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Si se Puede, Redux
by Luke W. Cole
As I write this, the final installment of Miriam Pawel's inelegant
LA Times series on the UFW has yet to be published. However, like
many readers, I am disappointed to read what can only be described
so far as a series of gross political hit pieces on the United Farm
Workers (among them "Linked Charities," Miriam Pawel,
January 9). These articles, packed with unfounded assertions, paint
a relentlessly negative and therefore inherently unfair picture
of one of the most remarkable stories of the 20th Century-the UFW.
Far from being an incestuous den of iniquity, as the Times would
have it, the UFW today provides one of the few bright lights for
U.S. farm workers, who as a result of the global marketplace make
less in real wages today than they did in 1975.
The Times' central "accusations" - political broadsides
is a more accurate description - seem to be that 1) the Chavez family
supports the "struggling" UFW with the receipts from its
related non-profit charities; and 2) that the family is somehow
self-dealing, "enriching their own enterprise" in Pawel's
breathless reportage. The first of these charges is true, and laudable,
while the second is misplaced. I'll speak to today's [1/10/06] piece
on Cesar himself later.
That the various charitable organizations in the UFW constellation
support the union is not something to criticize, it is the brilliance
of the strategic vision of Cesar Chavez and his heirs. After 40
years of fighting Big Agriculture, these leaders know that it is
critical to have independent sources of income for a union that
is perennially locked in combat with well-funded, ruthless and politically-connected
growers. It is also a recognition of the difficulty of organizing
farm workers - among the lowest paid, least organized and hardest
to reach workers in the U.S. So, in addition to developing low-income
housing, educating youth, and providing medical care and pensions
to farm workers - remarkably, the Times' stories make this work
sound somehow unseemly - the charities try to help farm workers
better their economic situations by unionizing. In pursuit of this
important work, they rely on a network of interconnected businesses:
the very economic diversification and vertical integration practices
developed and practiced by thousands of U.S. corporations. Yet,
the Times views these common (and sound) business practices with
raised eyebrows when employed by a union. The examples of alleged
abuses, such as a troubled rehabilitation of the Vista Del Monte
apartments - what, a housing renovation in San Francisco ran over
budget? Shocking! - are routine problems faced in doing business,
and not evidence of corporate greed. Perhaps if the Chavez family
ran the Staples Center, rather than a collection of public-spirited
charities, they could receive less biased coverage from the Times.
Is the UFW a family-run organization? Sure, but that accusation
rings hollow coming from the Times, a corporation where for 100
years the requirement to be the publisher was the name Otis or Chandler,
or even better, both. The fact that the Chavez family is involved
in their patriarch's business is something celebrated in every other
sector as the American way. And unlike the Chandler family and most
other family-run businesses, the Chavez family has sacrificed economically
to try to better the plight of farm workers. As your articles accurately
describe, they live at the UFW headquarters - a geographically isolated
and somewhat down-at-the-heels former sanitarium where couples live
in "double-wide trailers" on a plot "littered"
with "junked cars." This is unjust enrichment? Union president
Arturo Rodriguez draws a salary of - horrors! - $77,890 a year,
less than a mid-level reporter at the Times and far less than any
other union president in the country. While the Times insinuates
that this is self-dealing, it appears to be self-sacrifice to the
more objective observer.
Is the UFW perfect? Surely not. There are those who argue it should
pay its organizers more, and work them for shorter hours. But these
valid criticisms are lost in the early flood of unfounded insinuation
that lead up to today's hit piece on UFW co-founder Cesar Chavez.
That the LA Times has chosen to print such a one-sided caricature
of Mr. Chavez should be unthinkable in 2006. The one dimensional
approach is so racist as to be almost laughable, were its potential
ramifications on the eve of the Martin Luther King holiday not so
tragic for thousands of school children across the state. As any
informed adult knows from personal experience, there are always
two sides to every story even in the course of normal business dealings.
It takes very little imagination to understand how complex daily
life must be for the visionary who is also daily charged with building
institutions that must outlive his charismatic leadership. Which,
when all is said and done, is what Cesar Chavez has accomplished.
Would that the LA Times had bothered to tell even a portion of the
whole story, a story that is continuing to this very day.
While there are many who would like to see more unionization in
agriculture, the UFW can hardly be blamed for "dwindling"
membership in an era where nationwide union membership in all sectors
has fallen to its lowest level in almost a century, the anti-union
Bush administration has stacked the National Labor Relations Board
with pro-grower members, and the concerted federal attack on labor
that began when Ronald Regan "broke" PATCO has reached,
hopefully, its apex. In the end, union membership is not about undue
"burdens" on business. It is about human dignity in the
face of corporate, government, and business greed. It is about decent
pay and benefits for honest work.
In my 16-year experience working in rural California, I have seen
the UFW give some of the poorest Californians hope, capacity and
most importantly a vehicle for collective resistance to the extreme
exploitation by one of the most powerful industries in this state,
corporate agriculture. It is unfortunate that in this ongoing struggle,
the Times has chosen to put its thumb on the scale firmly on the
side of business overlords.
The writer is the Executive Director of the Center on Race, Poverty
& the Environment in San Francisco and Delano, California.
Luke Cole
Director
Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment
450 Geary Street, Suite 500
San Francisco, CA 94102
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