The way the growers went about this was to continue the abuse as far as they could go, and to try in every way to turn the workers against the union.

They had a campaign of dirty tricks to undermine the union. They would not report a worker's hours to medical care or medical bills paid, they would be told they lacked the required hours. This would make the workers very angry at the union. They would over-deduct dues farm workers' paychecks. When the workers would complain the growers would tell them to go and talk to the union about it. Then the workers would get mad at the union. Most of the growers refused to pay into the Martin Luther King Fund. We had to take most of them to court to collect. This was the money that was used to build the retirement village. One grower even refused to accept grievances. They would over-order or under-order workers, which would in turn make the workers mad at the union. So there was constant tugging and pulling to gain the power. The growers hated and despised this because they had been in control so many years.

There was no time to set up strong ranch committees or union stewards to deal with these problems. As soon as the grape contracts were signed, even before we had a chance to celebrate, we got the word from our lettuce or organizers in Salinas the 65 growers had just signed sweetheart contracts with the Teamsters. Everybody had to drop everything that had to do with the table grape workers, and rush over to start organizing against the Teamsters and growers in the Salinas Valley. So all that could be done at the point to help the grape workers was to help them ratify their contracts and set up ranch committees of five people. Ideally, each crew should have its own steward.

We intended to go over to Salinas, get the contracts back for the Teamsters and come right back and continue the work of setting up stewards in the table grapes. Ha! The Teamsters signed another pact with us--we stay off the trucks and they stay out of the fields. They pretended they were going to try to get the growers to rescind their Teamster contracts and signed with us. These two companies were more vulnerable than most to a boycott, because of products other than lettuce. Purex is a product of Freshpict and Chiquita bananas are a part of Inter Harvest. They are more important than all the lettuce in the world, and the companies did not want these names blackened.

Thus, the lettuce boycott began. Then as now, most of the leadership of the union was out working on the boycott in the cities. We couldn't get back to the table grapes until 1971. When we finally did get back we went crew by crew and had elections for stewards. The workers also voted as whether they wanted a clinic. This took three months of intensive work. For the first time, the workers saw what they could with some power, in each crew. Delano was the only place we were able to build this kind of organization. It showed up in 1973 during the strike when the Delano workers held out longer than any other workers.

There were legislative attempts in over 20 states to get laws passed that would outlaw the secondary boycott and the strike at harvest time, in return for some kind of phony election procedure. In the most important states of California, Washington, and Oregon, all attempts were defeated by the union members coming together in mass at the state capitol and putting pressure on legislators, etc.. When the opposition couldn't win at the legislative level, they went to the Initiative procedure in California in the form of proposition 22. The union defeated that too. We defeated them at the ranch level, where they tried to get workers to turn against us. When that didn't work they went to the legislatures, and then to the voters at large. We beat them there too. Finally, there was the California Supreme Court decision of 1972, which proved that the Salinas lettuce strike was not a jurisdictional dispute between the UFW and the Teamsters, but was rather "the ultimate form of favoritism" on the part of the growers toward the Teamster. To put it simply, it was grower-Teamster collusion to destroy the UFW. So, we beat them in the courts, too.

Then came 1973!!