The story about the rugged little frontier farmer who tilled his fields from dawn to dusk and helped make America safe for democracy holds a fond place in most of our hearts. As America grew bigger and richer, the story continues, so did the farms, and the farmers. It is today's conventional wisdom that farmers wear gray flannel overalls and take care of their farms with three or four gleaming machines.

But what most people don't know is there are many crops around without machines to pick them. For instance, a machine to pick plums would have to wrap itself around the trunk and shake the plums down. So it has not been invented yet, and neither has a grape-picking machine. And this is where the real story begins.

In California, tens of thousands of men pick grapes for a living. About half of them are migrants, every year making the route through Texas, Arizona, California, and Oregon, picking whatever is in season. The rest are full-fledged Californians. They work eight months a year and try, usually without success, to get welfare for the other four. About three-quarters of these farmers are Mexican-Americans; the remainder are Oakies, Philippinos, and Negroes.

A grape picker in California works between 10 and 12 hours a day in fields which average more than 105 degrees during the summer. There are no toilets in the fields. Drinking water is allotted according to the number of bushels picked. The number is arbitrary depending upon the foreman's mood. The migrants live in tents, the regulars in long tin huts. By the time most of the children are 12 years old, they've quit school and work with their parents in the fields. Nobody earns more than $1.40 per hour picking grapes.

Not Covered

Everything is so bad because, for some reason, farm workers are not covered under the National Labor Relations Act. This law guarantees workers the right to unionize if they have so indicated by a majority vote and ensures that both parties, manager and employee, must bargain "in good faith."

Unionizing California's farm workers has been a major AFL-CIO project for three years. In September, 1965, they called a general strike in Delano, California, against 38 major growers. When the logistics of maintaining the strike proved too difficult, the AFL-CIO decided to confront the growers one at a time. Since that time, strikes and national boycotts have been carried out successfully against three now-infamous wine companies: Schenley, DiGiorgio, and Parelli-Minetti. Six others, including Gallo Wine, have singed union contracts after negotiation.

At the beginning of last summer, the AFL-CIO's United Farm Workers' Organizing Committee (UFWOC) decided it would finally try to unionize the fresh grape industry. In July, they sent a team of experienced organizers to the Giumarra Vineyards Corporation, largest producer of fresh grapes in the world, near Bakersfield, Calif. It took three weeks for the union men to present their case to the farm workers. By the end of July they had voted unanimously to strike.

Shut Down

On August 3rd, 1500 men walked off Giumarra's fields. For one week, Giumarra's 25 ranches were virtually shut down. But Giumarra, owned and operated by the many members of the family of that name, had learned something from the previous Delano strikes. There are special contractors who get 50 cents a head for importing workers from Texas and Mexico. The workers, called "scabs," had been earning 12 cents per hour in Mexico, so they discharged their new duties in California with little compunction.

The AFL-CIO took its case to the Immigration Department of California, claiming it was illegal to import workers in this fashion. The department responded by deporting 15 of these immigrant workers a day. Thirty more scabs arrived by bus every morning. As one Immigration official reportedly explained, "We have a community responsibility." The strike had been broken.

But there remained the single strongest tactic available to the UFWOC: the boycott. While strikes are easy to overcome in unregulated industries, a national boycott of the producers' goods can only be withstood for a relatively short time. The scandalous publicity and economic loss of a boycott brought Schenley to its knees a year ago.

In their attempts to counter the boycott, the Giumarra family have proved unusually resourceful. On August 5, they called a secret meeting of lawyers for the country's largest grape producers. The UFWOC learned from an informant who was present at the meeting that the growers would allow Giumarra to market grapes under all of their labels. Before the boycott effort had been initiated, Giu- marra sold grapes under six labels; the two most well known were "Arra Grapes" and "Grape King." Now, according to union information, there are at least 35 different labels used for grapes grown by Giumarra.

By September 1, the UFWOC had placed organizers in 20 strategic cities. Their job was to establish a thorough boycott; trying to elicit cooperation from wholesalers and retail outlets, picketing those who were uncooperative, getting publicity for the boycott in local news media.

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