June 4, 1975: The California Agricultural Labor Relations Act is passed.
The landmark California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA), at least in its own terms, sought “to provide for collective-bargaining rights for agricultural employees;” it was thereafter to be official state policy to “encourage and protect the right of agricultural employees to full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing.” It was not, in spite of such glowing language, an affirmative gift bestowed upon the downtrodden, but rather a compromise emerging out of decades of labor strife.
The ALRA explicitly covered a vast swath of workers which the old New Deal-era National Labor Relations Act had bypassed: laborers in agriculture - a sector, it was reasoned, whose exigencies and seasonal nature made it unfeasible to protect collective bargaining rights. Perhaps at a later date - but either way, most of the workers in those sectors that the federal architecture kept out for the time being were black or immigrants, so what did it matter, really? In the following decades, agricultural labor’s share of the total labor force plummeted, to 8% by 1960. The once economic and cultural backbone of American society had plummeted in prestige accordingly; where once Thomas Jefferson had envisioned the future United States as a continent politically dominated by proud yeomen farmers, incessant agricultural labor shortages pushed the state to initiate programs to induce various foreign and otherwise non-white populations into its fields: Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Mexicans, Central Americans. The histories of many of the marginalized peoples of America may be traced in tandem with the needs of labor-intensive agricultural production, from slavery to sharecropping to guest-worker programs.
Long before California legislators picked up formal debate in the chambers of the Capitol, agricultural workers working fields across California were organizing. In 1965, Filipino and Mexican farmworkers in Delano, California, came together in a comprehensive strike involving boycotts and multi-pronged national campaigns to petition California grape-growers for better wages. The United Farm Workers was birthed in the process. The UFW and the weight of its workers in subsequent bargains with agricultural employers grew after the grape strike - and then crested as quickly as it shortly afterward declined.
At the expiration of the 1970 UFW-negotiated contract, growers now confronted a future in which they would have to face on more a more equal bargaining level new demands - from the very workers on whom they could once depend to pick cheaply and quietly. A 1973 article which appeared in Rolling Stone described growers’ discomfort with dealing with these processes and the basic notion of now having to negotiate:
Today’s troubles started when it came time to sign a new one: Negotiations never passed the first point of discussion. It wasn’t just the [UFW]’s proposal the growers didn’t like. Most of them plain couldn’t stand the union. “It’s too goddamn democratic,” is the way one described it.
In 1973 ongoing conflict between the UFW and the Teamsters over contracts inflamed again into violence. At the height of UFW-Teamster conflict, an estimated 50,000 farm workers could claim membership to either one of the organizations. César Chávez accused the latter of “acting in concert with the growers to destroy” the UFW’s bargaining efforts; even AFL-CIO president George Meany, a prominent conservative unionite, substantiated Chávez’s claims: the Teamsters were effectively acting, in his words, as strike breakers for the growers. The instability of the situation forced state law enforcement to frequently intervene to adjudicate, and the internal weakening of the UFW amidst this strife pushed Chávez and other union leaders to consider legislative resolutions. Finally, in 1975, with the support of Governor Jerry Brown, the Agricultural Labor Relations Act passed.
Its legacy from the start was fated to be mixed, and the fate of California’s farmworkers even moreso. The ALRA fundamentally upheld the collective bargaining rights of California farm workers and established rule of law for union leadership and electoral processes. But because it also represented a compromise between oppositional forces - the UFW, the Teamsters, and agribusiness, the act put in place certain restrictions on union activity and was designed not simply to protect labor rights but to tamp down its potential radicalism by providing legal structures for what was already taking place at the grassroots. Governor Brown’s Republican successor, George Deukmejian, was expectedly less eager to enforce its provisions, and the power of the UFW and personal luster of its leader, in a broader context of declining union power nationally and across sectors, faded over the following decades.
In 2017 Agricultural Labor Relations Board chairman William B. Gould IV described in his resignation letter that the Agricultural Labor Relations Act is “now irrelevant to farmworkers” and that “more than 99% of the agricultural workforce (a group disproportionately plagued by homelessness, diabetes, and lack of health insurance)” were not even represented by unions or collective bargaining agreements. Around half of California’s present-day agricultural workforce (which represents about a third of the country’s entire farm labor population), Gould pointed out, is undocumented, and such a vulnerable population is not eager to petition the government to serve as arbitrator of its interests. Governor Brown, now serving his second round of governorship over four decades after the UFW’s heyday, reflected that "when he signed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, [he] probably thought there would be more… members in the farmworker unions than there are.”