United Farm Workers Of America

Activist Dolores Huerta was supposed to talk to Catholic schoolchildren Thursday about her founding role in the United Farm Workers and the importance of public service. Instead, she was fielding calls from reporters after Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Bakersfield abruptly canceled her appearance. A parent at the school had complained that Huerta's public support for abortion rights makes her an unfit role model.

Photos of a defiant Cesar Chavez line the walls. A weathered packing crate, a keepsake from one of the United Farm Workers' first table-grape contracts, sits on a bookshelf flaunting its Aztec eagle label. It is here, in a home office near Oxnard's agricultural heartland, that Jessica Arciniega has come to learn the law.

In the 1970s, United Farm Workers founder Cesar E. Chavez fought in dusty fields and the halls of government to give agricultural laborers the right to cast secret ballots to form unions at California's farms, ranches and vineyards. Now, those who came after Chavez want to change the rules, and that has farmers and business groups up in arms.

Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America, is improving and acknowledging friends and family members after three surgeries to stop intestinal bleeding, a Bakersfield hospital spokesman said. Huerta remained in critical condition and her prognosis was guarded Thursday, more than a week after she was first sent to Bakersfield Heart Hospital with a bleeding ulcer. An arterial abnormality was discovered later and repaired over the weekend.

Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America, remained in critical but stable condition Tuesday at a Bakersfield hospital, two days after surgery to stop internal bleeding. Huerta, 70, who stepped down as the union's secretary-treasurer in September, originally was admitted to Heart Hospital last Wednesday for a bleeding ulcer, then was readmitted Sunday when her condition worsened.

The United Farm Workers of America lost another court battle in Imperial County on Wednesday in a case that poses a severe threat to the union's financial health. Imperial County Superior Court Judge William E. Lehnhardt rejected the plea of the UFW that he reduce a $3.3-million bond the union must post by June 5 while it appeals a judgment of more than $1.6-million it has been directed to pay a vegetable grower for losses from a violence-torn 1979 strike.

Farmhands at Gallo of Sonoma cast votes Thursday on whether to oust the United Farm Workers of America from the vintner's fields, less than three years after the union won a hard-fought and much-publicized contract there. The fieldworkers gathered at ranches across Sonoma County in Northern California shortly after daybreak to weigh in on the petition to break ties with the UFW, filed with the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board last week by workers.

The second San Joaquin Valley farmworker in a year has died of heat exposure in triple-digit temperatures, sparking renewed calls from labor leaders for worker safety regulations in extreme heat. Witnesses said Salud Zamudio Rodriguez, 42, was picking bell peppers in Arvin, Calif., south of Bakersfield, in 105-degree heat Wednesday when he complained of feeling ill, according to Lupe Martinez, a vice president of United Farm Workers of America.

"No Grapes!"--a spirited rallying cry of the labor movement and the political left for much of the last four decades--officially receded into history Tuesday as the United Farm Workers of America declared an end to its protracted boycott of California table grapes. The announcement by UFW President Arturo S. Rodriguez makes official what had already become a fait accompli; the union and even its loyal followers had mostly lost interest in the sanction against the state's grape growers.

In a rare rebuke, a state labor board ruled that the United Farm Workers of America deliberately misled workers about their rights not to join the union or fund its political activities. The ruling comes amid a continuing national effort by anti-union activists to weaken organized labor's political clout, and as the farmworker group continues to lose membership and influence among California's immigrant farm laborers.

Charities affiliated with the United Farm Workers did not break the state's laws on charitable trusts but should change their procedures to prevent "the appearance of impropriety" in the future, the state attorney general said Tuesday. Earlier this year, the charitable trusts section of the attorney general's office opened an investigation into transactions involving union insiders after they were detailed in a series in The Times.

The results of a September 2005 election in which workers at Giumarra Vineyards narrowly voted against joining the United Farm Workers should be thrown out, a hearing examiner for the state's Agricultural Labor Relations Board has recommended. The election had been seen as a defeat for the UFW in its organizing efforts at Giumarra, one of the country's largest table grape growers, with vineyards extending over many miles of the Central Valley.

As debate rages over immigration, the United Farm Workers union and an agricultural labor contractor signed a nationwide agreement Tuesday covering guest workers. "This gives us a chance to have a national contract that protects the rights of agricultural guest workers," UFW President Arturo Rodriguez said. The contract, which provides such things as medical care and a grievance system, ends a battle between the UFW and Los Angeles-based Global Horizons Inc.

Several thousand farmworkers from as far away as Oregon marched in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday to celebrate the life of Cesar Chavez and protest proposed federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants. The crowd at the march and rally, which culminated with a Mass honoring Chavez at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, was estimated by police at 3,800.

In a Napa vineyard where farmworkers labored under one of the first contracts negotiated by Cesar Chavez, the 1967 pact lives on. About 20 veteran members of the United Farm Workers are pruning grapes for $10.35 an hour under a contract with Vista Vineyard Management. Alongside them, crews of younger nonunion workers do the same job; right now they earn less, but during harvest the nonunion workers, paid by the ton rather than the hour, often make more than the UFW members.

In a rare rebuke, a state labor board ruled that the United Farm Workers of America deliberately misled workers about their rights not to join the union or fund its political activities. The ruling comes amid a continuing national effort by anti-union activists to weaken organized labor's political clout, and as the farmworker group continues to lose membership and influence among California's immigrant farm laborers.

Capping off a string of successful organizing efforts after years of setbacks, the once-powerful United Farm Workers of America on Friday signed its biggest labor contract in recent years--with Bear Creek Production Co., the nation's largest rose grower. The union has won seven other, smaller contracts in the past year. But adding the 1,400 workers at Bear Creek, formerly known as Jackson & Perkins, is on the scale of the good old days of its organizing efforts.

One of the nation's largest strawberry growers and the United Farm Workers have reached agreement on a new three-year contract, union officials said. The contract freezes wages for Coastal Berry Co. pickers at the current rate of $7.75 an hour for the first year and provides better medical coverage with lower premiums. Wages will rise 1.5% in both 2007 and 2008.

Two government agencies, one state and one federal, are reviewing operations of the United Farm Workers and the union's related charities to determine whether the tax-exempt organizations' transactions warrant investigation. Officials with the U.S.