César Chávez Day

Many farmworkers around the world continue to face low wages, irregular employment, long hours, and few benefits, often without written contracts.

In some regions, they also experience exposure to pesticides and extreme heat, limited access to clean drinking water and shade, overcrowded or substandard housing, and barriers to healthcare and education because of language, immigration status, or rural isolation.

These conditions are documented in reports from labor, health, and human rights organizations that study agricultural workforces in the United States and globally.  [1]

The United Farm Workers (UFW), which grew out of the National Farm Workers Association, used strikes, boycotts, and nationwide consumer campaigns to win the first broad union contracts for farmworkers in U.S. history.

Those agreements improved wages, created grievance procedures, and placed some limits on pesticide use and unsafe working conditions.

The union’s efforts also helped secure the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, the first state law to grant farmworkers collective bargaining rights similar to those of other workers.  [2]

Leaders of the farmworker movement believed nonviolence was both a moral commitment and a practical strategy.

Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and the U.S. civil rights movement, they argued that disciplined nonviolence helped protect vulnerable workers, win public sympathy, and isolate employers who used violence or intimidation.

Historical accounts show that even when strikers were attacked or arrested, organizers urged boycotts, marches, and fasts instead of retaliation, which helped attract churches, students, unions, and other allies to the cause.  [3]

In labor struggles, consumer boycotts aim to reduce sales of a company’s products until it agrees to negotiate with workers.

Organizers educate the public about working conditions, ask shoppers to avoid specific goods, and build coalitions with community, faith, and student groups to widen the economic and reputational pressure.

The grape boycott of the 1960s and 1970s, for example, persuaded millions of consumers to stop buying table grapes, which helped push growers to sign contracts with farmworker unions. [4]

In many movements, religious faith has provided language, rituals, and moral frameworks that sustain long campaigns for justice.

Fasting in particular has been used as a form of personal sacrifice and spiritual discipline that dramatizes injustice and calls people to conscience.

In the farmworker movement, for example, leaders staged extended fasts to recommit participants to nonviolence and to frame their struggle in moral and spiritual terms, drawing support from churches and other faith communities. 

The modern farmworker movement in the United States grew out of multiracial organizing, especially among Mexican American and Filipino workers.

Filipino grape workers in Delano began a major strike in 1965, and Mexican American organizers soon joined, merging their associations into a single union.

Historical research shows that Latino and Filipino communities contributed leadership, strike funds, cultural traditions, and family networks that sustained picket lines, boycotts, and union elections over many years.  [5]

The farmworker struggle formed part of a wider mid‑20th‑century push for civil rights and economic justice.

Its leaders drew on the tactics and rhetoric of Black civil rights campaigns, cultivated alliances with civil rights organizations, and framed farm labor demands as questions of human dignity and equal protection under the law.

Government archives and civil rights histories describe how marches, boycotts, and legal challenges in the fields paralleled sit‑ins, freedom rides, and voting rights efforts across the country.