Word: ufw
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...There was an old Teamster contract at Sam Andrews, but as of last March the Teamsters National, having lost 75 per cent of the elections, withdrew from the fields and agreed that they will not try to win any new elections in the fields, and will not oppose the UFW where they have old contracts...
...pick just one example, the Teamsters medical plan covers the farmworker only while he or she is still working, and the working hours needed to qualify do not transfer from ranch to ranch. The UFW medical plan by contrast, has three different levels of coverage--the lowest beginning after a total of 50 hours work under any union contract. I explain this here as I explained it every day for the two and a half weeks that we organized at Sam Andrews. Each morning I got up at 3:45 a.m., arrived at the office in Lamont...
Once, some ex-Teamsters, now working for the company, drove up, and one of them boarded the bus where I was talking with the workers during lunch break. He ignored me, and began to lecture the workers on the evils of the UFW, and promised that if they voted "no union" and signed a petition he had with him, the Teamster dues would end. Actually, this petition was meaningless because the vote was UFW vs. "no union"; the dues to the Teamsters would stop anyway, whether or not the UFW won. It was obviously a list to separate the UFW...
...done, and since Sam Andrews was charging $8 per day for the rice and beans he offered them for dinner and the barracks-like tin sheds they lived in in the camps, the grower knew they wouldn't stay without work. However the saqueros were so strong for the UFW that they wrote and signed a petition to the Agricultural Labor Relations Board to hold the elections a few days earlier. Facing about 170 signatures, nearly all of the affected workers, the NLRB divided the election so that the melon sack workers could vote at the end of the last...
...older couple I was living with who had been farmworkers all their lives, and staunch supporters of the union for many years. During the time we had to talk, I learned of their struggle for the union; in the spring of 1973, when the hard won 3-year UFW contracts expired, the growers signed new contracts with the Teamsters. The UFW went out on strike; the reaction of Kern County was violent repression of the strike in the movie "Fighting for Our Lives". There were many beatings and arrests, and even spraying from a helicopter at one point...