On this day in 1970, the largest U.S. farm worker strike in history, known as the "Salad Bowl Strike", began when field workers, organized with César Chávez and the United Farm Workers (UFW), struck, doubling the price of lettuce and costing sellers $500,000 a day.
The UFW had just won the Delano Grape Strike, which had lasted an astonishing five years, winning contracts with dozens of grape growers that were the first of their kind in agricultural history.
The origins of the Salad Bowl Strike lay in a jurisdictional dispute with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which had won the right to organize field workers after concluding a successful strike of drivers and packers in the lettuce producing sector in July.
The UFW strongly contested this claim, and, after negotiations broke down, between 5,000-7,000 field workers went on strike. The labor action was not just a strike, but also included mass pickets, boycotts, and secondary boycotts by the participants.
The price of lettuce almost doubled immediately, and the interruption to work cost lettuce growers approximately $500,000 a day. The strike was a bitter dispute which suffered violence and state repression. César Chávez, a leading labor organizer, was jailed after refusing to stop the picketing on court order. On November 4th, 1970 a UFW regional office was bombed.
The strike ended on March 26th, 1971 when the Teamsters and UFW signed a new jurisdictional agreement reaffirming the UFW's right to organize field workers, however jurisdictional disputes between the UFW and Teamsters continued for years afterward. In 1975, the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (CALRA) became law, establishing the right to collective bargaining for farmworkers in that state, a first in U.S. history.
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The shock troops of fascism on the mass political level are drawn from members of the lower-middle class who feel the upward thrust of the masses more acutely. These classes feel that any dislocation of the present economy resulting from the upward thrust of the masses would affect their status first. They are joined by that sector of the working class which is backward enough to be affected by nationalistic trappings and the loyalty syndrome that psychologists have termed the "authoritarian personality." One primary aim of the fascist arrangement is to extend and develop this new pig class, to removed and diffuse working-class consciousness with a psycho-social appeal to man's herd instincts. Development and exploitation of the authoritarian syndrome is at the center of totalitarian capitalism (fascism).
-George Jackson, Blood in my Eye