Can United Farm Workers make a comeback?

Decades after Cesar Chavez made the United Farm Workers a powerhouse in California's fields, the union has lost much of its clout.

UFW's membership in the 1970s was around 60,000. Now it's closer to 5,500, less than 2% of the state's agricultural workforce.

But the union is hoping to regain its relevance and the ability to mobilize public opinion as it did under Chavez, as Kurtis Lee and Liliana Michelena recently reported for The New York Times. The question is whether the union can pull it off.

“This is a major moment for labor organizing nationwide,” Lee said. “We've seen unions win elections among white-collar workers in the tech and media industries. But that has not been the case for some of the most marginalized workers in the country — farmworkers, especially those here in California.”

Lee and Michelena traveled to several communities in the Central Valley to report on unionization efforts among farmworkers in California's fields, which supply about half the produce grown in the United States for the domestic market.

As they explained, after the UFW rose to prominence through grassroots organizing in the 1960s, it began to lose influence in the 1980s. The union continues to advocate farmworker protections in Sacramento and to secure local contracts for workers, but it has also seen precipitous membership drops in recent decades.

But the UFW believes that a new California law could help reverse its decline. Signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, Assembly Bill 2183 was the union's biggest legislative victory in years, paving the way for farmworkers to vote in union elections without in-person election sites.

The UFW and its supporters said the law was needed because of how farmworker demographics had shifted since the 1970s, when many farmworkers were U.S. citizens. Migration from Mexico and Central America in the following decades created a workforce comprising primarily workers without legal status.

That has led to heightened fear among farmworkers that seeking unionization could get them fired, or even deported, advocates of the new measure say. The law will help protect against voter suppression and retaliation, since unionization votes would be kept private from employers, they argue.

Though Newsom vetoed similar legislation in 2021, he signed AB 2183 into law after Rep. Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, and President Joe Biden publicly pushed him to do so. “In the state with the largest population of farmworkers, the least we owe them is an easier path to make a free and fair choice to organize a union,” Biden said at the time.

As is often the case, what happens in California going forward will most likely be watched closely by unions and activists who work on behalf of farmworkers elsewhere in the country.

“There is new energy, new legislation and attention from the public in terms of workers' rights,” said Christian Paiz, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley