On April 10, 1966, a crowd of 10,000 farm workers and supporters
gathered at the California state capitol to celebrate victory in
one of the most significant strikes in American history--one that
made Cesar Chavez famous as leader of the National Farm Workers
Association, which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW).
In Why David Sometimes Wins, Marshall Ganz tells the story of the
UFW's ground-breaking victory, drawing out larger lessons from this
dramatic tale. A longtime leader in the movement and current
lecturer in public policy at Harvard, he offers unique insight.
Since the 1900s, large-scale agricultural enterprises had relied on
migrant labor--a cheap, unorganized, and powerless workforce. In
1965, after successive waves of attempts at organizing this large
and growing population, the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters, and the
three-year-old NFWA all found themselves on the ground, recruiting
members. That year, some 800 Filipino grape workers began a strike,
under the aegis of the AFL-CIO. The UFW soon joined the action with
some 2,000 Mexican workers. The UFW's leaders turned the strike
into a kind of civil rights struggle; they engaged in civil
disobedience, mobilized support from churches and students,
boycotted growers, and transformed itself into La Causa, a farm
workers' movement that eventually triumphed over the grape
industry's Goliath. Why did they succeed? How can the powerless
challenge the powerful successfully? Ganz points to three elements:
the greater motivation of its leaders, their ties to the community
and access to grass-roots knowledge, and their open and
deliberative decision-making process. In total, the ability to
devise good strategy and turn short-termadvantages into long-term
gains.
As both an insider and scholar, Ganz provides insight unavailable
anywhere else. Authoritative in scholarship and magisterial in
scope, this book constitutes a seminal contribution to the
movement's struggles and ultimate success.
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