The Wrath of Grapes

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck awakened the American conscience to the hapless life of the migrant farm worker. That was exactly 30 years ago. The stoop laborer in the fields today is still a forgotten man among U.S. workers, often little better off than he was at the time of the loads' tribulations in Depression-era California. In 1969, the field worker is more likely to be a Chicano--a Mexican-American--than an Okie. And the grapes of Steinbeck's title are at the focal point of one of the decade's longest and most wrathful U.S. labor disputes.

After four years of Union Leader Cesar Chavez's celebrated huelga (strike) by California grape pickers, the growers are anxious for federal regulation of union activity in agriculture. Farm workers have always been excluded from coverage by federal labor-relations law. One reason is that farmers are terrified of strikes at harvest time, which would be ruinous. Another rationale for exclusion has been that agricultural employment is so seasonal and transient that farm .workers were not even covered by minimum wage legislation until 1966.

Unique Setting. In hopes of meeting both sides halfway, the Nixon Administration last week came up with the first presidential proposal advanced for bringing farm workers under a national labor relations law. One much-discussed approach would simply put agriculture under the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board, which has covered industrial workers since 1935. Because farm labor presents special problems, however, the Administration asked for a separate, presidentially appointed Farm Labor Relations Board. "There are unique characteristics about the agricultural setting," said Labor Secretary George Shultz. "There is no great pattern. You'd have a lot to learn. The board could feel their way and develop something that fits. Let it develop its own rules and regulations."

Continued Boycott. What the growers want is a ban on the kind of secondary boycott that Chavez has used against California grapes. They also want laws barring organizational picketing and harvesttime strikes. Not until 1947, twelve years after the NLRB was established, did the Taft-Hartley Act outlaw secondary boycotts and organizational picketing for industrial plants and products. The Shultz plan would extend those prohibitions to agriculture. While the Administration plan would not flatly forbid strikes at harvest time, it would allow a 30-day cooling-off period that an employer could invoke whenever he needed workers in the fields. The law, while excluding small farms, would cover about 45% of U.S. farm employees --perhaps 400,000 in all.

Louis Lucas, a major grower of table grapes in Chavez's California base in Delano, said of Shultz's plan: "I think he is on the right track" vim But the United Automobile Workers' Walter Reuther found "no moral or economic justification" for separating farm workers-from NLRB coverage. Reuther, a longtime supporter of Chavez, complained: "The Farm Labor Relations Board proposed by the Secretary would operate under law so filled with exclusions and fishhooks as to render it meaningless. We call on the President to reconsider his position." In dozens of cities around the U.S. last weekend, Chavez's United Farm Workers Organizing Committee managed to drum up healthy turnouts for rallies in observance of International Boycott Day. Chavez supporters plan to continue their boycott of stores and supermarkets handling California grapes. Both growers and strikers have now dug into inflexible positions, and there is small chance that either the Government or the parties concerned will soon resolve so old and hurtful a dispute.

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