The Los Angeles Times, in an unusual break from liberal myopia, has a front-page expose on the United Farm Workers union in the post-Chavez era. Apparently, the UFW has become a Chavez-family sinecure which collects donations based on old glories, but spends next to nothing on farm workers.
Thirty-five years after Chavez riveted the nation, the strikes and fasts are just history, the organizers who packed jails and prayed over produce in supermarket aisles are gone, their righteous pleas reduced to plaintive laments.If the Times is right, the UFW should be decertified as a union and it's leadership should be investigated for tax fraud and other violations of its non-profit status. How the AFL-CIO countenances this scam in a member union is another question: the UFW even uses non-union labor in its various projects, like the multi-million dollar temple to Cesar Chavez in Tehachapi. Forgotten is even a semblance of it's former mission:What remains is the name, the eagle and the trademark chant of "Sí se puede" ("Yes, it can be done") — a slogan that rings hollow as UFW leaders make excuses for their failure to organize California farmworkers.
Today, a Times investigation has found, Chavez's heirs run a web of tax-exempt organizations that exploit his legacy and invoke the harsh lives of farmworkers to raise millions of dollars in public and private money.
The money does little to improve the lives of California farmworkers, who still struggle with the most basic health and housing needs and try to get by on seasonal, minimum-wage jobs.
Most of the funds go to burnish the Chavez image and expand the family business, a multimillion-dollar enterprise with an annual payroll of $12 million that includes a dozen Chavez relatives.
The UFW is the linchpin of the Farm Worker Movement, a network of a dozen tax-exempt organizations that do business with one another, enrich friends and family, and focus on projects far from the fields: They build affordable housing in San Francisco and Albuquerque, own a top-ranked radio station in Phoenix, run a political campaign in support of an Indian casino and lobby for gay marriage.
In the fields, the only Cesar Chavez many farmworkers have heard of is the famous Mexican boxer. "I think right now it's one of those nice memories for the older people," Eliseo Medina, one of the most successful labor organizers in the country, said about the farmworker union he once helped lead. "It's just not the factor it should be, which is unfortunate. Because farmworkers desperately need a strong union."Posted by Kevin Murphy at January 8, 2006 11:57 AM