John Cramerus Document Based Questions What Made Cesar Chavez an Effective Leader? Before the advent of the man Cesar Chavez, workers on the Californian farms had been exploited for decades. Facing horrible working conditions and terrible pay, many attempts had been made to organize a union and push for better more rights and more reasonable statures for the farmers, but it had met with no success. So, what set apart Cesar Chavez from the rest? What made him able to succeed where all others had failed? To unite a group whose disunity seemed almost inherent from the numerous failures to unionize? In order to begin, one must begin talking about the man Cesar Chavez and his own thought processes behind his machinations. machinations. He had moved from Arizona with his family as a boy and had attended over 30 different schools before finally dropping out at the end of eighth grade, living only in tents o shacks. It was then after a small time in the navy and ten years doing community service work did he finally join the farming business once more, having worked on his grandfathers before the Great Depression forced it into destruction. It was during this time that the beginning of his ideas of his relation between himself and those who he wished to band together would be defined. Ideas that can be highlighted by an excerpt from Ann McGregor’s Remembering Cesar: The Legacy of Cesar Chavez; in it McGregor talks about her personal experience with Chavez visiting him on a ‘hot summer night’ in the small ‘San Joaquin Valley town’ of Daleno, Califnornia. She highlighted highlighted the fact that Chavez sat behind a
makeshift desk and cluttered shack, which served as the headquarters of his organization that was attempting to form the union. In the excerpt he repeated his famous trademark phrase, “Si si puede,” – “it can be done” in Spanish, to her. And he was right. It could be done, but it could only be done through his capable hands which had made a vital realization – in order to band together the workers to form a union they must also be able to sympathize with him, to join with him in motivation. And he believed that the best way in order to achieve this institutional unity was to be on the same level as his associates, to be situated in the exact same economic position as his peers. Clearly he met with success while those who attempted doing otherwise – The Industrial Workers of the World, Communists, socialists, the AFL and CIO organizers – all failed, no matter what their intentions. However, one part of the equation that should be always be known and never escape one’s mind when thinking of Cesar Chavez is the ethic of hard work. Chavez never stopped, despite receiving so little. His staff received a pitiful $7.50 a week for food and $5.00 for other random expenses, which also helped attribute to the fact that only those most committed joined his entourage. Beyond the pitiful pay the administrative staff had scheduled work weeks of fifty-three hours…but that was besides the actual time they spent on strike. Chavez required himself and his other officer staff to aid the strikes with the low levels, for he felt that there was a need to be connected with the miscellaneous workers who didn’t make the executive decisions to keep a tight nit community. In order to do those strikes, it
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required one to rise at four o-clock in the morning, driving forty miles, and then walking a picket line outside an orchard or vineyard. In the end, Chavez’s efforts undoubtedly met with success. He gained the support of Robert
Kennedy and increased the wages of his associates from a mere $1.10 an hour to a much more manageable and survivable $1.80 an hour including twenty cents a box during harvest time. The companies themselves themselves suffered from his strikes, suing for seventy five million dollars after saying that Chavez had caused them to lose twenty five in profits. They caused the sales to be of by ten percent in 1968. The figures all point to the same thing, as well as the end result…in ‘seventy -five causing the
Californian state legislature giving the United Farm Workers the right to unionize and for collective bargaining. If anything can be said about Cesar Chavez , it’s that he got the job done, and that his ideas
of working closely with the laymen of his organization and working like a demon are the true reasons to his success.
