United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America

The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) was a labor union formed in 1937 and incorporated large numbers of Mexican, black, Asian, and Anglo food processing workers under its banner. The founders envisioned a national decentralized labor organization with power flowing from the bottom up. Although it was a short-lived, the UCAPAWA influenced the lives of many workers and had a major impact for both women and minority workers in the union.

The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing Allied Workers of America (or UCAPAWA) was an organization formed after the American Federation of Labor (AFL) ignored several delegate members plea to have better working conditions for farm and food processing workers. At its head stood an intense and energetic organizer named Donald Henderson who was a young economics instructor at Columbia University and a member of the Communist party. Henderson, who was also one of the founders of the People’s Congress, noted the importance this union placed on popularizing the conditions of black and Mexican American workers and organizing them as a way to improve their social and economic situation. Henderson declared that the “International Office was sufficiently concerned with the conditions facing . . . the Negro people and the Mexican and Spanish American peoples.” Henderson observed that both minority groups were deprived of civil rights, exploited to the point of starvation, kept in decayed housing, denied educational opportunities, and in Henderson’s view, “blocked from their own cultural development.” Henderson eventually, as President of the union, established it as the agricultural arm of Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1937 after having been abandoned by the AFL.

Unable to persuade the AFL to charter an international union of agricultural workers and increasingly drawn to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) industrial union structure, Henderson and representatives from locals throughout the country met in Denver in July 1937 to form UCAPAWA, which promptly received a charter from the CIO. Part of the reason behind its founding was to address the concerns of agricultural laborers and their counterparts in packing and canning during the Great Depression.

The UCAPAWA represented multi-cultural workers from Mexicans in sugar beet to black sharecroppers in Arkansas and Missouri. They were also very involved in Asian-American workers such as Filipino, Chinese and Japanese cannery workers in Washington. UCAPAWA was particularly strong among Mexican and Mexican American workers. In 1940, the San Francisco News called UCAPAWA the "fastest growing agricultural union in California", and attributed its success to its appeal to Mexican and Mexican American workers. The union was also supported by such outside organizations as the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Agricultural Organization, the J. Lubin Society, the Spanish-speaking Peoples Congress, and on occasion, local clergy.

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