United Farm Workers
American labor organization
The United Farm Workers of America, or more commonly just United Farm Workers (UFW), is a labor union for farmworkers in the United States. It was founded in 1966 through the merger of two workers' rights organizations, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) led by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Gilbert Padilla, and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) led by organizer Larry Itliong.
They allied and transformed from workers' rights organizations into a union as a result of a series of strikes in 1965, when the Filipino-American and Mexican-American farmworkers of the AWOC in Delano, California, initiated a grape strike, and the NFWA went on strike in support. As a result of the commonality in goals and methods, the NFWA and the AWOC formed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee in August 1966.
This organization was accepted into the AFL-CIO in 1972 and changed its name to the United Farm Workers Union. The UFW disaffiliated from the AFL–CIO in 2006.
History
Founding of the UFW
In 1952, César Chávez met Fred Ross, who was a community organizer working on behalf of the Community Service Organization. During Chávez's participation in the Community Service Organization, Fred Ross trained César Chávez in the grassroots, door-to-door, house meeting tactic of organization, a tactic crucial to the UFW's recruiting methods. The house meeting tactic successfully established a broad base of local Community Service Organization chapters during Ross's era, and Chávez used this technique to extend the UFW's reach as well as to find up and coming organizers. In the 1950s, Chávez and Ross developed 22 new Community Service Organization chapters in the Mexican-American neighborhoods of San Jose.
“United Farm Workers” enters the record as american labor organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what United, Farm and Workers can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7887749. VIAF identifies the subject as 122075105. The Library of Congress control number is n91008086. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1966, 1965, 1972 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “United Farm Workers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.