Marion Moses, 84, was a top aide for Cesar Chavez

Marion Moses, who as a trusted aide to the farmworkers’ leader Cesar Chavez promoted a nationwide boycott of table grapes and helped create a health care system for impoverished grape pickers, died Aug. 28 in San Francisco. She was 84.

The cause was heart failure and renal failure, her brother Maron Moses said.

Moses met Chavez in 1965 at a church near the University of California, Berkeley, where she was pursuing a master’s degree in English, and was struck by what she described as his “strong moral force.” A month earlier, Chavez had led around 1,700 farmworkers and their families in his fledgling union to strike against grape growers in California.

Moses soon traveled to Chavez’s headquarters in Delano, a small city in the heart of California’s tablegrape region. At the time, farmworkers’ wages in California averaged less than $1.20 an hour (less than $10 an hour in today’s money). Moses found that the grape pickers lacked running water and toilets, were excluded from health safety labor laws, could be fired at will, and got no overtime or vacations.

Union volunteers such as Moses, much like the workers, lived in impoverished circumstances, and they earned even less: $5 a week in addition to room and board. Moses started out sleeping on a farmworker’s floor. By 5:30 a.m., she was on the picket line.

“The valley was hot and dusty and dull,” she wrote later in a firsthand account in The American Journal of Nursing, adding: “I worried about where I would live, what I would eat, what I would do for money. I worried about inconsequential things that never concern me now.”

Moses devoted the next five years to Chavez and his campaign to force grape growers to the bargaining table and win new rights for farm laborers.

Having worked as a nurse in the Bay Area, Moses focused on providing health care to strikers. She made hundreds of home visits and ran the union’s health clinic, despite a meager supply of drugs and staggering medical problems.

“Having some kind of health care was a big deal for people and their families,” said Miriam Pawel, who interviewed Moses for her biography “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez” (2014). “The clinic becomes part of the effort to appeal to farmworkers that there is some benefit to them in joining the union.”