As the Delano grape harvest began in late August, the Filipinos who worked for Marco Zaninovich decided that they wanted their boss to pay them the $1.40 an hour and 25 cents a box that grape workers had won in Coachella earlier in the year. It didn’t seem like such a big deal. Most of the Pinoys had worked for Zaninovich for more than a decade—some had even planted the first grape vines for him back in the 1920s—and over the years they had learned how to negotiate. A respected elder, who was also often a leadman or foreman, would let Zaninovich know what the men wanted. Usually, the negotiations were carried on without rancor, even when the workers backed them up with slow downs, short work stoppages, and other semi-ritualized job actions. Zaninovich was the boss, and his power was respected. But the highly skilled Filipino workers, who were almost always completely united, had their own measure of power. Even though they had suffered from discriminatory wage rates in the 1920s and ’30s, by the 1960s they were, on average, the highest-paid ethnic group in California agriculture.9
But this time the informal negotiations did not go well. Zaninovich was in no mood to give in. Even though the Delano growers had not used braceros, they feared that the labor shortage around the state would push up wages everywhere. The successful strike in Coachella, in the midst of statewide uncertainty and labor troubles, seemed to justify their fears. And the Delano workers were asking for a significant raise. A $1.40 minimum plus a piece-rate incentive would push the wage to around $2 an hour, about a 33 percent jump over the previous year.* The growers had beaten back the workers’ attempt to extend their Coachella victory into Arvin, and they had decided that they wouldn’t knuckle under in Delano, either.
The workers had another option besides the limited job actions. They could stay away from the fields entirely; they could strike. They had done it several times before, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but usually minimizing their losses by returning to work quickly if they could not win their demands. Often they would strike without picket lines, just as the rose grafters had done; though “a stay at home” for the Zaninovich Filipinos meant remaining at the company-owned labor camp in the midst of Zaninovich’s fields, playing cards, eating and drinking a bit, and waiting to see what they could extract from the boss. Starting September 5, 1965, that’s what they did.
The first day of the stay-at-home, Larry Itliong came by for a talk with Zaninovich. Itliong was the head of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee operation in the area. He had been involved in labor fights almost since the day he got off the boat from the Philippines, in 1929; he had been a Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (C&A) organizer in the early 1930s, and then a paid organizer off and on for various Filipino unions. Since 1959 he had been in charge of AWOC’s Filipino membership. He knew the work and was an excellent card player (Gilbert Padilla says that often he would collect union dues by going to a camp, playing an evening of cards, and if he won, which he usually did, making a show of subtracting each man’s union dues from his winnings). He was generally respected as a shrewd, knowledgeable, capable representative of the workers to their bosses.
Itliong wanted the men to give up their stay-at-home and go to the vineyards. He didn’t think it could work. The victory in Coachella had been a bit of a fluke, he said. Coachella had received a hit of especially hot weather, which made the growers even more eager than usual to get the grapes picked. But in Arvin, where AWOC had first tried to extend the new pay raise, the cops had arrested twenty-four people just for being on the picket line. Now, in Delano, Zaninovich couldn’t give in to the demands even if he wanted to. To do so would shut him out of Delano’s tight Slav community. Better to go back to work, he said, and wait for a better time. But the workers weren’t having it. The strike in Arvin had been mostly Mexican pickers who were relatively easy to replace, they said, while they were Zaninovich’s best packers; he wouldn’t risk losing them. And the hot weather had lasted, so the pressure was still on. They decided to keep playing cards.10
The stay-at-home spread. Filipino workers at other companies refused to leave their camps. Despite his doubts, Itliong had little choice but to prepare for a formal strike vote. Hundreds of men came to Filipino Hall on September 8 and voted to strike. Some went on picket duty the next morning, but others, concerned about losing their homes in what might be a relatively long strike, decided to wait it out in the camps. The growers had other ideas and employed a tactic they hadn’t used since the battles of the 1930s: they turned off the gas, water, and electricity. But the strikers were not easily bullied; they continued to sleep in their beds, built outdoor toilets, and cooked their meals on campfires. The growers then busted the stay-at-home by busting up the camps, first using private security guards, who scattered the strikers’ food, moved their belongings out of the bunkhouses, and barred the doors. Later, police evicted the men from company property. Hundreds of Filipinos moved to Delano’s west side, walking the streets, hanging out in the bars and cafés, sleeping at Filipino Hall. The hall, a place usually used for card games, dances, and various patriotic celebrations, was about to become a bivouac in a labor war.
Entering the 1960s, Filipino workers were the main bearers of the limited tradition of conventional unionism in the California fields. In the 1920s, when the national average for production-line factory workers was under $5 a day, they had pushed their average earnings above $6, thanks to their exclusive control over who worked in the asparagus fields, their near monopoly on the difficult skill of cutting asparagus, and their unity in various Filipino-only associations.11 Between the springs of 1932 and 1934, they were the leading ethnic group in ten separate successful strikes, one of which even secured formal recognition of the C&A as the workers’ bargaining agent, one of the few times the Communist-led union forced a grower to sign a contract. Carey McWilliams reported that by 1934, the independent Filipino Labor Union (FLU) had seven locals throughout California with about 2,000 dues-paying members. Its most stable local, in Santa Maria, operated out of a labor temple built with $8,000 from union dues.12 Propelled by a victorious strike in 1934, and working in close cooperation with independent Anglo and Mexican unions, the Santa Maria FLU local signed contracts with the local Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association. Those contracts were strengthened through a successful 1937 strike, and in 1939 they included preferential union hiring, overtime pay, provisions about working conditions, and a joint labor-management grievance board.13
But for all the successes of the FLU, it was not as powerful as the Filipino Agricultural Labor Association, or FALA, which scored its first great victory in a one-day stay-at-home by 5,000 Stockton asparagus cutters in 1939. No one worked that day in 40,000 acres of ready-to-harvest asparagus, and the growers immediately capitulated and signed a collective bargaining agreement. The FALA, whose membership included not only workers but professionals, small businessmen, labor contractors and foremen, followed up that victory with strikes in the Sacramento Delta’s Brussels sprout, tomato, and celery fields, all of which resulted in signed contracts and union recognition. The next year, the power of the union was somewhat diminished as the growers organized a company union with a group of breakaway Filipino contractors, but FALA still had some 7,000 workers under contract in the delta region and nearly 30,000 members in other parts of the state, organized into separate, independent locals. These remarkable achievements, virtually unacknowledged in the conventional chronicles of endless farm worker defeats leading up to the supposedly singular victory of the UFW, continued in force until World War II, when the FLU and FALA memberships were depleted by the entry of so many Filipino farm workers into the U.S. Army. Bracero labor made it difficult to rebuild the two unions, but Filipino workers maintained a level of militancy and organization which made them, since AWOC’s inception