Farmworkers Win Rights: California Grants Collective Bargaining Power

Governor Jerry Brown signed the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act on June 5, 1975, the first American law granting farmworkers the right to organize unions and bargain collectively. The legislation was the culmination of a decade-long struggle led by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, whose strikes, boycotts, and marches had brought national attention to the working conditions of California's agricultural laborers. Farmworkers had been deliberately excluded from the protections of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, a concession to Southern Democrats who wanted to maintain cheap agricultural labor in cotton and tobacco fields. That exclusion left millions of workers without the legal right to form unions, bargain over wages, or strike without fear of permanent replacement. Chavez had organized the Delano grape strike in 1965, leading Filipino and Mexican American farmworkers in a five-year boycott that eventually brought the table grape industry to the negotiating table. The UFW's marches from Delano to Sacramento, Chavez's twenty-five-day hunger strike in 1968, and the national grape and lettuce boycotts that enlisted millions of American consumers as allies created political pressure that Brown could not ignore. The act established an Agricultural Labor Relations Board to oversee union elections and mediate disputes, giving farmworkers institutional protections that the NLRA had denied them for forty years. The law was immediately contested by growers who challenged its provisions in court and resisted unionization through delays and legal maneuvers. The ALRB's effectiveness has been debated since its founding, with advocates arguing it transformed farmworker rights and critics contending that enforcement has been inconsistent. The act remains the only state law of its kind in the United States.