The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) was a union that worked to bring better working conditions to agricultural laborers and people working in the food-processing industry. It was founded in 1937 in reaction to the refusal of the American Federation of Labor (AF of L) to consider the needs of workers in agriculture and food processing. The union’s leader, Donald Henderson, an economics instructor at Columbia University and a card-carrying Communist Party member, recognized that the AF of L suppressed the rights of people of color, including Black Americans and Latino Americans. Henderson affiliated UCAPAWA with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a federation of unions focused especially on unskilled laborers and other underrepresented workers, in 1937, the same year that the union released this resolution.