The scenes are straight out of the great grape strike of the late 1960s. In Southern California's Coachella Valley, Chicano laborers again cry "Viva la Huelga" (long live the strike) at flashy sedans roaring through vineyard gates, and priests who join them are arrested for illegal picketing. Cesar Chavez again summons his workers to talk up a grape boycott. But this time, his opposition is not confined to the growers whom he signed to contracts three years ago. Now Chavez's still tiny United Farm Workers Union (28,000 members at the end of 1972) is locked in a struggle with another union that happens to be one of the most powerful in the non-Communist world, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
When a group of three-year contracts that Chavez had negotiated expired on April 14, only two Coachella Valley growers renewed them. Thirty others, who raise 85% of the valley's table grapes, signed with the Teamsters, who have long represented drivers trucking grapes out of the packing houses to market. Chavez bitterly told a group of laborers that the agreements "weren't contracts, they were marriage licenses. Tomorrow you will see the growers and the Teamsters skipping hand in hand into the fields on their honeymoon." He called a strike that last week began spreading into Arizona and other areas of California, where Teamster organizers have also been at work. Violence has erupted as Chavez's migrants face burly Teamster "protectors" of workers who cross the picket lines. The $750,000 packing shed of one grower who had signed with the Teamsters was burned to the ground, and a Teamster organizer has been charged with assault and battery for running U.F.W. strikers off a road with his car.
The odds against Chavez are long. If many more growers sign with the Teamsters, his union could be wiped out; and most growers are eager to get rid of the U.F.W. at nearly any price. Many of those in the Coachella Valley signed Teamster contracts after only a single day of formal bargaining, during which, Chavez charges, no genuine farm workers sat at the negotiating table. The Teamsters accepted a contract calling for a wage of $2.30 an hour this year, a bit less than the $2.40 that Chavez got for his followers, and also allowed growers to bring back the labor contractors who hand-pick groups of workers for a day's labor. Chavez's agreements had banned the contractors and set up union hiring halls at which growers chose their field hands.
This month Chavez will visit AFL-CIO headquarters to ask the labor federation's support for a new nationwide grape boycott. It will be much harder to popularize, though, than the boycott that became a flaming liberal cause toward the end of the '60s. Chavez this time cannot ask consumers to shun all grapes, only Teamster-picked ones, and shoppers have little way of telling which those are. Chavez has strong verbal support from the AFL-CIO, which booted the Teamsters out 15 years ago; but as yet he has received no federation money —and his union has no strike fund.