CESAR CHAVEZ FACTS
César Estrada Chávez was born March 31, 1927, near Yuma, Ariz.
In 1939, the Chávez family settled in San Jose, earning a living as farmworkers.
Chávez moved his wife and children to Delano in 1962 and dedicated himself to organizing farmworkers. He founded the National Farm Workers Association, later to become the United Farm Workers.
The five-year Delano Grape Strike began in 1965, with the mostly Latino NFWA joining Filipino farmworkers against grape growers.
The union negotiated its first contract with a grape grower in 1966.
According to a 1975 national poll, 17 million Americans were boycotting grapes.
Chávez died in 1993 at the home of a retired farmworker in San Luis, Ariz., while defending the UFW against a lawsuit brought by a vegetable grower.
SOURCE: United Farm Workers
The dynamics of the farm labor population have changed since César Chávez and others began organizing workers in California's fields.
In the early 1960s, a guest-worker program that had imported workers from Mexico since the days of World War II was drawing to a close. Those who were left picking crops were largely legal residents or U.S. citizens of Mexican and Filipino descent, along with working-class white and black Americans.
“Back then, probably 80 percent were documented, and about 20 percent were undocumented. Today it would be just the reverse,” said Arturo Rodriguez, president of United Farm Workers, the nation's first farm labor union. The UFW was founded by Chávez, whose birthday is celebrated Tuesday.
The makeup of the nation's manual laborers – and in particular, farm laborers – changed as economic conditions in Mexico and other parts of Latin America coincided with a demand for cheap labor in the United States.
It is now estimated that as many as 90 percent of California's farmworkers are foreign-born, most of them here illegally. This resonates in San Diego County, home to more small farms than any other county in the United States, according to the San Diego County Farm Bureau. Agriculture has repeatedly ranked fourth or fifth among the county's top industries.
Nationwide, the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C., has estimated that while only 4 percent of unauthorized workers are employed in agriculture, such workers make up the vast majority of farm labor.
As the labor force has changed, so has many organized labor groups'attitude toward unauthorized workers, whom they once viewed as low-paid competition and, in the case of farmworkers, as strikebreakers.
Along with prominent labor groups such as the Service Employees International Union, the UFW, which has about 27,000 members, is a vocal proponent of revamping immigration laws to grant legal status to those already working here.
While guest-worker plans continue to be a sticking point and dissent persists among trade unions in some industries, the general thinking in recent years has gone as such: If you can't beat the competition, let them join.
Unauthorized workers who are easily exploited give an unfair advantage to employers who hire them and drive down wages for other workers, say labor leaders who favor legalization. Giving them legal status and rights would level the playing field, while bringing them into the union fold would boost membership and bargaining muscle.