United Farm Workers endorses Barack Obama

It should come as no surprise that the United Farm Workers have announced their endorsement of Barack Obama[1], which will officially happen later this week. The United Farm Workers are a great example of the large business unions and their disregard for their rank and file, as well as the working class as a whole, most of whom aren’t in unions.

The UFW are slightly worse than other working class gravediggers like SEIU because while the latter is a huge union and has influence, United Farm Workers is very small union, with numbers far lower than the attention they deserve (they’ve reported about 5,000 members[2] to the Dept. of Labor every year since 2002). With membership numbers almost as small as independent unions like the IWW, the UFW primarily exists now as an identity-politics group, exploiting their past to encourage Latinos to vote for Democratic Party politicians. Not that their past is something to be proud of, their late leader Cesar Chavez was a noted anti-communist[3] who used his union members almost as a pre-Minuteman organization against undocumented immigrants. Class struggle knows no borders, and to have a union leader pitting worker against worker in such a way is nearly as bad as the tactics of the early 20th-century AFL.

Dolores Huerta is still active with United Farm Workers, along with Democratic Socialists of America, but she’s more of a Democratic Party partisan than a “socialist”. Besides strongly campaigning for Hillary Clinton in 2008, she attempted to derail[4] the 2011 May Day march in Sacramento by using the tried-and-true Democrat “look at the scary Republicans!” tactic. The crowd saw past those tricks and shouted her down.

With approximately one million[5] farm workers in the United States, the “contracts” the 5,000-strong UFW manages don’t mean much, if anything at all, to farm workers as a whole. Sure, even a tiny gain is better than nothing, but with farm workers still living in terrible conditions[6] with bad pay, which the UFW seems to take perverse pride in (see their “Take Our Jobs”[7] campaign of 2010 where they challenged unemployed Americans to do field work to see how bad farm worker conditions are), do they really mean anything?



1. http://univisionnews.tumblr.com/post/15671300135/united-farm-workers-of-america-to-endorse-obama-on

2. http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=13415030#.TxSJi287U1I

3. http://labornotes.org/blogs/2011/11/cesar-chavez-and-enduring-poverty-farmworkers

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSiz3Ssnt7c

5. http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/April08/Features/HiredFarm.htm

6. http://www.ncccusa.org/publicwitness/mtolive/conditions.html

7. http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jul2010/ufwa-j20.shtml