But Solomon and Johnson agree that those problems were only temporary conditions, if they did exist at all, and Solomon says Gallo does not care which union represents the workers, saying, "That's for the workers to decide."

The UFW, however, believes that the winery wanted the Teamsters to depose the Farm Workers. Johnson says the Teamsters were "hand-picked" by Gallo and that UFW organizers were harassed by Gallo guards. Gallo says the Teamsters were organizing in the valley already and that the company did not involve itself in the inter-union dispute. "We chased Teamster organizers off the property, too," Solomon says.

On June 25 the Teamsters sent a hand-delivered letter to Gallo stating that they had gotten the signatures of a majority of the field workers and were now representing them. Gallo told the UFW of the Teamster claim the next day and said they were going to schedule a meeting to investigate. The next morning the UFW called a strike.

Solomon says there was confusion initially because the UFW had been representing the workers for six years and most workers responded to the strike call at first, but many came back to work when they found that the issue was the fight between the two unions and not a question of employee-employer relations. He says "when the dust settled by the end of the month, 72 of 180 workers had not returned to work."

Part of the confusion, Solomon says, was that some of the 72 had signed the Teamster cards. "You know, when a burly Teamster wants you to sign something, you sign it to avoid the hassle. So when the strike came, some of the workers just left and we have never seen them again."

But Johnson says that 127 of approximately 150 workers joined the strikers. The actual number of strikers is currently being investigated by the California Labor Relations Board.

The UFW says that Gallo recruited a strike-breaking force of non-union migrants, "many of them children," and tried to evict 70 striking families from their homes in the labor camp. Gallo says that when they began negotiating with the Teamsters they asked the workers to come back to work, and then replaced those that didn't.

On July 10 the non-striking Gallo workers, including the new replacements, ratified a four-year Teamster contract by a vote of 158-1. The striking workers did not vote in the contract-ratification election and Cesar Chavez, head of the UFW, called the contract a "sweetheart deal" between the Teamsters and the winery. The UFW complained that the election had not been verified by a third-party, but Solomon said that it had not even been observed by Gallo. "It was a closed-door union meeting; management doesn't sit in on contract-ratification votes," Solomon says now.

The Teamster contract called for a 36 cent per hour wage increase, established a pension plan and provided unemployment insurance, hospitalization and major medical protection, life insurance and paid vacations and holidays. Gallo advertised on May 6, 1975, during the UFW's National Farm Workers Week, that the Gallo farm workers were "the highest paid in the continental United States."

Johnson says the Teamster contract is not better than the UFW's because most of the workers are ineligible for most of the benefits; to qualify they must work the "equivalent" of ten months at one ranch within a year, and most pickers must follow the harvest from ranch to ranch. With the UFW and the hiring halls a worker could work at several union ranches and still qualify.

Solomon says that is factually untrue: Under the Teamster contract a worker must work 80 hours at one ranch, compared to a 40 hour requirement in the UFW contract. He says it is a philosophical question to decide whether it is better to help all the people all the time a little bit, or to help most of the people most of the time a little bit more.

The rest of 1973 was filled with picketing and violence and squabbles between the two unions and between Gallo and the UFW. On August 30, 1973, 60 picketers were arrested at the Gallo plant, and in the middle of September Chavez announced a boycott against Gallo.

The New York Times endorsed the boycott as the best of the available alternatives and called upon the Teamsters to let the UFW unionize without having to fight the "piratical raids and sweetheart contracts of the nation's biggest, toughest union."

AFL-CIO president George Meany accused the Teamsters of a "vicious" and "disgraceful" campaign to destroy the UFW, but did not endorse the boycott, even though the UFW is an affiliate of the AF1-CIO.

The union of distillery workers and the glass blower's union, also AFL-CIO affiliates, did not endorse the boycott either. They pointed to their 30 years of relatively harmonious unionization in the Gallo factory. UFW staff member Johnson says they did not endorse the boycott because they feared that the militant UFW would strike and shut off the flow through the factory, forcing lay-offs of other workers. One of the reasons the Teamsters wanted to unionize the field workers was to cement their hold on the food industry from the fields to the trucks to the stores, he adds.