United Farm Workers of America (UFW) | |
Founded | August 22, 1966 |
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Headquarters | Keene, California |
Location | |
Members | 4,682 (2023)[4] |
Key people | Teresa Romero, president |
Affiliations | Strategic Organizing Center |
Website | www |
The United Farm Workers of America, or more commonly just United Farm Workers (UFW), is a labor union for farmworkers in the United States. It originated from the merger of two workers' rights organizations, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) led by organizer Larry Itliong. They allied and transformed from workers' rights organizations into a union as a result of a series of strikes in 1965, when the Filipino American and Mexican American farmworkers of the AWOC in Delano, California, initiated a grape strike, and the NFWA went on strike in support. As a result of the commonality in goals and methods, the NFWA and the AWOC formed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee on August 22, 1966.[5] This organization was accepted into the AFL–CIO in 1972 and changed its name to the United Farm Workers Union.[6]
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was invoked but never defined (see the help page).At the mortuary, UFW supporters unfurled their union flag—and then the trouble began. The bold red flag with its black Aztec eagle in a white circle had long been controversial in the Central Valley. During the 1960s grape strike, the growers used to call it "Chavez's Trotsky flag." Even UFW members were initially unnerved by the powerful image. When the flag was first displayed to the fledging union membership in 1962, some workers complained that it looked like a Communist flag, others that it resembled a Nazi banner. "It's what you want to see in it," Chavez told them, "what you're conditioned to. To me it looks like a strong, beautiful sign of hope."