Last year, Mr. Newsom became the third governor in a row to veto a bill that would allow farmworker unions to be certified by card check, a process in which a union can gain bargaining rights by collecting commitments from a majority of workers (which the labor movement has pushed for unsuccessfully on the federal level). His most recent predecessors — a Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a Democrat, Jerry Brown — vetoed similar bills, on similar grounds: If union organizers fill out forms and solicit workers’ signatures, it deprives workers of the right to vote in secret. Union organizers’ knowing how each worker votes can constitute a different type of intimidation. This year’s bill, which Mr. Newsom has indicated he does not support, provides for mail-in ballots only if an employer agrees to remain neutral and not discuss the union; otherwise, a union may use card check.
California is the only state with a labor agency dedicated to protecting the rights of farmworkers, who are excluded from the national labor law that governs union activity. Governor Brown, who marched with Mr. Chavez, negotiated the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975.
By the time he returned to the governor’s office 36 years later, time and circumstances had eroded the power of the union and the law. The U.F.W., which went into decline decades ago, reported 4,332 active members for 2021, a small fraction of the farmworkers in California, much less the country. Even in its heyday, dues never were the bulk of the union’s revenue. Then as now, it relied heavily on donations from organized labor, foundations, companies and supporters like those who embraced the recent march.
The pomp and celebration of the marches and the failure to organize seem particularly painful at a moment when there is widespread empathy for farmworkers, who could not work from home, who cannot escape ever-rising temperatures, who labor in an industry being reshaped by drought and global warming. The Covid pandemic has made farmworkers more visible and climate change makes their livelihoods even more precarious — generating public appreciation that could be leveraged for real change, not just fund-raising.
A friend who grew up in a family deeply shaped by the farmworkers’ movement, his parents one generation removed from the fields, told me of his angst when a colleague proudly said her aunt made breakfast burritos for the marchers. He tried to explain how grateful he was for what the U.F.W. did back in the day, the way it showed poor people the power of collective action and showed the world the power of a union, and the real changes the movement brought about in the fields. But that was history.
In more than a decade of research and writing, I have seen the power of the U.F.W. over and over, in the generation of farmworkers and organizers who came of age at the movement’s height. I immersed myself in that history to understand how it transformed lives, wrote about Cesar Chavez in all his humanity and heroism.