Delano Grape Pickers Strike

The Filipino American grape workers protested about their poor wages and conditions for years, until they decided to do something about it. They asked Cesar Chavez who has been the head of the Latino farm workers union, called the National Farm Workers Association, to help them with their strike.

Cesar realized the importance of this issue and what it meant for the farm workers across the nation. He thought that a victory for the union would show to many farm workers that haven't yet unionized that it is the right thing to do, thus giving the unions more power. Cesar thought that the power of this strike would be with the Latino and Filipino workers to strike together.

The problem with this strike was the duration of the strike and persistence that many of the employers had to not change their prices. Cesar understood that the strikers greatest weapon was that they were not going to quit. The strikers have lost everything, especially their financial security, as many of them were just waiting to get paid a reasonable amount for their work.

Cesar was learning some of the tactics from MLK and Ghandhi, and made the strikers vow that they would remain non-violent. But he was facing the same problems that they faced as-well, many of the strikers thought that nonviolence was equivalent with cowardice. Cesar realized that a lot of his movement was fading on him, and similar to the actions that Gandhi did he went on a fast.

His fast lasted 25 days, and showed the strikers how much nonviolence meant to him. After eventually breaking the fast when he was too weak to speak in the middle of a mass in Delano where thousands came to watch and pray with him. But Cesar has had many strikes like this where they have all been crushed, but Cesar used the idea of a boycott on grapes to show the effects of how not eating a food can help a strike. This was best stated in an article by United Farm Workers, "The boycott connected middle-class families in big cities with poor farm worker families in the California vineyards. Millions stopped eating grapes. At dinner tables across the country, parents gave children a simple, powerful lesson." The strike ended in 1970 as a success and the growers signed union contracts granting workers better pay, benefits, and protections.