Maurice 'Mo' Jourdane, California lawyer who fought for farmworkers, dies at 83

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Set us as preferred Maurice “Mo” Jourdane, the California attorney who led a long legal fight to ban the short-handled hoe, or el cortito, improving the lives of farmworkers across the state, died Saturday.He was 83.Jourdane spent his life championing the causes he believed in, such as safe conditions for workers, voting rights and standing up for the oppressed, his family said.

“It’s fitting that he died on Labor Day weekend, ...a weekend to give homage to workers,” his son, Jonathan Julio Jourdane, said.

“He always made sure to remind us that if we see someone getting harmed, we do something about it.And he didn’t just say that, that’s how he lived his life.” Jourdane died at his San Diego home after a two-year battle with cancer, according to his family.

Entertainment & Arts Activist Dolores Huerta helped create the exhibition ‘Help Wanted/Leave Now,’ with plans in the works for travel.He took up the case against the short-handled hoe — which many laborers at the time called el brazo del Diablo, or the devil’s arm — in 1969, according to a historian’s account of the case, after spending a day toiling in the field with the tool himself and feeling extreme back pain “after just a couple hours.” The tool required farmworkers to bend down over rows of crops given its short length, a task they often had to do for hours.The United Farm Workers said the work caused “crippling back [pain] and skeletal injuries.” It took several years for Jourdane to reach a favorable outcome in the case, but in 1975, the California Supreme Court ruled that the short-handled hoe was a violation of state safety standards, according to a 2025 column published in newspapers across the state that marked the 50th anniversary of the ruling.

The piece called the case a breakthrough that “represented a new e...