ustxtxb_obs_1972_11_17_50_00012-00000_000.pdf

average. Because their life expectancy is 49 years and the norm is 60. Because their disease rate is 260 percent higher than the national average. Because they have more industrial accidents than any other group of workers except coal miners and the highest industrial disease rate, bar none. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, the average lettuce worker earns $2,400 a year. Anglo farmworkers average $1,706 a year. Minority farmworkers average $1,172 a year. There are 2.6 million farmworkers 14 years or older who earn an average of $882 a year. Because they can’t make it on that kind of money, their wives and their children work. Because their children work, they don’t get an education. \(Chavez attended 40 different schools before he the children don’t get an education, they 12 The Texas Observer CLASSIFIED BOOKPLATES. Free catalog. Many beautiful designs. Special designing too. Address: BOOKPLATES, P.O. Box 28-1, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387. CABLE REPORT. Cable television could be a spy in . your bedroom. It may also allow you to shop from your living room. We are the only people reporting on the development of this industry from the citizen’s perspective. $7 per year. 192 North Clark Street, Room 607, Chicago, Illinois 60601. Two samples, $1. $1000 REWARD for return of tan-gray female deer-type Chihuahua. Lost between Villa Capri Motel and LBJ Library in Austin Sept. 4. No questions asked. 713/468-2236 or 465-1225. MARJORIE A. DELAFIELD TYPING SERVICE: Theses, dissertations, manuscripts, reports, etc. I.B.M. Selectric II typewriters, multilithing, mimeographing, addressing envelopes. Public Notary. 25 years experience. Call 442-7008, Austin. WE SELL THE BEST SOUND. Yamaha pianos, guitars; Moeck-Kung-Aulus recorders; harmonicas, kalimbas and other exotic instruments. Amster Music, 1624 Lavaca, Austin. 478-7331. THURSDAY DISCUSSION GROUP meets at noon weekly at the YMCA, 605 North Ervay in Dallas. No dues. Everyone welcome. CENTRAL TEXAS ACLU luncheon meeting. Spanish Village, 802 Red River, second Monday of each month. From noon. All welcome. STAFF EMPLOYEES at state-supported universities are banding together to make reforms in salaries, the Teacher Retirement program, the health-insurance plan, and staff representation on campus. For more information, a brochure, the newsletter, and the proposals re Teacher Retirement, write Texas College & University System Staff Employees’ Association, P.O. Box 7444, Austin, Texas 78712. An organization of, by, and for staff employees. have no freedom of choice about what they want to do and to be in life. Because the workers have to migrate, they don’t have a chance to register and even if they are registered, they don’t have much of a chance to vote. \(Less than 10 percent of them are registered and only half of that they have no political power. Because they have no political power, they can’t change their lives. Texas farm workers are particularly vulnerable to the feudal peon system that operates in the Valley. Mexicans, legal and illegal, are just across the river. The average No matter how many scabs the union can convert, the growers can always find more. So when Texas growers hire Mexicans, Texans start migrating. Every year. Up and out the Winter Garden to the San Joaquin to the Imperial and maybe into Oregon and Washington. Or through the Panhandle to Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, where the piece work rates are a little higher. Sometimes over into southern Minnesota, Idaho. Everywhere they go, the same barriers. For example, in Kern County, California, an agribusiness center, only those who have been residents of the county for six months or more are eligible to be treated at the county hospital. Kern County Land Co., one of the largest landowners in the country, is owned by Tenneco, Inc., headquarters, Houston, Texas. In another happy Texas connection, one of the big lettuce growers with whom UFW is currently seeking a contract is Harden Farms in California. Harden Farms owns La Casita in the Valley. In ’67, the strike at La Casita failed. If the lettuce boycott works, and Harden signs, La Casita’s workers will finally be able to negotiate under UFW. In Texas, there are now six paid, full-time boycott organizers. The organizers, like everyone else who works for UFW, and may the Dallas Morning News choke on it, get $5 a week. From Cesar Chavez down to 21-year-old Rosa Maria Lopez of San Antonio, UFW employees get room, board and $5 a week for high living. The organizers take pride in charging the union as little as possible for room and board. One is told with admiration of the Denver organizers who haven’t asked for food money in months because they’ve found some people to donate food. Board for Bill Chandler, executive director of the Texas boycott effort, for example, is a crummy house between two condemned buildings near a freeway-to-be. He considers it a great find. Everything in the house, from the furniture to the pictures on the walls, was donated to the Chandlers and their three little girls. \(By the way, if any of you San Antonio readers happen to have a spare heater, the The structure of the boycott is simple. Every major city in the state already has a boycott committee and each committee has been assigned a fund-raising goal. When the organizers first come into a state, they Contact groups that would logically be sympathetic. In Texas, that includes unions and churches. The Texas AFL-CIO has been backing the farmworkers for a long time and president Roy Evans is one of their biggest boosters. The Catholic Church has also been supportive here, particularly that estimable gentleman, Bishop Patrick Flores of San Antonio, who helped the UFW picket the visit of U.S. Treasurer Romana Banuelos \(a Nixon appointee who uses wetback labor in her California taco invocation at the dinner in her honor. THE POINT OF all the effort is quite simply to get the word out. When and if the Farmworkers are able to tell their story, they invariably find a sympathetic audience. For instance, at the September Democratic convention in Houston, boycott workers got to about 100 Wallace supporters, many of them small farmers. The Wallace supporters not only signed the “I will not eat lettuce pledge,” but when the vote on the resolution to make support of the boycott part of the party platform came up, these Wallaceites stood and argued against their own delegations. For those who remember the Wallace delegates in Miami bringing lettuce into the convention in order to taunt McGovernites, it was an impressive turnaround. But between the likes of the Morning News and the Farm Bureaus, the UFW has plenty trouble trying to tell its story. Henry Grover has been making an issue of the state Democratic party’s support for the boycott, implying that Briscoe, who has come out against the UFW, is somehow secretly in favor of this somehow comsymp group. In the next to the last week of the campaign, when Grover was finally nailed down by questions from an audience as to just why he opposes the lettuce boycott, he had no answer. None. In sum, the Farmworkers need anything you can give them. Time, money, space, supplies, food, work on the picket lines, help in pressuring restaurants and grocery stores, leafletters, office workers, anything that your talents can provide. A group of artists is even creating a special show for UFW. If you can’t afford the time or money to help in any other way, at least you can stop eating iceberg lettuce. A proper Cesar salad is made with Romaine anyway. Spinach tacos, anyone? M.I. The Observer’s deadline for this issue was Nov. 6 and the paper went to press on election day. Rather than attempting to predict our way out of this hole, we decided to let our ever-brilliant post-election analyses marinate in hindsight for another two weeks. We’ll be explaining how and why it all turned out in the next issue. Hasta la vista.