Salad Bowl Strike - Strike

Strike

By 1969, the UFW was on the verge of winning its four years old Delano grape strike. In June 1969, about twenty-five (25) small growers broke ranks with the rest of the industry, and by the end of July 1970 the strike had ended. The UFW believed that success over the Delano grape growers would lead hundreds of growers to recognize the union and negotiate contracts with the union.

But the UFW was not the only union to see the end of the Delano grape strike as an opportunity. Six thousand drivers and packing workers in the Salinas Valley in California, represented by the Teamsters, struck on July 17, 1970 effectively preventing most of the nation's summer lettuce crop from reaching consumers. The price of iceberg lettuce tripled overnight, and thousands of acres of lettuce were plowed under as crops spoiled on the ground. The strike ended on July 23, but the contract included a special agreement by the growers to give the Teamsters, not the UFW, access to farms and the right to organize workers into unions.

The UFW, which had long asserted jurisdiction over the field workers, was outraged, especially when the Teamsters signed a contract with the growers days later without having to do much organizing or build support among the workers. Even as UFW leader César Chávez went on a hunger strike to protest the Teamsters' actions and a state district court imposed a temporary injunction to preempt UFW members from walking off the job, the UFW held secret talks with the Teamsters to avert a strike by the UFW. An agreement to return jurisdiction over the field workers to the farm union was reached on August 12, and FreshPict Foods (then owned by the Purex Corporation) and Inter-Harvest (part of the United Fruit Company) broke ranks with the other lettuce growers and signed contracts with the UFW.

But the August 12 agreement collapsed, and 5,000-7,000 UFW workers struck the Salinas Valley growers on August 23 in what was the largest farm worker strike in U.S. history. More workers walked off the job in the next few weeks, while other unions supported the strike, shipments of fresh lettuce nationwide almost ceased, and the price of lettuce doubled almost overnight. Lettuce growers lost $500,000 a day. A state district court enjoined Chávez personally and the UFW as an organization from engaging in picketing, but both Chávez and the union refused to obey the court's orders. In late September 1970, the UFW asked consumers to join in a nationwide boycott of all lettuce which had not been picked by members of the United Farm Workers. Violence, sporadic at first but increasingly widespread, began to occur in the fields. On November 4, 1970 a UFW regional office was bombed.

On December 4 federal marshals arrested Chávez and, for the first time in his life, César Chávez was put in jail. Two days later, he was visited in the Monterey County jail in Salinas by former Olympic gold medal-winning decathlete Rafer Johnson and Ethel Kennedy, widow of slain Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy and Johnson were attacked by an anti-union mob on the steps of the jail, and only intervention by city police, Monterey county sheriff's deputies, and the Brown Berets prevented a riot and injury to the visitors. Chávez was released by the Supreme Court of California on December 23, but the next day called a strike against six additional lettuce growers.

The bitter strike ended on March 26, 1971 when the Teamsters and UFW signed a new jurisdictional agreement reaffirming the UFW's right to organize field workers.