Who started the Delano grape strike?

Filipino American farmworkers of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee started it, walking out of Delano vineyards on September 8, 1965, under organizer Larry Itliong. Cesar Chavez's mostly Mexican-American National Farm Workers Association voted to join eight days later. The two unions merged in 1966 into what became the United Farm Workers.

Did the grape boycott actually work?

The boycott is widely credited as the deciding pressure. Direct picketing of Delano-area fields had not moved growers after nearly three years; the shift to consumer boycotts, first of Schenley Industries in 1965 and then of table grapes nationally from 1968, coincided with the growers' 1970 decision to sign. Correlation is not the same as a controlled experiment, but the union, growers, and historians of the strike agree the retail pressure was decisive.

How long did the Delano grape strike last?

Just under five years: from September 8, 1965, when the walkout began, to July 29, 1970, when 26 Delano-area table grape growers signed the union's first contracts.

How many Americans boycotted grapes during the strike?

There is no exact count. A Louis Harris poll conducted in 1975 found 17 million Americans had stopped buying grapes; other estimates of the boycott's peak in the years just before the 1970 settlement put the number closer to 14 million. Both are survey estimates, not sales or membership records, and the union itself never claimed a precise figure.

What did the 1970 grape contracts actually change?

The July 1970 contracts covered roughly 10,000 workers across 26 growers representing about three-quarters of California's table grape acreage. They set a union pay scale, established grievance procedures, and required growers to fund a health and welfare plan, the first time table grape workers had any of the three.

The Delano grape strike turned the supermarket into a picket line

On the morning of September 8, 1965, more than 800 Filipino farmworkers walked out of ten grape vineyards around Delano, California. They belonged to the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, and their organizer was a Filipino labor veteran named Larry Itliong. The growers had just cut the piece rate they paid Filipino crews to $1.20 an hour, less than what those same workers had earned picking grapes in Coachella weeks before. Itliong’s members voted to strike the night before at the Filipino Community Hall in Delano, and by morning the vineyards were empty of pickers.

That date matters because most retellings skip it. The Delano grape strike is remembered, when it is remembered at all, as Cesar Chavez’s strike. Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association, a mostly Mexican-American local built over the previous three years, did not vote to join the walkout until September 16, eight days later, at a meeting of more than 1,200 workers at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. Chavez became the strike’s public face and, eventually, the labor movement’s most famous organizer of the twentieth century. But the Filipino manongs of AWOC struck first, and the strike’s own timeline says so plainly. The two unions merged in August 1966 into the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, the union that would later shorten its name to the UFW.

Why picketing alone did not work

For its first two years the strike ran the way strikes usually run: workers on the road outside the fields, growers bringing in replacement labor, local police enforcing the growers’ injunctions against picketing too close to the rows. It held, mostly because the Filipino and Mexican-American strikers had nowhere else to go and would not go back. It did not win. Grape harvests in Kern and Tulare counties continued through 1966 and 1967 with strikebreaking crews doing the work the union’s members had walked away from.

What changed the calculation was a decision to stop picketing the field and start picketing the checkout line. In December 1965 the NFWA opened its first consumer boycott against Schenley Industries, a liquor company that also held large Delano-area grape and wine holdings, sending organizers to cities with instructions to ask shoppers, plainly, not to buy the product. Schenley signed a contract with the union within months, the first agreement of the entire strike. It was a small win in acreage but a large one in proof of method: a company that could outlast a picket line for years could not outlast a drop in retail sales for a few.

The boycott goes national

The union scaled that method up. Starting in 1968, the UFWOC extended the boycott to table grapes generally, sending organizers into dozens of cities to set up pickets outside supermarkets and ask shoppers directly to skip the grape display. New York alone had UFWOC boycott staff working the major chains. Senator Robert Kennedy visited Delano in 1966 and again during his 1968 campaign, giving the strike a national political audience it had not had as a regional labor dispute. Grape shipments and prices weakened through the boycott years as retailers, wary of picket lines at their doors, cut back on grape orders even where individual shoppers kept buying.

How many of those individual shoppers actually stopped is the figure most often repeated and least often sourced. A Louis Harris poll conducted in 1975 found that 17 million Americans said they had stopped buying grapes. Other tallies of the boycott’s peak years, roughly 1969 to 1973, put the number closer to 14 million. Both come from opinion surveys asking people what they had done, not from grocery-chain sales data or union membership rolls, and neither the union nor any historian of the strike claims a precise count. What both numbers agree on is the order of magnitude: tens of millions of households, not a fringe of committed activists, changed a grocery habit over a labor dispute three thousand miles from most of their kitchens.

What actually got signed

The stalemate broke in the spring of 1970. Two of the largest Delano growers signed contracts with the union in May, and on July 29, 1970, twenty-six Delano-area table grape growers followed, gathering to sign three-year agreements that put more than 10,000 workers under union representation. Together those growers controlled roughly three-quarters of California’s table grape acreage. The contracts set a union wage scale, established a grievance process for the first time in the industry’s history, and required growers to fund a health and welfare plan. Wages that had stood near $1.10 an hour when the strike began rose under the contract toward $1.80, with scheduled increases after.

Almost five years passed between the walkout and the signing. Roughly 95 percent of the strikers, by the union’s own later accounting, lost cars or homes waiting it out. The number that ended the standoff was not a court order or a labor board ruling; it was a decline in what supermarkets could sell.

Two unions, one contract

The merger of AWOC and the NFWA in August 1966 gets described, when it gets described at all, as a formality: two small unions pooling resources against a common enemy. It was more contested than that on the ground. Filipino and Mexican-American farmworkers had been played against each other by growers for decades, brought in as separate crews at separate rates precisely so neither group could organize the whole harvest. Itliong served as the new United Farm Workers Organizing Committee’s assistant director under Chavez, a title change from the leadership role he had held at AWOC. He later fought within the union to fund and build Agbayani Village, a retirement home the UFW opened in Delano for the manongs, the aging Filipino farmworkers who had spent decades in the fields with no family in California to take them in when the work ran out.

What the boycott actually proves

It is tempting to read the Delano boycott as evidence that buying decisions change the world on their own, one conscientious shopper at a time. The record does not support that reading. It took an organized union running coordinated pickets in dozens of cities, five years of strikers who could not be replaced with a different brand, and a political spotlight from a presidential campaign to turn millions of individual grocery choices into pressure a grower could feel. A boycott is logistics: staffed pickets, a target chosen for maximum financial exposure, and a union willing to outlast the growers at the bargaining table as much as on the sidewalk. What one shopper skips at the register does very little. What an organized movement asks tens of millions of shoppers to skip, in the same season, aimed at the same company, can end a five-year strike.

DRESS is a union shop from cut to print, and that fact traces back through exactly this kind of history: a labor movement that learned the checkout line could be as decisive as the picket line, and never let go of the lesson.