Contracts in the Coachella

Since 1965, Cesar Chavez has been leading la huelga (the strike) to unionize California's farm workers and win contracts from the state's powerful agricultural producers. He has concentrated on growers of table grapes, a product that requires intensive labor and is difficult to mechanize. Last week Chavez's United Farm Workers Organizing Committee finally dented the opposition. Three Coachella Valley table-grape producers agreed to contracts with UFWOC raising wages 10-c- an hour, to $1.75, and adding 22-c--an-hour worth of fringe benefits. Said Chavez: "This is a very important day."

Central to the union's limited victory was the nationwide boycott of table grapes that Chavez organized two years ago. That source of pressure, plus rising production costs and a bumper 1969 crop that lowered prices, has driven more than one-third of the 85 Coachella Valley table-grape growers out of business; 1,000 of the valley's 7,800 grape-producing acres have been abandoned. The three growers who reached agreement with Chavez last week have 1,100 acres of the remainder, harvest 1% of California's total table grape crop. One of the three, Lionel Steinberg, was guarded about his contract with the UFWOC, which includes a union-shop clause. "I have some concern that it may not be completely workable," he said, "but I am convinced that I will try and they will try." Steinberg added: "It is my hope that we have commenced a historic breakthrough."

Mixed Appetites. Though Chavez and a group of Coachella growers had negotiated inconclusively for a month last spring, this time there was an extra factor that made the renewed talks successful. In November, at the request of both growers and union supporters, a group of five Roman Catholic bishops, headed by the Most Rev. Joseph Donnelly of Hartford, Conn., intervened to appraise the issues. The prelates then took an active part in the discussions. That, said UFWOC Lawyer Jerome Cohen, "created an atmosphere for conciliation." The union has yet to reach agreement with other Coachella growers or with any producers in the San Joaquin Valley, the state's principal table-grape region, but Donnelly said that he and his fellow bishops were "confident that this breakthrough will serve as a pattern for others."

Until that happens, the strike will go on and the UFWOC will continue to push its boycott of all table grapes--except those bearing the union label of a stylized black eagle against a red background. Said William Kircher, national organization director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O.: "We are going to expect every fair-minded citizen to have an awfully good appetite for grapes with this kind of label, and an awfully bad appetite for the other kind."

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