Ufw Quotes

I only understood the real power of the one-on-one in 1984, after I had left the United Farm Workers (UFW), when at an Industrial Areas Foundation training in San Antonio, I observed veteran organizer Ernesto Cortes model one.

Today, the UFW still fights for the rights of farm workers – winning concessions like basic access to toilets and running water – in an economy in which farm workers remain exploited, if a little less than before.

Of all the tactics brought to bear upon the growers in the sixties, the most important was the United Farm Workers’ (UFW’s) ever-resourceful grape boycott. Here, ironically, the weakness of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLR A), which had left agricultural workers out of its purview as a sop to southern political interests, proved beneficial. The Taft-Hartley amendments had eliminated the secondary boycott, which otherwise would have allowed unions to boycott firms who did business with an employer that was being struck—that is, boycott the secondary handler of a good. For the farmworkers, not being covered by the act meant that they could take their struggle from the fields to the secondary sight of the supermarkets that sold grapes. Working outside of the New Deal order, in essence, proved to be the workers’ best hope and most successful strategy.

In the coming years, Chavez would continue to call on Ross for special projects, but the trip to Los Angeles represented a significant shift: for the rest of his working life, Ross’s time would largely be dedicated to training new organizers—first with the UFW and later, once Chavez abandoned organizing, with a variety of peace and social-justice groups. It was in these trainings, which could last for more than a month, that thousands of people were introduced to Ross’s rigorous method of organizing, in sessions he dubbed the “battle of the butcher paper.”5

With the grape boycott relaunched, Ross spent much of his time traveling around the country—Los Angeles, Toronto, Ohio, New York, Florida, back to California—teaching UFW volunteers how to use house meetings to expand boycott chapters.