Cesar Chavez Day: Honoring a Man Who Helped Change the World

Some people are born destine to impact the world forever. Second generation, migrant farmer Cesar Chavez was one of those people. An America of Latino descent, Chavez was born in 1927 and went on to champion the Farm Worker's Civil Rights Movement for well over three decades. March 31st, his birthday, is celebrated annually by millions of people around the world.

Chavez first entered the political arena as an activist in the 1950's when he signed on to be a part of a venerable civil rights group known as the Community Service Organization. The experience so moved him that he felt compelled to move on and start the National Farmer's Association, now known as the United Farm Workers Association of America. That however, was just one of Cesar Chavez's lasting contributions to the world.

Here are three more.

1. Agriculture Industry's first labor contracts

Cesar Chavez's tireless efforts to legitimize the agriculture industry's treatment of migrant workers yielded the first labor contracts the industry was to ever see. The labor contracts championed by Chavez and his follows helped to ensure that migrant farm workers received fair wages, pensions, medical care and other benefits enjoyed by laborers in other industries.

2. California's 1975 Agriculture Labor Relations Act

Chavez was also the impetus behind one of the first and perhaps most significant pieces of agriculture legislation, California's 1975 Agriculture Labor Relations Act. It guaranteed migrant farmers the right to unionize and to this day remains the only such act in the nation.

3. Lobbied against use of pesticides in farming

Labor relations were not the only cause Cesar Chavez championed. In his later years he became concerned about the widespread effects of the agricultural industry's pesticide use. In the late 1980s he helped to bring the issue to the forefront of America's consciousness through a series of boycotts and protests.

In the wake of Chavez's death in 1993, his beloved United Farm Workers Association of America and others, continue the fight against the agricultural industry's use of chemicals like Methyl iodide. Used in strawberry and tomato farming, Methyl iodide is known to seep into ground water and is believed to be a carcinogen.

Sources:
beginningfarmers.org
cesarechavezfoundation.org