Cesar Chavez Mother Jones

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Social advocates are the only reason why this world gets better generation after generation and the world would much worse without them. The biography “About Cesar” by the Cesar Chavez Foundation (CCF) is about the life of Cesar Chavez and how he became the American hero who fought for workers’ rights and inspired people to stand up for themselves. By assembling a 125 mile march to the president of the United States, Mary Harris Jones, also known as Mother Jones, brought attention to child labor and textile workers in the biography “Mother Jones: Fierce Fighter for Workers’ Rights” by Judith Pinkerton Josephson. Both Cesar Chavez and Mother Jones fought for workers rights, however, Cesar Chavez had a more important and influential impact on …show more content…
In particular, Mother Jones was able to convince people to form a march to the president’s house. The author says, “They would march the mill children all the way to the president of the United States-- Theodore Roosevelt” (Josephson, 6). As a result, Mother Jones completed the march with very few children left only to be ignored by Roosevelt. Mother Jones later tried to contact the president, but was refused for the last time and Mother Jones returned for home, unsuccessful. On the contrary, even though Mother Jones never got the president’s full attention, she certainly got everybody elses’. Jones was able to bring enough attention to the infamy of child labor and textile workers. For example, “Though she had not met with the president, Mother Jones had drawn the attention of the nation to the problem of child labor” (Josephson, 9). Henceforth, 35 years later, the federal government finally passed a child labor law in 1938 and although Mother Jones wasn’t alive, she definitely played a big role in helping this law pass because without her bringing all of this attention to child workers, nothing ever might have …show more content…
At age 11, Cesar and his family became migrant farm workers because they lost their farm during the great depression and once he completed the eighth grade, he worked full-time as a farmer to help support his family. He later joined the U.S. navy and when he returned from his services he married his wife Helen Fabela. Additionally, the next few years would bring Cesar many strikes, marches, victories and defeats. In fact, Cesar formed his own union called the United Farm Workers union (UFW) which helped him make many changes to farmers’ working laws and conditions. In particular, the union created contracts requiring things such as resting periods, clean drinking water, and much more. To demonstrate, “The first union contracts requiring rest periods, toilets in fields, clean drinking water, hand washing facilities, banning discrimination in employment and sexual harassment of women workers, requiring protective clothing against pesticide exposure, prohibiting pesticide spraying while workers are in the fields and outlawing DDT and other dangerous pesticides” (CCF, 24). As a result, farmers’ lives and working conditions improved vastly and Cesar began to obtain fame all over the country. Furthermore, on top of all of Cesar’s accomplishments, he was a great motivational speaker and a big inspiration to many people. The text states, “Cesar liked to say that

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