Workers need his gift, not his gift shop

Since early December, California has buried some of its great and good: Ellen Stern Harris, the "mother" of the Coastal Commission Act; Bill Robertson, a working man who championed the worker as head of Los Angeles County's labor federation; and two city councilmen -- Ernani Bernardi and Marvin Braude, who were vigilant protectors of L.A.'s public money, public spaces and public health.

Then, this week, there's been The Times' series describing how the heirs to Cesar Chavez's name and legacy have, metaphorically, shoveled dirt onto his coffin.

According to the stories, the United Farm Workers has evolved, in the fashion of a "CSI" television series, into spinoffs. The Times detailed a broad-spectrum operation that has become, in effect, Cesar Inc.: interlocking nonprofit agencies that raise millions and have spread into lobbying and real estate and other unions' affairs. Organizing farmworkers, meanwhile, has slipped down the priority ladder.

At least the leaders were honest when they snipped out of the preamble of the UFW constitution the part about the people who have "tilled the soil, sown the seed and harvested the crops" and about struggling "as long as it takes" to build a union for them.

Today, only a few thousand farmworkers belong to Chavez's union. But the tales of suffering farmworkers still raise the big bucks. And why are so many tens of thousands still suffering? Why are there laudable laws on the books but not in the fields, where workers don't know about them and officials don't always enforce them? Isn't it the first and last mission of the UFW to organize and protect workers?

Cesar Inc. obviously isn't happy with The Times' stories, but they're not easy reading for the rest of us either. The strikes and grape boycotts of the 1960s and '70s led a lot of middle-class people, young and old, to think, "Hey, whaddya know -- even I can make a difference." After the bus boycotts and sit-ins across the South, Chavez brought his own methods to bear on California agriculture. He showed middle America that it could join in at home. When you could help the campesinos with something so simple as passing up the fruit plate, why not join the struggle?

Once millions of Americans saw the union make real progress -- minimum wages and labor protections and contract negotiations and a ban on the cortito, the short-handled hoe -- they figured, "Well, that's settled. What outrage do we take on next?"