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John Sweeney, president of the newly militant AFL-CIO, has pledged to pump "millions" into the strawberry campaign, part of a broad effort to recast the federation as a champion of the downtrodden. At a news conference last week, Sweeney launched a National Strawberry Commission for Worker's Rights, with 39 civil rights, environmental and religious groups, and such celebrities as Ethel Kennedy and Linda Rondstadt. "For years, the farmworkers have represented the moral center of the labor movement," says Sweeney. Now Rodriguez, the nation's only Latino union head, has brought "a breath of fresh air to the farmworkers."
A third-generation Mexican American and a devout Roman Catholic, Rodriguez, 47, was drawn to activism through a parish priest and joined the grape boycott while getting a master's in social work at the University of Michigan. In two decades as a U.F.W. staff member, he moved 25 times, with his wife Linda and their three children, following campaigns in California, Texas, Oklahoma and New Jersey. Mushroom grower Shah Kazemi attributes Rodriguez's negotiating success to his being "more practical than Chavez. Artie whips out a calculator and adds up cost per employee." But his colleagues cite tenacity, fanatical attention to detail and dedication as his prime qualities. Adhering to Chavez's creed that one must be poor to serve the poor, Rodriguez earns $6,362 a year. "He is a Gandhiesque figure--more monk than labor leader, " says Richard Bensinger, head of the AFL-CIO's Organizing Institute.
The strawberry campaign, Rodriguez acknowledges, is "a dogfight." In Watsonville, 40 organizers are recruiting farmworkers, lawyers have filed 140 intimidation and harassment charges against growers, and researchers are tracing distribution patterns to inform a massive consumer campaign. "A boycott won't be necessary if food chains threaten to stop ordering their products," Sweeney notes. To pressure groceries to do just that, the AFL-CIO is mobilizing its 600 central labor councils, and the U.F.W. is opening offices in 25 cities to work with civic, church and campus groups.
A hardball consumer campaign will persuade growers to adopt a neutral stance so workers can organize without fear, the U.F.W. contends. Pickers perform stoop labor for up to 10 hours a day; rarely get health insurance, despite chronic back injuries; and earn an average of only $8,500 for a seven-month season. But that doesn't necessarily make them want to join the U.F.W. Growers have stirred anti-union sentiment, dispatching "labor consultants" into the fields. "They told us we would be fired if we joined the union, and the farm would shut down," says Adela Rocha, a picker who marched for the U.F.W. despite the threats. In recent years hundreds of workers lost their jobs when three strawberry farms disked their fields after the U.F.W. won elections. Firing is simple, since work is given out on a day-by-day basis. An estimated 60% of berry pickers are illegal immigrants. With a porous Mexican border, troublemakers are easily replaced.