If César Chávez Were Alive Today, He Would Join the Resistance Against Walmart

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http://www.alternet.org/activism/celebrating-victories-cesar-chavez-his-87th-birthday-and-continuing-fight-farmworker-rights



This month, a new film documenting César Chávez’s historic campaign to organize farmworkers in America will be released in time with what would have been his 87th birthday. Chávez rose to prominence as a founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW), where he organized thousands of poor Latino workers laboring in fields throughout central California. Through nonviolent but aggressive tactics — many of which we’ve seen revived today — Chávez and the UFW successfully won higher wages, safer working conditions, and collective bargaining rights for generations of farmworkers, culminating in the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975.

So as we celebrate the legacy of this historic leader, we must also pause to consider that today farmworkers — and others laboring for low wages along the food supply chain — are still struggling. Back then, Chávez and his supporters famously camped outside grocery stores to encourage shoppers to boycott grapes until conditions and wages improved. But today, instead of a grocery store, he may indeed have been standing outside of a Walmart.

After all, not only is Walmart the largest private employer in the United States today, but the company has effectively “Walmart-ified” the entire supply chain of food and manufacturing in America, including farming. More than one quarter of all groceries in the United States are purchased at Walmart. In other words, many of the farmworkers laboring in U.S. fields and as far away as China, in effect work for Walmart.

Most of Walmart’s supply chain workforce is comprised of poor people of color, but the company is owned by six members of the Walton family, all of who are among the 85 wealthiest individuals in the world. Together, they control as much wealth as the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined. While Walmart workers must subsist on an average wage of $8.81 per hour — and farmworkers along the company’s supply chain earn even less — the Walton family earns over $1.5 million per hour. Instead of sharing the prosperity with its employees or addressing dangerous working conditions, the company chooses to spend much of its profits buying back its own stock. It’s no wonder workers across the Walmart empire have appealed directly to the company — and the family that controls it — to address egregious working conditions.