As the blazing sun burns high in the open sky, flanneled farm workers labor in the fields where a growing batch of uncertainty grows, waiting to be harvested.
Last month, the United Farm Worker (UFW) movement was brought back to the national spotlight in a recent five-year investigation by The New York Times. Cesar Chavez is alleged to have sexually abused former associates of his, including co-founder of the UFW, Dolores Huerta. In the wake of the report, the moral foundation of a movement that helped alleviate working conditions for thousands of farm workers was shaken to its core.
For decades, the UFW has positioned itself as more than just a labor union. It served as a symbol of Latine political power, and it was a cornerstone of California’s labor history. Any middle schooler can testify about learning about the UFW and its leaders, and for good reason. Their infamous Delano Grape Strike not only served as the first farm worker deal in history, but also inspired national boycotts in countless other sectors. At its peak, the UFW was able to turn farm workers from an ostracized faction into a truly visible and organized political force. It was the common folk who carried the weight, and it paid off. The UFW managed to exert national pressure to shape labor conditions in ways that had previously seemed impossible.
Yet today, this power feels doubtful. The movement that once unified thousands now appears diminished in both scale and influence. If the UFW no longer dominates, who speaks for farmworkers now?
“The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual.”
– Dolores Huerta
The movement seems more of a myth than reality. At its peak, about 60,000 farm workers belonged to the UFW. Presently, membership hovers around 5,000, accounting for less than 2 percent of the agricultural workforce. Moreover, fewer contracts are extended to laborers, and the UFW has less bargaining power since its conception. The diminished union presence is glaringly apparent. There are growing concerns about the UFW’s effectiveness and whether it’s worth paying union fees, and Spanish-language radio stations have been reported as touting that signing a union petition would lead to it “stealing 3 percent of your salary.”
This shift is tied to structural changes within the union and agricultural labor itself. In the years following the UFW’s successes in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the movement had shifted from union organization to advocacy work. An example of this shift is evident in a proposed 2016 state law that mandated employers pay overtime to laborers who worked more than eight hours a day. Employers who would be affected by the state law issued their concerns about the affordability of the overtime and how they may have to adjust schedules to avoid it. Instead of serving as a union and negotiating individual contracts with employers to reach a consensus, the UFW simply advocated for the passage of the law. And so it did, leading to farmworkers losing both hours and pay. If the union had organized, it could have demanded better overtime provisions in contracts, rather than forcing the hands of employers where some can afford to pay overtime, and many cannot.
Farm work itself has also become increasingly fragmented with multiple factors at fault. Mechanization has reduced the need for large stable workforces, while subcontracting has fractured labor into smaller, harder-to-organize units. At the same time, the increasing reliance on undocumented workers has introduced new vulnerabilities, where fear of retaliation or deportation makes collective organizing far more difficult. In fairness to the UFW, these conditions make organizing substantially harder, as workers often lack stability and legal protections.
Yet even so, the contrast between past and present United Farm Workers is stark. Where the UFW once represented a centralized, movement-driven model of labor organization, today’s agricultural workforce is deconcentrated and often invisible. As such, representation today is often indirect and sometimes nonexistent.
In addition, in shifting from organizing workers to advocating policy, the UFW has also moved away from the very mechanism that once gave it power — collective bargaining rooted in worker participation.
Clearly there is a broader vacuum of representation. Farmworkers today operate within an economy that depends on their labor, yet they lack a unified structure through which they can advocate for themselves. Where the UFW once provided a voice, today there is no equivalent institution capable of speaking at scale.
So what can we do? Well, the first step is to realize that the absence of a centralized representation means that farmworkers aren’t wholly voiceless. Rather, representation for farmworkers is simply decentralized like the days before the UFW. Farm workers have a voice, they just need a microphone.
While revival of the union is not impossible, it would likely require significant adaptation to the realities of modern agricultural labor, namely its informality. Rather than a single unified movement or organization, farm worker advocacy today is evolving into a network of smaller, localized efforts.
As UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Professor Christian Paiz notes, the story of the UFW has always been rooted in not just its leaders, but in the “lesser-known strikers who stood day in and day out, picketing and protesting in solidarity, and in love for one another.”
That same spirit persists today, even if it no longer operates under a single banner.
Featured Image Source: Gael De La Cruz