Giving Compass' Take:

•  Jorge Mariscal and Leroy Chatfield discuss how millions of farmworkers were excluded from the legal right to form a union, so, they started a movement instead. 

• How can we invest in the protection of farmers and agriculture? 

• Who is the new American farmer? Click here to find out. 

The growers have the money but . . . the farmworkers have the time. —Cesar Chavez

From 1962 to 1993, more than 2,200 people—all ages, all walks of life, and from all parts of North America—signed up as full-time volunteers to help Cesar Chavez and his farmworker movement. Tens of thousands of part-time volunteers in U.S. and Canadian cities participated in Chavez’s grape boycott by picketing supermarkets that sold California grapes, attending marches and demonstrations to publicize the boycott, raising funds to support his movement, and most importantly not purchasing California table grapes.

What kind of person, what kind of cause, could be so compelling as to attract thousands of volunteers and boycott supporters?

After I met Cesar Chavez in 1963, I became one of those full-time volunteers, who walked away from a religious vocation and an eight-year high school teaching career, left my place of residence, and relocated to Delano, California, to join Chavez and his farmworker movement.

Much was known about the plight and suffering of farmworkers—pitifully low wages, a cruel piece-rate wage system designed to push and maximize worker production, hours of nonstop back-breaking stoop labor, no access to drinking water or toilets, no paid work breaks, the financial necessity of having to bring children to work in the fields to earn additional money for the family, and living six months of the year as migrant workers as they worked their way north following the crop harvest seasons. They lived in farm labor camps in one-room shacks with no running water, one electric outlet in the ceiling for a light bulb, a gas line hookup for a two-burner stove, a few water spigots located in the camp for fresh water, and a dozen stall showers and outhouses to serve the toilet needs for several hundred people.

Read the full article about union farmers by Jorge Mariscal and Leroy Chatfield at YES! Magazine.