Thirty-six years ago, Dolores Huerta encountered hostile police and racist slurs on a pilgrimage to the Capitol that focused a national spotlight on the plight of California’s farmworkers. She’s marching again, and this time she’s a star.

The 72-year-old co-founder of the United Farm Workers signs autographs. After agreeing to a snapshot with an admiring California Highway Patrol officer, she notes that police barricades sometimes greeted the farmworkers on their first march.

Now they get a police escort.

The Central Valley march from Merced to Sacramento this week by Huerta and the UFW to lobby Gov. Gray Davis to sign a binding arbitration bill retraces the path taken by Cesar Chavez in 1966—a trek that became California’s equivalent of the Southern civil rights marches of the same era. But this week’s march shows how difficult the UFW’s transition from popular social cause to effective labor union has been.

While Huerta has adoring fans throughout California, and Chavez’s image appears on billboards hawking computers, the union’s membership has dwindled. Its efforts to organize farmworkers have been largely stymied.

“The UFW is almost mythological in some ways,” said Assemblyman Kevin Shelley, D-San Francisco. Shelley walked with the UFW outside Stockton earlier this week and said that following the same path Chavez took in 1966 gave him a “goose bump moment.”

‘NEED TO BE REAL’

“But the union is the advocate for the most oppressed workers in the state. They need to be real.”

That’s why they’re marching, UFW officials say.

Hoping to persuade the governor to OK legislation that would give the union substantially more bargaining power, union leaders say farmers’ lawyers and current labor rules make it nearly impossible for workers to get contracts. The bill, by Senate leader John Burton, D-San Francisco, would give the union the right to seek binding arbitration after contract talks stall.

Growers, who adamantly oppose the legislation, say the union has gone to the Legislature for help because it can’t do its job.

“In the last 20 years, the union has lost members, lost contracts and lost power,” said Tom Nassif, president of the powerful farmers’ group Western Growers Association. “Now they want the Legislature to give them a shortcut.”

Union membership, which at one time neared 100,000, is now about 27,000. State officials estimate there are between 600,000 and 1 million farmworkers in California.

An effort to organize California’s 20,000 strawberry pickers in the mid- ‘90s has resulted in only one contract, which covers 800 workers in Ventura County.

According to union figures, workers have voted for UFW representation in 428 elections, but the union has secured only 185 contracts.

About 75 percent of California farmworkers still earn less than $10,000 a year, and 90 percent don’t have health insurance, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

OTHER FACTORS

While growers point to these numbers as examples of the UFW’s failures, there are other reasons why organizing farm labor has been a tough task, said Carol Zabin, chairwoman of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.

Economic crises in Mexico in both the 1980s and 1990s flooded the state with undocumented workers willing to pick crops for whatever wage was offered, said Zabin, who has researched state farm-labor issues.

“Growers can turn on labor like a spigot. It’s there whenever they need it,” she said.

Secondly, 16 years of Republican governors favorable to agricultural interests meant UFW lawyers had little luck convincing the state’s agriculture labor relations board to force growers to negotiate contracts, according to Zabin. The board’s members are appointed by the governor.

UFW officials say some growers have successfully snuffed contract talks for years. Workers at D’Arrigo Brothers, a big Salinas Valley grower that produces brocoli and other vegetables, voted to unionize in 1975 and still don’t have a contract.

“Growers know they can stall, so we have this situation where all the money is going to anti-union lawyers, not the poor people,” said Huerta.

UFW officials note that the union has gone to the state labor board 59 times in its history with formal complaints about growers’ negotiators. Only four of the cases resulted in contracts, and the process is so lengthy that workers who are owed money have often moved on by the time of settlement.

Nassif of the Western Growers Association and other farmers say the union simply has not used the negotiating tools given to it under current state farm labor laws.

KEY LEGISLATION

But UFW president Arturo Rodriguez said Burton’s measure is the key to leveling the playing field so the union can win contracts and then begin increasing its membership.

The governor has not publicly said what he will do with the bill, which is expected to land on his desk early next week. The governor has 12 days to take action once he receives it.

Huerta and the other marchers will arrive in Sacramento on Sunday for a rally in support of the measure. Between 70 and 250 marchers participate in the trek each day, and organizers expect more than a thousand people to attend the rally. The union has touted its public support, including a letter that ran in two Hollywood trade papers endorsing the bill and signed by such luminaries as Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and Barbra Streisand.

And while those who are trekking along dusty highways lined by tomato and chile crops receive plenty of supporting honks from passers-by, some of the marchers admit the UFW must work to convince people it is a living cause that has a long way to go.

“I feel like my generation, if they know about the UFW, is disconnected from it and thinks of it as history,” said marcher Victoria Serna, a 21-year- old student at Sacramento City College. “They don’t really understand it’s still a movement.”