United Farm Workers

Established in 1962 by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Larry Itliong, and others, the United Farm Workers (UFW) is a labor union representing and advocating for farmworkers’ rights and environmental and social justice concerns. It is presently organizing in 10 states across the United States. Through farmworker strikes, social movement organizing tactics, marches, and other nonviolent actions, the UFW has raised awareness about and helped to improve the working conditions of impoverished, mainly Latino and Latina farmworkers. Their organizing efforts, both past and present, also connect the struggles of disenfranchised farmworkers with the environmental and health impacts of pesticides, making the UFW one of the earlier groups to advocate for environmental justice. Some also credit the UFW for taking early action against harmful pesticides when government regulations were inadequate, and before the emergence of the environmental movement.

In 1962, César Chávez resigned from his position as the executive director for the Community Services Organization in California, a group associated with Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation, which worked with Mexican Americans. Chávez left the Community Services Organization to pursue his dream of organizing farmworkers. Excluded from mainstream labor organizations and unprotected under the National Labor Relations Act, farmworkers endured low wages, poor working conditions, and inadequate access to drinking water and sanitary restrooms. Chávez began speaking to farmworkers, encouraging them to join his newly formed group, the National Farm Workers Association.

In 1965, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, which represented predominantly Filipino-American farmworkers, initiated a major and now well-known strike against grape growers in Delano, California. The Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee invited Chávez's mainly Latino National Farm Workers Association to also participate in the strike. A year later, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the National Farm Workers Association joined forces to form the UFW. Chávez became the leader of this new organization. UFW garnered support from labor, church groups, and student and civil rights activists. Senator Robert F. Kennedy also came to support the strike. Committed to nonviolent forms of protest by way of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Chávez organized a significant march from Delano to the state capitol in [Page 432]Sacramento. He also conducted the first of many fasts in 1968 to bring attention to the farmworkers’ cause.

By 1968, the UFW began to take action against pesticides in response to two major cases of farmworker poisoning by an increasingly popular type of pesticide: organophosphates. Organophosphates came to replace pesticides such as DDT (dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane) in California's fields by the mid-1960s. This new type of pesticide, though less persistent in the environment, was highly toxic and dangerous to farmworkers’ health. Although it was considered a fairly better alternative to DDT because it did not bioaccumulate in the environment, some farmworkers became violently ill after exposure to the pesticide, and some were hospitalized. There was little concern during this time for farmworkers’ health problems resulting from pesticide exposure. In fact, government regulation of pesticides was said to be inadequate and favored growers’ interests. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was responsible for overseeing pesticides before 1970, but the department, some charge, was merely a lobbying instrument for agribusiness. As result, the UFW decided it needed to campaign around pesticide use and exposure.

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