On this day in 1970, the largest U.S. farm worker strike in history, known as the "Salad Bowl Strike", began when field workers, organized with César Chávez and the United Farm Workers (UFW), struck, doubling the price of lettuce and costing sellers $500,000 a day.
The UFW had just won the Delano Grape Strike, which had lasted an astonishing five years, winning contracts with dozens of grape growers that were the first of their kind in agricultural history.
The origins of the Salad Bowl Strike lay in a jurisdictional dispute with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which had won the right to organize field workers after concluding a successful strike of drivers and packers in the lettuce producing sector in July.
The UFW strongly contested this claim, and, after negotiations broke down, between 5,000-7,000 field workers went on strike. The labor action was not just a strike, but also included mass pickets, boycotts, and secondary boycotts by the participants.
The price of lettuce almost doubled immediately, and the interruption to work cost lettuce growers approximately $500,000 a day. The strike was a bitter dispute which suffered violence and state repression. César Chávez, a leading labor organizer, was jailed after refusing to stop the picketing on court order. On November 4th, 1970 a UFW regional office was bombed.
The strike ended on March 26th, 1971 when the Teamsters and UFW signed a new jurisdictional agreement reaffirming the UFW's right to organize field workers, however jurisdictional disputes between the UFW and Teamsters continued for years afterward. In 1975, the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (CALRA) became law, establishing the right to collective bargaining for farmworkers in that state, a first in U.S. history.
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People that think using "they" as a singular pronoun is confusing because they is plural should be followed around with an air horn and have it blown in their ears every time they casually refer to someone as "they" so they can realize just how often most people do that normally.
I remember that as a kid, when my only understanding of the word "gender" was that I was told to say "sex" instead, I found it very silly that English had no dedicated gender-neutral singular pronoun. It seemed like a weird hole in the language for no apparent reason, and it seemed strange to me that you either had to establish every hypothetical individual's gender when it didn't matter, or else settle for a quantity-ambiguous pronoun.
But then, once I started mentioning it to family as an "Isn't it odd that no word exists for this common and intuitive use case?" I started to get what was happening from how uncomfortable they were with the idea. I'm pretty sure those bigots were scared of enbies for decades before they even heard of them. Now they'll complain about quantity-ambiguity to disguise how angry they are at enbies for existing
English is an absolutely baffling shit-show of a language and even young people know it.