Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers

FOOD, TOBACCO, AGRICULTURAL, AND ALLIED WORKERS. The origins of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers (FTA) can be traced to efforts by various radical and trade union groups to organize agricultural workers during the Great Depression. The United Farmers League and the Trade Union Unity League’s Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union represented the Communist Party’s early efforts in this area. The Party’s adoption of a Popular Front strategy gave rise to the National Committee for Unity of Rural and Agricultural Workers, later the National Committee of Agricultural Workers (NCAW), which provided the structure and leadership for the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA). Donald Henderson, a former economics instructor who had been fired by Columbia University for activities on behalf of the unemployed and New Jersey migrant workers, headed the NCAW. Henderson attempted to put together a coalition of NCAW-affiliated unions and independent locals of the American Federal of Labor (AFL) and seek a charter from the AFL. When that failed the NCAW called a national convention and voted to affiliate with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

The formation of the UCAPAWA brought together a diverse group of local unions. Beet workers from the Rocky Mountains joined forces with Filipino fishermen, Mexican and Japanese field workers, and former lettuce pickers from the Industrial Workers of the World on the West Coast. Members of the Southern Tenants Farmers Union came together with mushroom workers from New York. The CIO’s John L. Lewis funded a major organizing drive, and thousands of workers joined UCAPAWA. Agricultural workers were excluded from the provisions of the Wagner Act, as well as from most other federal protective legislation. They were among the nation’s most exploited citizens, in many cases living and working in a state of virtual peonage. Their work was seasonal and many workers lacked a home base, moving from farm to farm as the season progressed. UCAPAWA’s leadership subsequently concluded that organizing field workers required the organization of more stable workers one step removed from the harvest, in the fisheries, canneries, and processing sheds.
World War II greatly aided UCAPAWA’s efforts as labor shortages and the activist role of the War Labor Board increased workers’ bargaining power. Among the key victories of this period were the organization of workers at R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Campbell Soup in Chicago and Camden, New Jersey, and workers in the cigar factories of the American Tobacco Company. To reflect the changing composition of the membership, the union changed its name to FTA at its convention in 1944.

One reason for FTA’s success was the union’s policy of nondiscrimination in industries dominated by women and minority workers. Locals were organized on an interracial basis, and regional and national meetings were integrated. The union actively promoted women and minorities to leadership positions at the local and national level. In 1947 the international vice-presidents were a black tobacco worker, a Mexican American woman organizer, and a Cuban cigar worker.

The postwar reaction hit FTA particularly hard. From its inception, FTA was a union of the Left. Donald Henderson had been an active Communist Party member during the early 1930s, and many of the union’s leaders shared Henderson’s political sympathies, if not his Party membership. As a result, the union’s position on national and international issues generally reflected the thinking of people in the Communist movement. Such ideas were not to be tolerated in the ensuing Cold War years. An equally important reason for the postwar attack on FTA (and other Left-led unions) had to do with its growing success in organizing low-wage, women, and minority workers. Democratic unions threatened management authority on the shop floor, and the increased political activism of FTA members, particularly among blacks in the South, challenged the power of local elites.

FTA refused to support the Marshall Plan and the growing anticommunist stance of Harry Truman and in 1948 supported the Progressive Party candidacy of Henry Wallace. Like other CIO unions, FTA did not sign the non-Communist affidavits required by the Taft-Hartley Act. By 1949 FTA faced raids not only from AFL unions but from unions in the CIO. In 1950 the CIO expelled FTA and the union merged with the Distributive Workers Union and the United Office and Professional Workers Union to form the Distributive, Processing, and Office Workers Union.

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Korstad, Robert. Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Ruiz, Vicki. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987.

Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America and Related Agricultural Unions Records. Inventory. The Norman Leonard Collection, 2916-1960. Labor Archives and

Research Center. San Francisco State University. http://pdf.oac.cdlib.org/pdf/sfsu/larc/ftadg.pdf