To call Dolores Huerta a legend is almost an insult, because as the saying (attributed to fellow union member Lauren Bacall) goes, legends are all to do with the past, and nothing to do with the present. And after spending the past five decades fighting for workers’ rights, labor icon Huerta is still on the clock. As the COVID-19 pandemic ravages the globe, the farmworkers she has spent a lifetime organizing have been classified as essential, a designation that is as apt as it is dangerous. These workers are desperately overworked and underpaid, and those who are undocumented do not qualify for federal unemployment insurance. You can’t telecommute to a tomato field, and Huerta is worried.
Even before this latest challenge, Huerta’s journey through the labor movement has been long, hard — and successful. In 1962, she and fellow organizer Cesar Chavez, who would be 93 today, founded the National Farm Workers Association (which became the United Farm Workers in 1965), the first U.S. labor union to organize and advocate for the rights of farmworkers, who remain some of the most marginalized workers in the country. The UFW has proven to be an immensely influential organization, thanks in no small part to Huerta’s tireless efforts organizing in the fields, waging legal battles in the courtroom, and confronting discrimination in the halls of power. Among other successes, her work on the 1965 Delano grape strike and the 1973 table grape boycott helped lead to the passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, the first U.S. law to extend collective bargaining rights to farmworkers (who remain excluded at the federal level). Her impact on the lives of working people in this country — down to coining the eternal rallying cry, “Si se puede!” — is incalculable, and she’s not finished yet.
At 89, Huerta is always on the move, a sought-after public speaker on civil rights, social justice, and public policy as well as a fixture at both local and national political rallies. She has not shied away from the front lines, either. She has been arrested, jailed, and beaten many times throughout her years of activism, and when she was 58, a police officer shattered her spleen and broke four of her ribs with a baton at a protest of then-president George H. W. Bush. She took time off from her union work to recover, then traveled the country to advocate for Latina women running for office. Inspiring is far too soft a word to describe her. More than anything, she is fearless, and unlike many cherished movement elders, she has been honored many times during her lifetime (including by former president Obama, who awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011).
Backed by her nonprofit, the Dolores Huerta Foundation (DHF), Huerta has thrown herself into a variety of recent campaigns, from pushing for the inclusion of ethnic studies in California curricula to fighting against the Trump administration’s racist efforts to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census (“We were one of the plaintiffs that sued Trump, and we won!”). She’s also adamant that labor studies should be taught in schools alongside ethnic studies, so that the next generations know about the true history of the workers who built this country.
Teen Vogue reached out to Huerta for some wisdom about what workers need now, and what struggles lie ahead.
Editor’s note: This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Teen Vogue: I wanted to ask you about the challenges facing farmworkers, and particularly migrant farmworkers, today. What are the major issues they’re dealing with right now in the current pandemic?
Dolores Huerta: It’s having so many ramifications. Number one, the farmworkers are exempt from the stay at home order, because we have to eat, right? So they are still out there in the fields. I haven’t been out there because we’re all grounded, but I don’t know what precautions are being taken for the workers themselves. Usually when they do work, they’re not shoulder to shoulder, they usually have some distance between them as they are working, and of course they’re out in the open air, which is probably safer than being in a building.
But a lot of the workers are undocumented, so in terms of any assistance from the federal government, they won’t be eligible for it. So it will all be very dependent on state resources. My foundation is part of a campaign called End Child Poverty, and many of the children who are in poverty are farmworkers, so we have to continue to hope the state of California considers those workers and those families when it comes to the resources that will be given to people.
So many of these families are in poverty and are poor: their children don’t have computers. A lot of the educational work that is going to be given to students will be online learning, but they don’t even have the computers in the first place to be able to take classes online. This thing is projected to be quite a long shutdown, and this is definitely going to affect their educational progress.
TV: How can the rest of the labor movement, and the people who consume produce in this country, better support these workers?
DH: I know this would be a really major undertaking, but it would be to change the mentality of the way people think about farmworkers. Farmworkers have one of the most important jobs in our economy, because these are the people that have to feed us, and to get out there every single day in the cold weather, planting and pruning and preparing the earth for the harvest, and then, during the harvest, being out there in the hot sun, doing the work that they have to do out there to bring the food to our tables.
We have to look at farmworkers as a very special occupation, just the way that we respect our firemen and our policemen. They should be treated the way that policemen and firemen are treated. We should give them a living wage, pensions when they retire from the arduous labor they do. And that [disparity in treatment] comes from slavery, unfortunately, and it comes from racism. When you think of firefighters and police as occupations that are mostly Anglo, and you think of farmworkers, you’re thinking of people who are mostly brown and black, and as long as those people that are out there doing that work happen to be brown and black, they won’t get that respect that everybody else does.
TV: You’ve been involved in workers’ rights and labor organizing for decades. What are the most important lessons you’ve learned throughout your lifetime of service?
DH: The main thing, and I know that this is what your publication is devoted to, is that we can make a difference, and we should never give up on that, and we should never doubt ourselves that we can change things and make them better in our world. Si se puede!
TV: What do you think the future of the labor movement will look like in this country?
DH: The labor movement has been under attack for quite some time now, and the number of people who are members of labor organizations has shrunk, and that is a very dangerous situation because the only organization that working people have is their union. Under the Constitution of the United States, we have the right to assembly, so belonging to a labor union is a constitutional right. And with workers’ organizations being attacked the way they have been, so that workers do not have the representation that they need, not only in the workplace but also in the state legislatures, in city councils, on school boards, and in the U.S. Congress, then that is a very scary thing that’s happening in our country. Labor unions created the middle class in this country, and if we don’t have a middle class, we don’t have a democracy.
TV: What’s the most important thing for a young person who is just now getting interested in labor history and workers’ issues to know?
DH: The pandemic is going to force people to reexamine the economic system that we have, because our whole economic system is just based on consumerism, and if people can’t buy things, then the whole system collapses. We have to look at the system as it really works, and anyway, it wasn’t working in the first place: when you have the heads of these corporations whose salaries are in the multi-millions, and you have workers who are working two jobs in order to pay the rent and feed their kids, when you have a federal minimum wage of $7 an hour when our federal minimum wage should be $30 an hour, because on $15 an hour, you can’t make a living wage in California.
I talked to a teacher in Pennsylvania who teaches at a college, and his wages were $40,000 a year; we’re a nonprofit organization, and we pay our workers $17 an hour! This is not working. My grandson just got a job at Taco Bell, and he had to buy his own special shoes…it probably put him out over $100, and yet he’s working for minimum wage and no health benefits at all. This is crazy, and this system is not working for young people — or for anybody.
TV: It makes sense that the younger generation is so opposed to capitalism.
DH: I keep thinking that maybe we should change that word from capitalism, because people think that that’s somehow our savior, and talk more about greed, and profiteering, taking advantage of other people. That’s what’s wrong with our system, and that’s where unions come in, because you have people that are organizing to have a voice. People that aren’t organizing don’t have a voice.
TV: Even after all these years, you just don’t stop!
DH: [Laughs] Yeah, we can’t stop. We’ve got to keep going.
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: The Coronavirus Pandemic Demonstrates the Failures of Capitalism
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