Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Strategy and the Organization in the California Farm Worker Movement

Marshall Ganz (Lecturer in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Lecturer in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University)

Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Strategy and the Organization in the California Farm Worker Movement
Format
Hardback
Publisher
Oxford University Press Inc
Country
United States
Published
28 May 2009
Pages
368
ISBN
9780195162011

Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Strategy and the Organization in the California Farm Worker Movement

Marshall Ganz (Lecturer in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Lecturer in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University)

Why David Sometimes Wins tells the story of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers’ groundbreaking victory, drawing important lessons from this dramatic tale. Since the 1900s, large-scale agricultural enterprises relied on migrant labor–a cheap, unorganized, and powerless workforce. In 1965, when some 800 Filipino grape workers began to strike under the aegis of the AFL-CIO, the UFW soon joined the action with 2,000 Mexican workers and turned the strike into a civil rights struggle. They engaged in civil disobedience, mobilized support from churches and students, boycotted growers, and transformed their struggle into La Causa, a farm workers’ movement that eventually triumphed over the grape industry’s Goliath. Why did they succeed? How can the powerless challenge the powerful successfully? Offering insight from a longtime movement organizer and scholar, Ganz illustrates how they had the ability and resourcefulness to devise good strategy and turn short-term advantages into long-term gains. Authoritative in scholarship and magisterial in scope, this book constitutes a seminal contribution to learning from the movement’s struggles, set-backs, and successes.

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