The Filipino workers in particular had experience organizing unions in the fields and with strikes. AWOC was mostly composed of Filipinos, Chicanos, Anglos and Black workers. It was an outgrowth of an earlier farmworker organization, the Agricultural Workers Association (AWA), founded by Dolores Huerta. One had been formed in 1959 by the AFL-CIO, called the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. Two organizations attempted to represent and organize the farmworkers. The average life expectancy of a farmworker was 49 years. Child labor was rampant, and many workerswere injured or died in easily preventable accidents. Workers’ temporary housing was strictly segregated by race, and they paid two dollars or more per day for unheated metal shacks-often infested with mosquitoes-with no indoor plumbing or cooking facilities.įarm labor contractors played favorites with workers, selecting friends first, sometimes accepting bribes.

At one farm the boss made the workers all drink from the same cup “a beer can”in the field at another ranch workers were forced to pay a quarter per cup.

State laws regarding working standards were simply ignored by growers. Grape pickers in 1965 were making an average of $.90/hour, plus ten cents per “lug” (basket) picked. CONDITIONS OF FARM WORKERS & THEIR WORKīut some things hadn’t changed. Over time, however, farmworkers, led by Cesar Chavez, were able to call upon allies in other unions, in churches and in community groups affiliated with the growing civil rights movement, to put enough pressure on politicians to end the Bracero Program by 1964

The small but energetic National Farm Labor Union, led by dynamic organizer Ernesto Galarza, found its efforts to create a lasting California farmworkers union in the 1940’s and 50’s stymied again and again by the growers’ manipulation of braceros. In fact the growers had wanted the Bracero program to continue after the war precisely in order to replace domestic workers. In reality this provision was rarely enforced. Public Law 78 stated that no bracero-a temporary worker imported from Mexico-could replace a domestic worker. Started during World War II as a program to provide Mexican agricultural workers to growers, it continued after the war. The Bracero program, an informal arrangement between the United States and Mexican governments, became Public Law 78 in 1951. Within another fifteen years more than 50,000 farmworkers were protected by union contracts. And yet by the early 1960’s things were beginning to change beneath the surface. Essential to the state’s biggest industry, but only so long as they remained exploited and submissive farmworkers had tried but failed so many times to organize the giant agribusiness farms that most observers considered it a hopeless task. For more than a century farmworkers had been denied a decent life in the fields and communities of California’s agricultural valleys.

Farm works office keygen