaigns, other unions’ political programs focused on “writing checks to political candidates and party organizations, lobbying entrenched members of Congress, and—shortly before Election Day—sending mailings to union members informing them of our endorsements.”

Cesar Chavez and the UFW laid the groundwork for California’s increase in Latino voting, and Marshall Ganz and other UFW veterans then refined and expanded the UFW model in a series of 1980s campaigns. After Miguel Contreras and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor found success using this approach during the 1990s, this grassroots mobilization and voter outreach model spread throughout California through labor-backed organizations, fueling the transformation of California politics.

These efforts continue to expand nationally as SEIU and other unions build their presence in Colorado, Florida, Arizona, Texas and other states where greater Latino voter turnout is boosting progressive candidates and issues. To the extent that much of America’s Latino electorate was once described as a “sleeping giant,” its awakening depends not on reacting to a hostile political environment, but rather on the spread of a UFW organizing model that has proven successful for over 40 years and is advancing the struggle for economic justice across the nation.

[Editor’s note: This article is drawn from Shaw’s new book Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century (University of California Press). You can purchase the book here.]

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