The solidarity shown for the struggles of farm workers during the march and rally in California helps point the road forward in bringing union organization to the fields. It will take a massive social battle--with the full backing and mobilization of the labor movement--for the hundreds of thousands of farm workers to force the bosses to recognize their union and sign contracts.

Working people and fighting youth don’t have to wait for such titanic struggles to weigh into the battle. The march and rally in Sacramento showed the number of organizing drives and union skirmishes that are ongoing across the state. They are part of a crucial resistance that will not go away, and will not let the capitalist growers claim victory over farm labor.

Like the battles of the Palestinian people against the dispossession of their land by colonial-settler Israel, long-term struggles often must be waged in order for there to be the possibility to fight when broader conditions ripen. Thousands of farm workers--and a wider number of working people in other industries--are gaining experience in these struggles, drawing the lessons of the tricks and divisions perpetrated by the bosses and their government, and seeing the necessity of relying on their own collective power.

Historically the bosses--always with the collusion of the federal, state, and local governments--have kept agricultural wage laborers in the weakest position possible from the point of view of organizing unions or charting a course of political struggle.

In The Changing Face of U.S. Politics Jack Barnes writes that a "factory in the fields is more difficult to organize than a factory within four walls. The increasingly seasonal and migrant character of the labor force compounds the difficulties. Farm workers also face some of the most powerful monopolies in the world, whose interests are protected by the federal, state, and local governments."

Despite these obstacles, the United Farm Workers union was able to score significant victories in the 1970s, winning widespread support not only in the Southwest but across the country. Through the struggle the union came to defend undocumented workers against victimization and deportation, one of the most brutal weapons wielded by the bosses, cops, and government at all levels.

The experience of the last several decades has shown it will take a determined, independent mass movement to force the growers to terms--even after union elections are won--and to extend the organizing drive to other sections of agriculture. The question of political organization and the need for independence from the liberal Democrats, or any other capitalist politicians, is sharply posed.

As longshore workers continue to fight for a contract in face of strike-breaking threats by the government, and union members at Boeing stand up to concession demands by the aerospace giant, there are plenty of opportunities for working people to widen the knowledge, understanding, and solidarity with their brothers and sisters who also labor for a wage in the fields.
 
 
Related article:
Rally backs farm workers in California  
 
 
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