The Lettuce Boycott

IN THE last two weeks scab lettuce emerged as a political issue, in the midst of much cynicism and many bad puns. (Would it have been inexcusably naive to expect anything else from a Harvard audience?) But the student organizers began with confidence that they could get enough people to take them seriously; after all,, they had a good cause and they were heading straight for the bureaucracy with it. Not a bad risk, really: administrative fumbles have provoked us to positive action, in the past...

Seventeen hundred people remembered grapes well enough to sign the petition against scab lettuce at Harvard. Once again, after moral arguments had been ineffective, Cesar Chavez called for a boycott to exert economic pressure upon the growers. The demands were not quite the same. The objective of the grapes boycott was to obtain the growers recognition of the farmworkers' union (one of the few not yet protected by national labor legislation). The unsettling complication with lettuce was that most of the growers could point to a contract they made with the Teamsters Union last summer as their excuse for avoiding negotiations with the United Farm Workers.

Probing the subtleties of contract law: what recourse do the victims have? I relied on a reliable law student who confirmed my pessimism: since the Teamsters did not claim to represent the farm workers when they negotiated the contract (they only agreed to take responsibility for signing up workers) the workers have the law on their side. The August 12 agreement between the Teamsters and the United Farm Workers that only the latter union represents the workers add strength to the moral, not the legal, arguments. So the growers can rescind the contract if they want to, but if they don't want to, they don't have to. . .

Not too many nice guys in our sagt-in fact, we can't even focus all of our disgust on one antagonist which might be somewhat idle; anyway there's a boycott on. We decide we want to improve the conditions for migrant workers and we can join consumers and chain stores in organized activity. It worked once with grapes. In this frame of mind, we can be rather startled when our administrators defend their position on lettuce by admitting that their policy on grapes had been equally impervious to moral argument. We knew that Harvard had stopped buying grapes, but little did we suspect prohibitive prices to be the reason.

So now with lettuce, Harvard admits that 20% of its purchases (amounting to 660 crates of lettuce, costing $3000 yearly) must come from sources having Teamster contracts in order to preserve university neutrality. Realistically, to call that policy a definitive stand in favor of substandard conditions for migrant workers is to exaggerate. So the students have been asking for a relatively small thing, a symbolic expression of sympathy with the cause.

When the administration did not interpret the petition as a convincing show of strength, the student organizers resorted to moderate civil disobedience. The subsequent refusal of roughly 800 students to cross picket lines to eat in their own House dining halls (when they could always eat elsewhere on interhouse) cannot be equated with unqualified support of the organizers position. But it caught our attention, and it gave us a political education.

When the administration sent the students back to the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life (whose subcommittee on Food Services frankly confessed that it didn't know why the students had been sent) we have new grounds for suspicion. There are ways of making decisions and ways of never making them. While the student organizers waited their turn to testify before the Food Services subcommittee, a student was presenting a meal rebate plan for kosher students wishing to take Kosher meals at Hillel. He was a senior, and he'd been at it for four years...