Growers Spend Millions to Oppose UFW - Unions

 Ag groups spend millions on ads to discourage California farmworker unionizing. Supporters and members of the United Farm Workers union march in Galt on Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2022 on their way to Sacramento to ask for Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature on AB 2183. HECTOR AMEZCUA hamezcua@sacbee.com 

What to know BY MATHEW MIRANDA AND MELISSA MONTALVO UPDATED APRIL 15, 2024 10:38 AM

Major agriculture organizations have combined forces to spend millions on Spanish-language radio advertisements discouraging farmworkers from voting in union elections. Radio ads promoting anti-union rhetoric on multiple popular radio stations across the state and Spanish-language digital media over the past nine months have attacked a 2023 California “card check law” aimed to make it easier for farmworkers to vote in union elections. In some cases, the ads platform misinformation, according to labor experts. Behind the majority of the radio ads is the California Farmworker Information Center, a registered nonprofit and charity founded in 2023 by executives from the Western Growers Association, California Fresh Fruit Association and California Citrus Mutual — all groups that opposed the “card check” law.

Farm Labor Organizing is Tough

How California Birthed the Modern Right Wing

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18403/the-rights-roots-in-1930s-farmworker-unionbusting-and-redbaiting

Chris Lehmann

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Tuesday, October 6, 2015

In These Times

[Reprinted with permission from In These Times [1]. All rights reserved.

These labor struggles have cast a long shadow on our national politics, particularly when a Californian—who made a point of serving grapes at fundraisers in defiance of the United Farm Workers boycott—launched the conservative revolution proper in the 1980 presidential election.

Conservative rule in America is by now so deep-seated that a veritable cottage industry has sprung up to explain its origins. By varying accounts, the modern Right’s resurgence has its roots in populist religious revivals, Cold War paranoia, racial scapegoating and the ongoing cultural backlash against the New Left. Taken together, they raise the question: What served as the mainspring force?
Kathryn S. Olmsted [2], a UC-Davis historian, furnishes an arresting, if partial, answer in Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism [3]. In order to take hold,  the American Right had to make the liberal bulwarks of modern American prosperity seem irredeemably creaky, corrupt and sinister. Olmsted focuses on the convergence of the Right’s defining traits—a small-government ideology of economic individualism, a mediagenic narrative of business victimology and a healthy dose of anti-collectivist paranoia—as they were mobilized at the height of the New Deal to battle an enemy that barely registered on the radar of American public opinion at the time: the scattered, multiracial, and grossly undercompensated farmworkers of the Golden State.
How this defining conflict came to pass is itself an instructive story in the limits of New Deal liberalism. Migrant farmworkers, who had seen their wages stagnate well before the Depression, seized upon the Roosevelt administration’s support for collective bargaining to start organizing. But there was just one problem: Thanks to deals cut in Congress with conservative Southern Democrats, farmworkers were exempt from federal collective-bargaining protections (and still are [4]). Nonetheless, desperate Californian agricultural laborers picked up on the robust pro-union mood of New Deal America and took matters into their own hands. As a 1933 wildcat strike among California berry pickers picked up momentum throughout the state’s rich agricultural interior, one Department of Labor bureaucrat wrote to another: “They are union mad, and they have been led to believe that the government upholds them in their stand.”
The group doing much of the leading was the Communist-run Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union (CAWIU). In 1934, the union coordinated a strike for better wages in the cotton fields of the San Joaquin Valley.