In an earlier post, I've provided links to the four-part series the Los Angeles Times ran this week on the United Farm Workers union (UFW) and the related nonprofit organizations connected to it.
I would have to say that Miriam Pawel's series on the whole sounds like an anti-union hit piece. But the article in Part 3 touches on a very important issue and the story appears to be very well told. It also involves some people with whom I was acquainted and resonated with me, whatever her motivation was for telling it, or that of the Times for including it.
Pawel seems to go out of her way to make the current operations of the UFW and related groups sound shady. But most of the recent issues she presents as problematic are questionable judgment calls at worst. One land deal that she analyzes in Part 2 does seem to border on unethical. But although I wouldn't want to defend it, by her own account it does sound like the parties involved took some pains to comply with the law in that instance.
My viewpoint on this issue is not entirely that of an outside observer. Back in 1976, just before the events described in Part 3, I was on the staff of the UFW. I was an organizer, but not organizing farmworkers. I was part of the city support staff, raising money and organizing demostrations. (Yes, I was once a "professional agitator", if you want to look at it like that.)
We also spent a considerable part of that year registering voters and campaigning for an initiative sponsored by the UFW to protect farmworkers' union organizing rights. We also participated in the presidential campaign of Jerry Brown and the Senate campaign of Tom Hayden. On the whole, it was a great experience.
I've decided to comment on the series in the form of one long post, starting with some background information, then picking up on Part 3, which was the story of most interest to me. Then I cover the other parts. The links to the articles are in my earlier post.
Background on the UFW
Organizing farmworkers into unions in the United States has always been a major challenge. Even during the 1930s, when John L. Lewis' Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was agressively organizing industrial unions and federal laws under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal had become more favorable to labor organizing, attempts to organize farmworkers fell flat. César Chávez and the United Farm Workers (UFW) have been by far the most successful in that undertaking.
Chávez was trained in community organizing by a man named Fred Ross, who practiced the methods taught by Saul Alinsky, which focused on building support groups through house meetings and staging dramatic confrontations to give participants an action-oriented focus. It was a highly pragmatic, rather than ideological, approach.
Chávez succeeded in achieving more in organizing farmworkers, getting protective laws passed and providing services than any group before for several reasons. One is that he used Alinsky-type organizing to build a base of support and funding in cities among non-farmworkers.
This enabled him to carry out his famous grape boycott, which Pawel treats as some kind of iconic baby-boomer experience. This was Alinsky tactics applied on a national scale, providing both publicity and practical pressure on grape growers, who were the organizing targets at the time. In later years, Chávez joked about how, long after the grape boycott had ended, people would come up to him and say, "You know, I still don't eat grapes!"
Another strength of Chávez' approach was that he cast the farmworker-organizing effort not just as a union endeavor, but also as a civil-rights issue. Most of the farmworkers at that time were illegal Mexican immigrants. (That's still true, but there are many more Central American and Mexican-indigenous workers involved today.) This was part of what was often called at the time the "Chicano" rights movement, a term that has largely if not completely dropped out the American vocabulary.
And he built strong alliances with other institutions, most notably the AFL-CIO, the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church. The last was especially important, because most farmworkers were religious and the Catholic Church enjoyed high prestige among them. When the Church began endorsing the union movement, it made a huge difference in making it appear legitimate in the workers' eyes. And it gave the movement greater moral stature among the general public.
Of course, we're talking about a union here. So all respectable Republicans regarded it as a horror beyond imagining, like some lurking demon in an H.P. Lovecraft story.
The union and the cult
Part 3 isn't framed in terms of "cult" phenomenon. I'm not even sure if Pawel understood that angle of the story, although she reports well on important elements of it. Apparently beginning in early 1977, Chávez and those closest to him became enamored of the Synanon cult, which marketed itself as a drug treatment program.
This brief book review by Arthur Dole gives a quick glimpse at Synanon: The Rise and Fall of Synanon: A California Utopia Cultic Studies Review Vo1/No. 2/2002. Founded and led by Chuck Dederich, who Dole calls "a charismatic alchoholic", the group got favorable publicity for its claimed successes in rehabilitating drug addicts. He became notorious later over an incident with a rattlesnake being left in a mailbox. (Ouch!) Dole writes:
Although unfortunately no follow-up statistics were collected, Synanon gained a reputation for rehabilitating “dope fiends.” It attracted the attention of Hollywood celebrities such as Steve Allen and Stan Kenton; bevies of sociologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists; and squads of government officials eager to contract out the care of delinquents, criminals, and substance abusers. Synanon’s appeal as a Utopian, diverse, non-violent, caring, mini society led to the admission of “squares,” including anti-war hippies. At first, this mix of people bonded. Later, there were tensions, crime, skinheads, violence, and arbitrary expulsions.
Given this reputation, which was still generally positive in 1977, it's not surprising that Chávez may have found what he heard about the group sympathetic. The UFW had worked closely in San Francisco with the Delancey Street program, another drug rehabilitation effort that is still in operation and, so far as I know, still has a solid repuation.
Dole explains that Dederich ran Synanon is an authoritarian manner, and it eventually began to function as a cult. Eventually, as he puts it, "When a live rattlesnake was placed in the mail box of an opposing lawyer, Synanon’s reputation dropped sharply." Anthrax wasn't the first dangerous substance placed in mailboxes.
The rattlesnake incident occurred in 1978. Margaret Thaler Singer And Janja Lalich described it in their 1995 book Cults in Our Midst:
On the afternoon of October 10, 1978, [attorney Paul] Morantz went home, reached into his mailbox, and was bitten by a four-and-one-half-foot diamondback snake that had been placed there. Its rattles had been removed so he would hear no warning. He reportedly cried out, "Synanon got me!" as he was taken off by ambulance. Morantz barely survived the attack, requiring eleven vials of antivenom serum to pull him through. He continues to have some deficit in the bitten hand. Witnesses who had seen two suspicious men at the Morantz house had taken down the number of their car license, in spite of someone's attempt to alter the plate with tape. The car was registered to Synanon. Two of the Imperial Marines from Synanon's strong-arm force, Lance Kenton and Joe Musico, were arrested and later pleaded no contest to conspiracy to commit murder.
A month after the rattlesnake attack, law enforcement agents with search warrants confiscated documents and tape recordings including the one with Charles Dederich speaking of "greedy lawyers" trying to "bleed Synanon dry." "We're going to play by our own set of rules," he said. "I'm quite willing to break some lawyer's legs and break his wife's legs and threaten to cut their child's arm off. That is a very effective way of transmitting information.... I really do want an ear in a glass of alcohol. Yes, indeed."
Sounds more like the kind of guy you would expect to hang around with Dick Cheney than with César Chávez. But in 1997, Chávez began to adopt a practice called "The Game", which Synanon used as a method of "coercive persuasion" on cult members. Pawel describes it as follows:
In the winter of 1977, at the height of his union's power, Cesar Chavez summoned the leaders of the United Farm Workers to a mountain retreat in the Sierra foothills. They found themselves in an ultra-clean compound where recovering drug addicts with shaved heads wandered the grounds dressed in uniform overalls.
The purpose soon became clear: Charles Dederich, the flamboyant founder of Synanon, welcomed his guests to the rehabilitation facility and explained the rules of the Game, a therapy designed for drug addicts. A dozen players would gang up on each other, "indicting" a participant for bad behavior by hurling abusive and often profane invective.
The UFW board members had arrived expecting to hash out a new strategic plan after a string of victories, including a pact to keep the rival Teamsters union out of the fields. Instead, they found themselves in the Game room, where some observed from elevated seats as others accepted a challenge to play in the recessed pit.
In retrospect, some UFW leaders came to view the Synanon meeting as a watershed, the first clear signal that Chavez had veered off course and shifted his focus away from organizing farmworkers.
The Part 3 article in Pawel's series describes a series of events that followed over the next few years. As the union achieved it greatest successes in the fields organizing farmworkers and winning contracts, thanks in large part to a law signed by Governor Jerry Brown protecting farmworkers' organizing rights, Chávez and his inner circles became more autocratic and suspicious to the point of paranoid.
The eventual result was to sidetrack efforts to build a stable union with a professional staff for years. And the organizing efforts have apparently never fully recovered from the setback. What the growers and their loyal Republican allies in the California legislature were unable to accomplish, the UFW's disastrous embrace of cultish practices from Synanon did.
As I said, I knew some of the individuals mentioned in the articles. I was disappointed to read that Chris Hartmire of the National Farm Worker Ministry became the "Game Master" at the UFW for that abusive Synanon ritual. From my admittedly limited encounters with him, I would not be at all surprised if he now regards that as a serious mistake, though that's pure speculation on my part.
I'm not at all surprised to read, though, about this guy:
At a community meeting on April 4, 1977, that became known as the "Monday night massacre," volunteers were viciously attacked and expelled for sins ranging from smoking pot to betraying the union. "It was planned, and it was brutal," said Larry Tramutola, then a high-ranking union leader who participated in the denunciations.
That certainly fits with my memories of him. In fact, I have often thought about his management style as being one of the worst I've ever seen. At least I learned some lessons from his conduct about what not to do.
Pawel also touches on one aspect of Chávez' movement that I think laid the groundwork for the later cult involvement. The employees of the union, up to and including Chávez himself, were essentially given room and board and a token per diem for salary. The idea was that the union activists would dedicate themselves in a selfless way to bettering the lives of the farmworkers. It has a touch of the idea of the Catholic orders about it.
But, in practice, that meant that the union relied heavily on volunteers who were young, single, and only there for a few months or a year or two at most, especially in the city "boycott" staff that was critical for fundraising. That meant that as people began to be really experienced at organizing and developed a network of related contacts, they left and new people had to be trained. Pawel describes how a confrontation developed with the legal staff over the pay:
In an organization where most staff were volunteers, paid $5 a week plus free room and board, UFW lawyers had special status: They earned about $600 a month. In the spring of 1978, each lawyer asked for a $400-a-month raise.
Chavez seized on the requests and turned them into a referendum on the larger issue of whether the union would have paid staff. He painted the lawyers as greedy and unwilling to sacrifice like everyone else and said acceding to their demand would be a prelude to destroying the volunteer organization. He asked the board to vote in support of the status quo, effectively dismantling the legal operation.
[Chief counsel Jerry] Cohen and [field organizer and strategist Marshall] Ganz countered that a stable of professionals who could afford to stick with the union was critical, particularly as the contracts in Salinas were expiring.The debate was so heated the executive board adjourned for 10 days. Chavez eventually won by one vote, and most of the lawyers left soon after, replaced by a smaller operation at La Paz.
"It wasn't about money; it was about control," said Cohen, who resigned as chief counsel but stayed during a transition.
Without the ability to earn some kind of normal salary, the UFW had unwittingly created a situation where only the most dedicated would stay to become experienced staff professionals and leaders, or those who particularly craved the power or prestige associated with what then was a highly visible cause, or those who were just plain fanatical.
Sadly, that combination of circumstances and personnel made the union particularly fertile ground for Dederich's cultish ideas and practices.
The Times looks for scandal and finds mostly the "pseudo-" versions
Parts 1 and 2 deal with more recent events, when presumably the more cultish aspects of that period have long departed.
In the two articles of part 1, we learn the following: Lots of California farmworkers live in abject poverty; Pawel seems to think this is mainly the fault of the UFW, not of the growers who shamelessly exploit them. The larger "Farm Worker Movement" built around the union itself builds affordable housing in San Francisco and Albuquerque. They run a popular radio station. They participate in political campaigns. They use direct mail to raise money. They've gotten California to pass (during Jerry Brown's governorship) what is still "the only law in the country that protects and regulates union representation for farmworkers". They offer a health insurance program and English classes for farmworkers. In 2002, during Gray Davis' governorship, they to a law passed "that imposes mandatory mediation if contract negotiations reach an impasse at a farm where the union has won" a union election.
Pawel seems to think all of this is somehow scandalous. And a major departure from Chávez' vision.
But I just don't see it. Chávez always had a larger vision, hoping one day to organize a broader poor peoples' movement, for instance. If you look closelyat her criticisms, some of them perhaps have some merit. But others come off like Nedra Pickler, the AP writer who was known for writing things along the lines of, "John Kerry criticized Bush for inconsistency without mentioning that he himself has changed positions on some issues." (The quote is my own, not one from Pickler.)
Pawel, for instance, says that the UFW has only tried to use the 2002 law once, even though "there are dozens of companies to which it could apply". When you read that closely, you have to ask, what does that mean? Because earlier in the article she makes a big deal out of the small number of workers under formal contract, and gives the impression that the union is taking a passive attitude toward organizing workers. But here she seems to be saying that there are "dozens of companies" where the UFW has won an election and the growers are refusing to settle. Which is it? And couldn't she have included the names of a few of these intransigent growers in her article?
She goes on to give the union's version of why they haven't invoked the law more than once: "Union officials said they are wiating to see if it withstands a court challenge". Presumably this means that a court challenge is underway. Now, this may be good or bad judgment on the union's part. But she doesn't give us any information to judge that. And it's certainly not a wrong decision on the face of it.
This gives you an idea of the tone of the reporting in Parts 1 and 2.
The only substantial criticism I see in the Part 1 articles is that one of the nonprofit groups in the larger Farm Worker Movement used some non-union labor in the afforable housing projects they financed. Not the ideal approach from a union movement viewpoint.
In the articles of Part 2, she writes about a variety of charities run by the union and the related "Farm Worker Movement". Though she writes in a very skeptical tone, the interlocking nature of the various charities she describes is pretty much standard operating procedure for non-profit organizations. Nothing she describes here sounds like a red flag for misconduct to me, despite the use of words like "exploit", "enrich" and "insiders".
Several of the UFW-related nonprofit groups are run by Chávez' children or in-laws, as she reports. If you read far enough and carefully enough, she writes, "Though top officials in the various groups earn more than $100,00 the compensation is modes compared with that of comparable organizations." Despite the uses of the plural "officials", the accompanying Infobox shows only one person's salary over $100,000. The box also notes that those who serve in official capacities in more than one of the nonprofits "draw a single salary from one group", that is, they aren't double-dipping.
Part 2 disusses two real estate transactions whose judgment could reasonably be questioned. As I said at the start of this post, one of them, a Fresno deal, does seem to border on unethical, at least in her description.
A final thought on the history
Part 4 deals with the later career of one of the UFW's top leaders who left the union in 1978, Eliseo Medina, who was one of Pawel's most important sources for the series. She writes:
Chavez, Medina concluded, was caught up in the idea of creating a poor people's movement.
"My interest was building a farmworkers union," Medina said. "The goal was not building a farmworkers movement per se. It created a lot of tension."
I tend to think, instead, that the sidetrack into cult practices was the key problem. If the UFW had built on its successes in the late 1970s and build a much larger, stronger farmworkers union, it might well have formed the basis for a broader poor people's movement. It would certainly have brought the union and the labor movement generally more clout in California and elsewhere.
But cult practices are highly destructive, whether the group indulging them is a religious group, a drug-therapy group or a union. Just to be clear, I don't see the evidence to say that the UFW became a cult. But some aspects of it in the period described in Part 3 came close. Although not nearly so drastic, the UFW wound up sharing some of the problems that Arthur Dole wrote in reference to Synanon:
Synanon failed because, as it transformed from a drug rehab center to a “Utopia,” it indeed became acult. The harm its charismatic and dictatorial leader did to its members and tosociety outdid the good. In the absence of democratic checks and balances, and of responsibility, Synanon’s eccentric leader, like leader’s of other cultic groups, exercised a highly damaging behavioral, cognitive, financial, and emotional control over the group’s members. Finally, the decline of Synanon illustrates the importance of sunshine, of the public exposure of abusive groups.
Unlike Dederich with his thugs and their rattlesnake, César Chávez will rightly be remembered for his positive accomplishment for the farmworkers, the labor movement and civil rights.
And I hope the Los Angeles Times follows up this series with a close look at some of the California growers, at the conditions in which their workers live and work, and at how the growers' demand for illegal immigrant labor creates a brutal human-smuggling business on the border.
Maybe they will also take a close look at how the Republican Party in California facilitates this illegal labor market while demagoguing against illegal immigration. And even embracing the far-right border-vigilante movement, as Gov. Schwarzenegger has.
