They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California

12. Organizing Resistance: Swinging at the Heart of the Bracero Program

341 CHAPTER TWELVE Organizing Resistance Swinging at the Heart of the Bracero Program We trust that nothing in this discussion will be misinterpreted as critical of the Mexican National Workers themselves. It is well known that their wages in Mexico are so low and under-employment is so prevalent that many Mexican workers have the laudable hope of bettering the condition of their families by entering into the contractual agreement that has been approved by the Mexican and United States governments. At the same time, hardships of the Mexican worker should not obscure the fact that large farm and grower interests, aided and abetted by food processors who have their hands deep in the agricultural pie, are motivated by the aim of lowering, over the long pull, their labor costs through hiring Mexican Nationals. “Supplemental Statement in Support of HR 4575 . . . ,” United Packinghouse Workers of America, January 30, 1958 Let us attack! Let us blow the whistle on every violation we find, and flood state and Federal officials with complaints. Let us systematically report, process, prosecute and check on all violations we can find of regulations affecting braceros and domestics. Let us follow all this with organized check-ups and constant pressure! Either the Federal or the state boys do their jobs and enforce the law or let them get out!! Either they fish, or cut bait! Louis Krainock, Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, October 9, 1959 342 • chapter twelve IN 1952, AS PL 78 WAS TAKING EFFECT, farm labor wages in California were 41.5 percent of industrial wages, according to an analysis conducted by the newly chartered awoc in 1959. By that latter year, they had sunk to 28.6 percent. In metropolitan San Diego, industrial wages rose from index 100 to 152.4 over the same period. In San Diego and Riverside counties, farm wages stayed at a flat 100 (though wages in San Diego avocados did rise from 100 to 114, and miscellaneous vegetables and strawberries from 100 to 103).1 awoc was born in February 1959 amid some controversy, as well as heightened expectations—or fears—that at last California farm workers were to be organized. Harry Bridges’s International Longshoremans Union had been threatening to join the Teamsters in a reprise of their famous 1930s “march inland” to organize farm and packinghouse workers. Partially in response to that threat, as well as to ameliorate severe internal rivalries in the afl-cio (to say nothing of an apparent desire on the part of afl-cio president George Meany to get activists in the international labor movement “off his back”), the afl-cio made a significant commitment to organizing agricultural workers. The original plan was to have awoc take the lead in organizing, but to send enrolled field workers to Galarza’s nawu and packing shed workers to upwa. That plan quickly fell apart amid considerable internal bickering and whatever Louis Krainock’s exhortations, awoc proved fairly ineffectual in systematically reporting abuses and securing the prosecution of violations of labor law and the bracero program. Like many unions before it, however, it did prove fairly successful in latching onto wildcat wage strikes, sometimes launching its own strikes, and even, occasionally, leveraging those strikes into organizational gains. It also helped lay the foundation for the United Farm Workers (ufw) that was eventually to follow it.2 awoc was well funded (more than one million dollars in direct aid was provided by the afl-cio over six years), but it was also dedicated to straight-up business unionism, not creating a social movement. It is interesting, therefore , that its first sustained contacts in California were with Father Thomas McCullough’s Agricultural Workers Association (awa) based in Stockton. Beginning in 1958, McCullough worked with local farm families—most of them ethnically Mexican—as well as with the newly arrived cso activist Fred Ross to build a grassroots movement that focused on community development (within a year it had established a credit union and a cooperative grocery), English-language classes, and health. awa also sought to publicize the effect bracero domination was having on local “home guard” workers, pioneering a “reverse strike,” for instance, in which hundreds of unemployed local farm workers banded together and went to work—unpaid—clearing weeds from the Organizing Resistance • 343 edges of highways at the height of the harvest in order to publicize the scale of displacement and hardship.3 For various reasons...