At first Gilbert was just shocked. As soon as he and his friends arrived, the clerks started leaving the docks. Without the clerks, no work could get done. Then the longshoremen walked away. Some of them came by and gave the four bewildered picketers money. One guy gave them his lunch. Others joined the picket line; at one time fifty longshoremen were picketing in the rain. The line of idled trucks seemed to stretch back for miles. Some of the truckers were mad and started to honk their horns. That stopped quickly, though, as a group of longshoremen broke the windshields of a few of the complaining drivers. Even the lunch trucks were shooed away. One little lunch wagon whose owner refused to move had all its tires punctured. The whole dock came to a halt. “I felt like I was ten feet tall,” Padilla remembered. “Everybody walked out. . . . It was something that I had never seen before—the solidarity.”10
By 1965, this kind of elementary worker solidarity, termed “secondary boycotts,” had long been illegal in the United States—several times over. Late-nineteenth-century courts had been overwhelmingly hostile to unions and often ruled that ordinary strikes were unacceptable acts of coercion. Judges considered most sympathy strikes even worse, and universally declared them illegal. In 1911, the Supreme Court, in Gompers v. Bucks Stove and Range Co., ruled that even the AFL’s “We Don’t Patronize” list was an illegal attack by outsiders against an employer. This legal tradition was reversed by the 1936 National Labor Relations Act, which not only gave unions legitimate legal status but was silent on the issue of boycotts. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, however, again made secondary boycotts of “neutral parties” illegal. But the ban was difficult to interpret and enforce. Workers continued to refuse to handle scab products. Teamster truckers argued that they were not boycotting a neutral party but rather an individual commodity. Similarly, some factory workers refused to work on what they called “hot cargo.” The legal web tightened significantly with the 1957 Landrum Griffin Act, which added hot cargo campaigns to the prohibition against secondary boycotts, and provided for extensive fines for unions that violated the typical “no strike, no secondary boycott, no hot cargo campaigns, and no slow down” clauses that had become prevalent in union contracts. Some of the legal language was obscure, but its meaning was not: effective, open worker solidarity was against the law.
Some boxes of Pagliarulo grapes had been loaded onto the SS President Wilson, whose main cargo was 400 passengers, bound for Hawaii and Tokyo. But the longshoremen refused to load the rest. After a day’s wait, and with no guarantee that the rest of the grapes would be loaded anytime soon, the ship’s owners decided to leave the fruit behind. Gleeful workers took the boxes off the ship, and the enraged truck driver took off for San Pedro to see if the grapes could be loaded there. No luck; the alerted longshoremen refused to touch them, so the grapes had to be taken back to Delano and deposited in cold storage. The El Malcriado staff found a picture of an ocean liner and put it on the front page with the headline, “The grapes are rotting on the docks.” They quoted Tony Mendez: “When the unions and working people help each other, we can beat even the richest growers.” A triumphant editorial closed: “The huelga is a huge social movement involving the respect of a whole race of people. When outsiders—thousands of them—decide to help the farm workers in their fight for a better life, the ranchers say it is none of their business. The huelga has become everybody’s business. That is why it is winning.”11
The strikers’ surprising victory was a potentially disastrous defeat for the growers. If the ILWU, which controlled the West Coast docks, refused to handle scab grapes, the bosses would lose a lot of money and might be forced to settle with the workers despite having beaten them in the strike. The DiGiorgio Corporation, rich in antiunion experience, was sure that these activities were illegal. It got a restraining order forbidding the NFWA, AWOC, and 100 John Does from engaging in a secondary boycott and interfering with six upcoming shipments of grapes, naming the ships and the ports they would be sailing from. The strikers couldn’t believe their luck. They wouldn’t have to follow the grapes from Delano to figure out where they were bound. They could just meet the trucks at the docks and alert all their Bay Area support networks in advance. Large spirited picket lines easily turned back the friendly longshoremen. A few of the arrested picketers were brought before the judge for violating the injunction, but he dismissed the charges. Taft-Hartley and Landrum Griffin were amendments to the original National Labor Relations Act, but farm workers had been written out of the NLRA. They were not covered by its provisions and therefore could not be enjoined from breaking its rules. It was perfectly legal for the NFWA to engage in a secondary boycott and urge workers not to handle scab grapes. It was a sweet little irony: left out of the benefits of being covered by labor law, farm workers were also free of its restrictions.12
But the ILWU was not. Farm workers were free to ask for solidarity from fellow workers, but those workers were not free to give it. DiGiorgio, Pagliarulo, and other offended growers immediately got a judgment that allowed them to collect financial damages equal to the value of their grapes from any union that honored an NFWA picket line. The ILWU had very little wiggle room. All it could argue was that longshoremen had a right to refuse to cross picket lines if they felt that their health and safety were endangered by doing so. In all but one case brought before the courts, the grape growers won. Individual longshoremen, acting on their own, could refuse to work on scab grapes and maybe get away with it. But the union as a whole would have to repudiate such actions and would be liable for any losses. Finally, Padilla understood why Jimmy Herman was so adamant that those first four pickets not mention his name.
The law was not the only problem. In Los Angeles, which in its anti-union tradition was more like the rest of the West than like San Francisco, the NFWA learned that worker-to-worker solidarity was not only illegal but usually hard to put into practice. At the downtown produce market, some swampers, who unloaded the trucks, immediately agreed not to touch the scab product, others simply weren’t interested, and a few were openly hostile. Debates raged in the dark hours just before dawn, as the swampers and picketers, warming themselves by fires the workers had built in fifty-five-gallon drums, waited for the first trucks to arrive. Stopping those grapes would be a tough task, the picketers reported back to Chavez, so he assigned the job to a group of strike militants, including some young Filipinos who had already proved quite adept at sabotaging packing sheds, irrigation pumps, and other grower property.13 Among the strikers they were known as “special agents,” and their work was much admired. Rudy Reyes was one of them, as was his friend Ernie Delarmente, who had made a name for himself by holding his own in a short picket-line fistfight with the grower Bruno Dispoto, who was a head and a half taller and 125 pounds heavier than Delarmente. Chavez chose Dolores Huerta to head up this group, as she was, in her own way, just as fearless as the special agents.14
The LA swampers were members of Teamsters Local 630, whose contract allowed the membership to refuse to cross “a legitimate and bona fide picket line.” On December 3 the Los Angeles Teamsters Joint Council had ruled that the NFWA-AWOC pickets were, in fact, legitimate and bona fide, and members of Local 630 had received letters saying, “Your employer will be in violation of the contract if he discharges or otherwise punishes you for exercising your right to refuse to cross these picket lines to unload the Delano grapes.”15 But the letter also left the decision whether to unload the grapes up to the individual swampers.16 Some friendly swampers consistently refused to unload the grapes, and at first even the hostile ones would occasionally ignore a load, as long as the picketers stayed around. But a few swampers began to specialize in unloading the scab grapes, either sheepishly explaining that they needed the $80 to $100