Behind the Story: Can U.F.W. Make a Comeback?

Decades after Cesar Chavez made the United Farm Workers a powerhouse in California’s fields, the union has lost much of its clout.

U.F.W.’s membership in the 1970s was around 60,000. Now it’s closer to 5,500, less than 2 percent of the state’s agricultural work force.

But the union is hoping to regain its relevance and the ability to mobilize public opinion as it did under Chavez, as Kurtis Lee and Liliana Michelena recently reported for The New York Times. The question is whether the union can pull it off.

“This is a major moment for labor organizing nationwide,” Kurtis told me. “We’ve seen unions win elections among white-collar workers in the tech and media industries. But that has not been the case for some of the most marginalized workers in the country — farmworkers, especially those here in California.”

Kurtis and Liliana traveled to several communities in the Central Valley to report on unionization efforts among farmworkers in California’s fields, which supply about half the produce grown in the United States for the domestic market.

As they explained, after the U.F.W. rose to prominence through grass-roots organizing in the 1960s, it began to lose influence in the 1980s. The union continues to advocate farmworker protections in Sacramento and to secure local contracts for workers, but it has also seen precipitous membership drops in recent decades.

But the U.F.W. believes that a new California law could help reverse its decline. Signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, Assembly Bill 2183 was the union’s biggest legislative victory in years, paving the way for farmworkers to vote in union elections without in-person election sites.

The U.F.W. and its supporters said the law was needed because of how farmworker demographics had shifted since the 1970s, when many farmworkers were U.S. citizens. Migration from Mexico and Central America in the following decades created a work force comprising primarily undocumented workers.

That has led to heightened fear among farmworkers that seeking unionization could get them fired, or even deported, advocates of the new measure say. The law will help protect against voter suppression and retaliation, since unionization votes would be kept private from employers, they argue.

Though Newsom vetoed similar legislation in 2021, he signed A.B. 2183 into law after Representative Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, and President Biden publicly pushed him to do so. “In the state with the largest population of farmworkers, the least we owe them is an easier path to make a free and fair choice to organize a union,” Biden said at the time.

As is often the case, what happens in California going forward will most likely be watched closely by unions and activists who work on behalf of farmworkers elsewhere in the country.

“There is new energy, new legislation and attention from the public in terms of workers’ rights,” said Christian Paiz, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who has researched farm labor in the state. “We could be on the front lines of a renaissance.”

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What you get

For $5 million: A Spanish-style home in Los Angeles, a renovated 1905 bungalow in Palo Alto or a Cape Cod-style retreat in Laguna Beach.

Where we’re traveling

Today’s tip comes from Gabrielle Pascoe, who lives in Hollywood:

“My favorite place to visit in California is the window seat of an airplane flying into LAX at night. It’s an experience unparalleled in beauty, perhaps because the remarkable visuals are enhanced by the flowering of an inner warmth. The coming home feeling. But even without the feeling, the visuals alone are a knockout.

Lights pool in the valley. They pour like a lava flow down through the crevices of vast hills surrounding the city. It’s not nature, but it mimics nature; the spread of lights, sparks embedded in blackness, pushing outward like the lacy foam of waves climbing up a beach. Each light glimmers like a diamond, and together they are a bed of glowing embers that stretches for miles. There simply is no more beautiful sight in the world than this glistening blanket.

Push ahead in line. Pay extra for your ticket. Trick your travel partner. Do whatever you have to do to get that window seat on your flight into the city of Angels. You won’t regret it.”

Tell us about your favorite places to visit in California. Email your suggestions to CAtoday@nytimes.com. We’ll be sharing more in upcoming editions of the newsletter.

And before you go, some good news

In Los Angeles, a whole ecosystem has developed around watching planes flying into and out of Los Angeles International Airport. In a city where people are primed to view the everyday cinematically, the distance between person and airplane can feel thrillingly thin.

Plane spotters fill well-situated parks, beaches and even restaurants’ outdoor patios to catch a glimpse of low-flying aircraft. The watchers resemble amateur meteorologists, logging serial numbers in notebooks and uploading stats to obscure databases.

The Times published a photo essay that captures watchers’ collective sense of awe:

“It harks back to a time when airplane travel was something of an occasion, a little bit magical.

But is it not still? On the ground, what a sensation as the air moves over and past you, as you’re physically, psychically transported for an instant, harnessing the power of a plane from a patch of lawn outside a drive-through.”