United Farm Workers Of America history

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 AFL-CIO chartered the United Farm Workers, officially combining the AWOC and the NFWA, in August 1966.

In 1966, the DiGiorgio Corporation agreed to allow a union vote, but an investigation launched by California governor Edmund G. Brown, Sr., the first major politician to support the UFW, showed that the results had been rigged.

In 1967, African American sugar cane workers in the South began demanding higher wages and advocating for better working conditions, and sharecroppers in Mississippi also began organizing.

Saul Alinsky did not share Chávez's sympathy for the farm workers struggle, claiming that organizing farm workers, "was like fighting on a constantly disintegrating bed of sand." (Alinsky, 1967)

National support for the UFW continued to grow in 1968.

In 1968, the Western Washington Huelga Committee began organizing hop workers in the Yakima Valley, and pineapple workers in Hawaii earned the right to a $2.49 minimum hourly wage after 61 days of striking.

In 1968, they appealed to Chavez and the leadership for a much more systematic approach to the campaign.

Later, in 1968, Huerta led the boycotts of grapes within the east coast, successfully convincing other unions, such as the seafarer union, to join their cause while also getting multiple pro-union neighborhoods in New York to join the boycotting of stores that sold from grapes striking farms.

In 1970, Chávez decided to move the union's headquarters from Delano to La Paz, California, into a former sanatorium in the Tehachapi Mountains.

1971, Thomas John Wakely, recent discharge from the United States Air Force joined the San Antonio office of the Texas campaign.

In 1972, the union became affiliated with the AFL-CIO, created a national executive board, and changed their name to the United Farm Workers of America, simply known by their acronym, “UFW.”

Dolores Huerta, quoted in Jerald Barry Brown (PhD Diss., Cornell University, 1972), 205.

In 1972 Chavez sought assistance from the AFL-CIO, which offered help against the inroads being made by the Teamsters.

Flush with its successes and high visibility, the union, renamed the United Farm Workers of America in 1972, dispatched organizers to Arizona and Texas in efforts to duplicate its California victories.

These trailers served as the UFW's main clinic in Delano until 1972 when they were closed down in favor of opening the Terronez Clinic.

In mid-1973 the San Antonio office of the UFOC was taken over by the Brown Berets.

One major outcome of the strikes came in the form of a 1974 Supreme Court victory in Medrano v.

Just two years earlier, in 1975, the union was also buoyed by the passage of the Agricultural Relations Act in California, which established collective bargaining for farmworkers.

A nationwide survey showed that seventeen million Americans were boycotting the fruit in 1975.

After years of mayhem in the fields and numerous courtroom battles, the UFW and Teamsters met on December 1, 1976, to agree to a moratorium on filing suits against one another.

In 1977, the Teamsters signed an agreement with the UFW promising to end their efforts to represent farm workers.

By 1978, UFW Executive Board decided to end the programs due to dwindling resources.

The union survived the death of Chávez in 1993.

At the time of his death in 1993, he was leading another national boycott of grapes to protest pesticide use.

In 1994 President bill clinton posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom—the nation's highest civilian honor—to Chávez.

In 1996 the UFW launched a major campaign to organize union elections among California’s strawberry workers.

According to United Farm Workers, he was the "13th farm worker heat death since CA Governor Schwarzenegger took office" in 2003.

In 2006 California's first permanent heat regulations were enacted but these regulations were not strictly enforced, the union contended.

In 2013, farm workers working at a Fresno facility, for California's largest peach producer, voted to de-certify the United Farm Workers.

Miriam Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014), 414.

The UFW held a 5 day Fast on September 20, 2018, outside the Darigold headquarters to protest the poor work condition and treatments the Darigold farmers face and to bring attention to the Darigold Dozen.

News of this decertification was released to the public in 2018.

Sherman, J. (2020, August 11). UFW applauds Biden choice of Harris, citing her ‘fight for equal treatment & protection of farm workers’ and their joint support for overtime pay plus genuine agricultural immigration reform.