Marching on the Capitol
Richard Street | California, United States
Organization: Streetshots
Photographer: Richard Street
Organization: Streetshots
Exhibit Title: Marching on the Capitol
Location: California, United States
California Governor Gavin Newsom reluctantly signed historic farmworker union legislation after President Joe Biden and Democratic Party leaders rebuked him and 7,000 members of the United Farm Workers union along with allies marched en masse to the state Capitol on August 26, 2022 and demanded action. Will the legislation inject life into the union movement?
For a fuller presentation see the Custom Field, below, which documents the United Farm Worker union's 335-mile march from Delano, California to Sacramento.
While covering California agriculture and farm labor for 40 years, I completed the first five volumes of a massive history of California farmworkers 1769-present, including four studies of the relationship between farmworkers and photography. By amalgamation photography, submergence journalism, and schoalrship I try to overcome the artificial truncation of knowledge separating disciplines. Awards include: Best Agricultural Reporting in California; the Commonwealth Club of California Silver Medal; the Anthony Lukas Prize for Nonfiction; World Affairs Council Award for Reporting; the Lincoln Steffens Journalism. Award; and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Streetshots@aol.com
When California Governor Gavin Newsom reluctantly, and with much delay, finally placed his signature on a law supported by the United Farm Workers (UFW) union and passed by the California Assembly and Senate, he created a far easier way for farmworkers to vote in union elections and achieve collective bargaining contracts with California growers. The new law did not come easy.
To pressure Newsom, UFW members borrowed a tactic from March 1966 when a group of striking farmworkers from Delano marched 344 miles north on “La Peregrinción” to be greeted on Easter Sunday by 10,000 supporters on the steps of the state capitol. The march had kicked off the Delano grape boycott and led in 1970 to the first industry-wide contracts between grape growers and farmworkers.
Now, 56 years later, farmworkers were again marching, this time over 24 days. Leaving “Forty Acres,” the union’s original headquarters in Delano on August 3, they moved north through the Central Valley toward Sacramento. While “La Peregrinación” had benefitted from cooler spring weather, the 2022 marchers endured a broiling August sun and temperatures above 100 degrees.
Along the way clergy members joined, Martin Luther King III walked with the procession one morning, doctors provided first aid for those afflicted with heat prostration, legislators showed-up at sunrise to deliver stirring pep talks, farmworkers cheered from the fields, home owners volunteered their yards as shady resting places, passers-by stopped to offer cool refreshments, and near Walnut Grove a fireman who had once worked in the fields used his siren and the lights on his big water tender to lead marchers along a dangerous two-lane highway.
Finally, on the morning of August 26, with law enforcement helicopters above, and hundreds of police officers looking on, between 6,000 and 7,000 farmworkers, union members, and native American dancers followed the still spunky, 92-year-old Dolores Huerta (who in 1962 had founded the National Farm Workers Association with César Chávez and Gilbert Padilla), and newly-elected UFW president Teresa Romero, both dressed in white, with Romero wearing a huge, golden cross, in a noisy and joyous parade that moved with great dignity and resolve from an assembly place in Southside Park (where teams of doctors had tended to dozens of marchers limping about on grotesquely blistered feet) along Capitol Mall toward the capitol.
Accompanied by the sound of drum beats and mariachi bands, horns and whistles, and sirens sounding from a group of beautifully-restored low rider automobiles, and surrounded by giant images of the face of César Chávez, massive banners displaying the union’s black eagle, placards with images of our lady of Guadalupe, American flags, and enlarged photographs from the grape strike years, Romero, Huerta, and other UFW leaders and their allies delivered their plea to a huge crowd that sprawled down the Capitol steps, across the gardens, and overflowed onto 10th Street. But it did not end in speeches. After Romero expressed her disappointment that Newsom had not signed AB 2183, UFW members proceeded to construct a camp and maintain huge union banners on the capitol steps, where they vowed to remain until Newsom did the right thing.
Over the next weeks, while dignitaries visited the campers and newspapers ran images of their shrines, Newsom fidgeted and deflected pressure. Curious about Newsom’s reluctance, Sacramento-based independent journalist Dan Bacher looked into Newsom’s finances and concluded that his opposition may have had less to do with ballot security than his financial relationship with growers. According to Bacher, the governor received contributions from the agricultural industry totaling $977,000.
Bacher cautioned that the huge figure does not include funds used to fight Newsom’s recall. Among the contributions: $250,000 from Stewart and Lynda Resnick, whose Wonderful Company is the largest grower of almonds in the United States. For the 2018 election, Bacher found that the Resnicks had contributed $116,00 and E. J. Gallo, one of the largest wine makers on the planet, had given Newsom $58,400.
Newsom gained no friends when, on the day of the march, he traveled to the new, $14.5-million Napa Valley winery that he and billionaire Gideon Getty purchased from Robert Mondavi. Hounded by UFW demonstrators at his Napa Valley winery in 2021 and at the exclusive French Laundry, where Newsom dined with friends celebrating a lobbyist’s birthday party at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Newsome succumbed to building pressures to sign the new law when, on Labor Day, president Joe Biden thanked farmworkers for toiling ”tirelessly and at great personal risk” to feed America.
“I strongly support California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Voting Choice Act,” Biden said. “The least we owe them, is an easier path to make a free and fair choice to organize a union.”
And so, at the 11th hour, on September 28, one month and two days after the UFW’s 23-day march ended on the Capitol steps, Newsom finally realized that he would be disrespecting his own supporters and muffing his presidential aspirations if he vetoed AB2183, as the bill, written by Assemblyman Mark Stone [D], was officially known.
Just a few hours earlier while taking questions at a news conference in San Francisco, Newsom had squirmed and refused to field questions about the bill. “I’ve got four hundred bills on my desk, and I’ve got less than 72 hours,” he explained to Politico reporter Alexander Nieves. “And so we’ll be working on many other bills, and then the next one, when I get back to Sacramento.”
And then, back in Sacramento that afternoon, Newsome surprised everyone by walking unannounced out of the ornate Capitol building doors, into the blinding light of the sun-soaked front steps, made his way over to the 24-hour-a-day vigil where farmworkers had set up camp, shook hands with marchers, among them Chilly Nunez, who had walked all the way from Delano and cried in disbelief when Newsom appeared, greeted her and others who had been there for the past weeks, then stood beside a makeshift altar and calmly placed his signature on the newly-amended law.
“California’s farmworkers are the lifeblood of our state,” he said, “and they have the fundamental right to unionize and advocate for themselves in the workplace.”
Newsom’s endorsement dramatically broke with his predecessors, and his own actions, since Newsom had vetoed a similar bill in 2021. Democratic governor Jerry Brown, who had marched with Chavez and in 1975 negotiated the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA), dedicated to protecting the rights of farmworkers who since the 1930s have been excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, had vetoed bills similar to AB2183. Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger also rejected new farmworker legislation.
A major point of contention had been a provision in AB2183 allowing for mail-in-ballots. Like his predecessors, Newsom rejected mail-in-ballots because they constituted an “untested . . . process that lacks critical provisions to protect the integrity of the election.” He forgot that the state of California already allowed absentee, mail-in-ballot elections, without any problems, including in his own election. Under the compromise agreement an amended ALRA expands voting options by allowing voting to occur at a physical location, such as a farm, or by delivering a ballot card at a local Agricultural Labor Relations Board office. The ballot card method removes intimidation that can occur at job site polling places. Farmworkers could also receive assistance filling out ballots.
Commonly referred to as the “card check” the system (or, more accurately, majority sign-up petitions, lobbied for decades by unions asking for a federal statute) it is used most successfully by public sector unions. Under this system, farmworkers may organize when a majority signs cards indicating that they want to be represented by a union. UFW leaders have stated that this arrangement was essential to protect farmworkers from intimidation, retaliation, and even deportation for union activity. In a concession to the agricultural industry, Newsom’s “compromise agreement” limits the number of “card check” petitions to 75 certified union elections per year, while providing a mechanism by which the new legislation can be repealed or renewed in 2028.
Another point of contention had been the question of whether or not growers would be notified about an impending union election. The UFW argued that notification would allow growers to bust union efforts by weeding out organizers and activists, even deporting undocumented workers. Before conceding, Newsome had contended that by not notifying growers of union elections the law violated national labor organizing standards.
Growers were predictably angry. Their muddled reasoning: if farmworker organizers filled out forms and turned in cards with the signatures of workers, there would be no secret balloting, since organizers who knew how each worker would vote could exert undue intimidation. Yet, not a single example of this hypothetical problem has ever been documented.
“This was disappointing,” California Fresh Fruit Association president Ian LeMay told the Sacramento Bee. LeMay claimed that the agricultural industry had been “locked out of negotiations . . . to embolden the special interest group, and we’re extremely disappointed by the governor’s actions today.”
A rebuttal to AB 2183 by the California Farm Bureau Federation argued that the bill would “strip agricultural employees of their rights . . .” Ventura County Agricultural Association president and general counsel Rob Roy predicted that the legislation would not help unionization because the UFW was “virtually non-existent” and had not successfully filed for a union election during the past five years.
At the apex of its power during the early 1970s the UFW had between 500,000 and 60,000 members; today it reports somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 members and
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