betrayed. Consider story Cesar Chavez told of a grower who decades earlier had his employees terrified because of his skill with a whip. The grower, it was said, could flick the ashes off a man’s cigarette with his whip, and nobody wanted to defy him.

One day one of his workers noticed a bee buzzing around the grower’s head and asked him why he didn’t use his whip to kill the bee. The grower, Cesar went on to say, just smiled. Then he said, “Bees are different from anything I’ve whipped before. If you go after one, they all come after you.”

Cesar paused at this point. “That is what the union means,” he said. “The union is like the bees. The man with the whip is like the grower. He cannot do anything to one of us without having all of us come after him.”