Happy Cesar Chavez Day!
Mar. 31st, 2003 10:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gordonzola"We have to find some cross between being a movement and being a union. The membership must maintain control; the power must not be centered in a few. Maybe we would have some system where the jobs were rotated. It is important to remain free to work on many issues. That takes time, and sometimes it seems as if you get lost on unimportant issues. We're experimenting."
Cesar Chavez, 1965
Happy Cesar Chavez Day everyone. Today is now a California state holiday for one of this country’s great and most innovative labor leaders. I was unfortunately too dumb to remember the march yesterday, but I thought I’d honor Cesar’s memory by telling the story of when we went out drinking together.
In the late ‘80s my college political friends and I were doing a lot of local union work. The university service workers where we went to school were going through bitter negotiations and fighting the "give-backs"* the college was mandating in the new contract. We formed a "worker-student alliance" and provided food, fundraising, and picket support during the inevitable strike that followed. In a moment I’m still proud of, I even managed to fend off the Sparticist League attempt to take over our group during a 200 person meeting I facilitated. Their tactical mistake of calling up their "labor guard" from New York, four beefy, thuggy** white guys in longshoreman’s hats, to menace the meeting didn’t help their "cause".
So it made sense that after the strike was settled we looked for other labor issues to work on. One friend got involved with the new UFW campaign to boycott grapes. Cesar Chavez was touring the country promoting the boycott so we decided to have our college pay him a lot of money to speak and spark a campus boycott movement at the same time.
Amusingly enough, at the last minute I was asked to be a body guard, standing next to Cesar as he spoke, eyeing the crowd and looking for potential trouble. We didn’t really expect any, but Cesar’s regular bodyguard was sick or something, and he wouldn’t go on without guards on each side. Luckily, I didn’t have to make any "In the Line of Fire" type decisions.*** Except for a heckling frat boy or two from the AG school, ("The workers on our farm get treated very well"), the talk went smoothly. He was, as he always was, an eloquent an inspirational speaker.
Cesar was hungry after his speech and this was the moment we dreaded. In his later years, he had gone on a macrobiotic diet and none of the groovy natch places were open this time of night. As unreflective as we were at the time, even we realized we couldn’t bring him back to our squalid anarcho/punk/student house and cook him the hippie slop we specialized in. Our fears were unwarranted as Cesar, always a man of the people, told us that pizza and beer would be just fine.
We ended up at the underground (literally, not metaphorically) pizza place with the bitter bartender. He was Irish and even though the bar had more than one Irish whiskey, he would flat-out refuse to make a drink with anything other than the one from "free Ireland". At if you did insist, look out for spit under the ice cubes. He had made it his main personality trait to hate students and as the evenings got later, and he got drunker, he would often start ranting about privileged college fucks and how we would never understand working class guys like him
So when our group came in, even though at least a third were local union members not students, I thought he would have a heart attack. How dare we be talking with the great Cesar Chavez and not him? It was so unfair that college fucks like us were sitting at the same table as a great labor leader. He was ranting at the bar how we weren’t fit to wipe Cesar’s ass when I came up. I always thought it was a myth that people could turn red with anger but when I offered to introduce him, he did just that.
I wish I could relate great and amusing Cesar Chavez anecdotes, but honestly I remember mostly being too much in awe to participate in the discussion. He told us stories of marches and organizing and violence against UFW members. He told us of our responsibilities as students to try and change the world. He told us the unions would rise again. All inspirational, but nothing I could do justice to in this piece better than his own words below.
Despite his desire for pizza and beer, Cesar’s health wasn’t very good at that point in his life and he was fairly quiet and tired-looking, excusing himself early. The rest of us stayed late into the night, plotting our worker-student organizing and making concrete plans for a student/Gray Panther alliance that we had just started discussing. I picture Cesar having the same effect everywhere he traveled. In his footsteps, thousands of alliances and drives have bloomed.
If you don’t know why Cesar Chavez is an important person, here’s a good start Web searches can gather many, many more.
*Do people still use that phrase? Will they start again soon?
**in the old white street gang sense, not the hip hop sense.
*** I would have preferred that the "labor guard" been there in that situation.
Cesar Chavez, 1965
Happy Cesar Chavez Day everyone. Today is now a California state holiday for one of this country’s great and most innovative labor leaders. I was unfortunately too dumb to remember the march yesterday, but I thought I’d honor Cesar’s memory by telling the story of when we went out drinking together.
In the late ‘80s my college political friends and I were doing a lot of local union work. The university service workers where we went to school were going through bitter negotiations and fighting the "give-backs"* the college was mandating in the new contract. We formed a "worker-student alliance" and provided food, fundraising, and picket support during the inevitable strike that followed. In a moment I’m still proud of, I even managed to fend off the Sparticist League attempt to take over our group during a 200 person meeting I facilitated. Their tactical mistake of calling up their "labor guard" from New York, four beefy, thuggy** white guys in longshoreman’s hats, to menace the meeting didn’t help their "cause".
So it made sense that after the strike was settled we looked for other labor issues to work on. One friend got involved with the new UFW campaign to boycott grapes. Cesar Chavez was touring the country promoting the boycott so we decided to have our college pay him a lot of money to speak and spark a campus boycott movement at the same time.
Amusingly enough, at the last minute I was asked to be a body guard, standing next to Cesar as he spoke, eyeing the crowd and looking for potential trouble. We didn’t really expect any, but Cesar’s regular bodyguard was sick or something, and he wouldn’t go on without guards on each side. Luckily, I didn’t have to make any "In the Line of Fire" type decisions.*** Except for a heckling frat boy or two from the AG school, ("The workers on our farm get treated very well"), the talk went smoothly. He was, as he always was, an eloquent an inspirational speaker.
Cesar was hungry after his speech and this was the moment we dreaded. In his later years, he had gone on a macrobiotic diet and none of the groovy natch places were open this time of night. As unreflective as we were at the time, even we realized we couldn’t bring him back to our squalid anarcho/punk/student house and cook him the hippie slop we specialized in. Our fears were unwarranted as Cesar, always a man of the people, told us that pizza and beer would be just fine.
We ended up at the underground (literally, not metaphorically) pizza place with the bitter bartender. He was Irish and even though the bar had more than one Irish whiskey, he would flat-out refuse to make a drink with anything other than the one from "free Ireland". At if you did insist, look out for spit under the ice cubes. He had made it his main personality trait to hate students and as the evenings got later, and he got drunker, he would often start ranting about privileged college fucks and how we would never understand working class guys like him
So when our group came in, even though at least a third were local union members not students, I thought he would have a heart attack. How dare we be talking with the great Cesar Chavez and not him? It was so unfair that college fucks like us were sitting at the same table as a great labor leader. He was ranting at the bar how we weren’t fit to wipe Cesar’s ass when I came up. I always thought it was a myth that people could turn red with anger but when I offered to introduce him, he did just that.
I wish I could relate great and amusing Cesar Chavez anecdotes, but honestly I remember mostly being too much in awe to participate in the discussion. He told us stories of marches and organizing and violence against UFW members. He told us of our responsibilities as students to try and change the world. He told us the unions would rise again. All inspirational, but nothing I could do justice to in this piece better than his own words below.
Despite his desire for pizza and beer, Cesar’s health wasn’t very good at that point in his life and he was fairly quiet and tired-looking, excusing himself early. The rest of us stayed late into the night, plotting our worker-student organizing and making concrete plans for a student/Gray Panther alliance that we had just started discussing. I picture Cesar having the same effect everywhere he traveled. In his footsteps, thousands of alliances and drives have bloomed.
If you don’t know why Cesar Chavez is an important person, here’s a good start Web searches can gather many, many more.
*Do people still use that phrase? Will they start again soon?
**in the old white street gang sense, not the hip hop sense.
*** I would have preferred that the "labor guard" been there in that situation.
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no subject
Date: 2003-03-31 12:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-31 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-31 05:58 pm (UTC)Dad was a union organizer for several years. Then he was the state director of Frontlash in Florida. It's my understanding that Frontlash is a very different organization now than it was in the 80s. At the time, it was pretty heavily penetrated by either the Social Democrats or the Democratic Socialists. (Dad was both at various times) Although Frontlash was a youth voter education organization, my dad only spent about half his time working with campus groups and various boycots and other campaigns (like the grape boycot and some of the Jobs With Justice stuff). He spent the other half of his time as a lobbyist (actual registered lobbyist) and as a campaign strategist and organizer for electoral campaigns.
We also somewhat regularly had European and Israeli labor people in our house. I don't know if any of them were famous. Heh. European labor was and still is somewhat outside of my expertise.
And here's my last bit of name dropping for the night: when Gore ran for president in 1988, my dad was the guy who got to break it to him that the Florida AFL-CIO wasn't going to endorse him. Gore's strategy in 1988 was to pull ahead of the pack via the primarily southern Super Tuesday primaries. Not getting Florida's AFL-CIO endorsement was one of the last nails in Gore's coffin that year.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-31 10:11 pm (UTC)and I can only think it would have been incredibly satisfying to tell Gore he was done. but maybe that's just me.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-31 10:01 pm (UTC)And probably, at the time, I would have chalked it up to his insular, non-international viewpoint (oh callow youth!). But recently I wound up on the other side of that: some young academic dude, a philosopher even, told me that he had received a three-year grant to go and observe the Reconcilliation process in South Africa (um, okay, recently = three years ago; I guess he'll be back any day now). And while I didn't turn red or rant like Ed, instead smiling politely and pouring him another drink, inside I seethed. How intensely fucked up that we who actually fought to stop apartheid were serving drinks and selling cheese while these Ivory Tower fucks get paid to think about it?!
I am Ed.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-31 10:07 pm (UTC)