TOLEDO – Baldemar Velasquez, the man who created a powerful migrant workers union by doing things once thought to be impossible, has a suggestion for the leaders of the United Auto Workers union, who will soon begin bargaining for a new contract.
“You have to see things in terms of a global struggle against exploitation,” he said, during an interview at the headquarters of FLOC, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee he founded in 1967.
He even offered them an intriguing practical idea. But first – if you don’t know much about Baldemar himself, you should.
When he founded his union, he was just 20, a migrant worker who had been working in the tomato fields of Ohio since he was four but somehow found the drive and determination to get to college.
Ten years later, after struggling to win contracts with individual farmers, he tried a completely different strategy: He decided to lead a major boycott against the international firms that buy the produce.
In northwest Ohio, that meant the Campbell’s Soup Company. After carefully working for years to build public support for the farmworkers and their plight, FLOC announced a boycott against the giant firm in 1979 and strikes against growers who supplied them.
FLOC, then seen as a ragtag band of unsophisticated migrant workers was given no chance against Campbell’s. The effort dragged on for years. “Tom Donahue, the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, told me, ‘Baldemar, you are beating your head up against a brick wall. Campbell’s is never going to sign an agreement with a group of migrant workers who are not their employees.’ ”
But they kept fighting. Cesar Chavez came and marched to Campbell’s headquarters with FLOC. The union eventually pressured leaders of other companies who were on Campbell’s board.
The union shrewdly drew public attention to the conditions the migrants had to endure. After seven and a half years, FLOC proved everyone wrong. Campbell’s gave in and signed a revolutionary “three-way” collective bargaining agreement in February 1986. Campbell’s agreed to pay growers more, and the farmers agreed to more pay and better conditions for the migrants.
Initially, it covered only a handful of tomato farms in Ohio and cucumber growers in Michigan, but it quickly spread to other farms and other companies, including Vlasic and H.J. Heinz.
But then, FLOC was threatened by something that has affected autoworkers – the threat of outsourcing to Mexico. The companies began talking about not renewing their contracts with FLOC and instead buying tomatoes from Mexico, where labor was cheaper.
“So we went to down to Mexico,” said Velasquez, a Texas native who spoke Spanish before he learned any English. “We organized the workers and they got better conditions and an 18 percent raise. That was the last we heard about them (Campbell’s) going to Mexico,” the labor leader said.
Whether that tactic would work for the United Auto Workers is doubtful. But something else Velasquez said makes sense. “They talk about an immigration crisis, but most of these people wouldn’t want to leave their homes if they could make a living wage there.”
Rather than trying to build a wall and lock up and deport workers flooding to our border, he thinks it would make more sense for Washington to put pressure on these countries to treat their people better, and to allow unions to organize and fight for better working conditions without risking intimidation, torture and death.
But while unions don’t have to face death squads in the United States, many of them – notably the UAW — have undergone huge membership losses and a series of financial scandals in recent years.
Baldemar Velasquez thinks some unions have gotten away from their roots. “I believe all labor unions need to be community organizations. If you go back and look at the early unions, they did that,” he said. FLOC certainly does that. After the years of its initial struggle, they eventually established their headquarters not far from downtown Toledo, in a building on Broadway Street on the heavily Hispanic south side. They renovated the building, designing it to be a state-of-the art “training, organizing and conflict resolution center.”
FLOC helped spur further renovation efforts on the block, and then, about five years ago, started an after school and training program for neighborhood kids, a “Homies Union.”
“Kids who get in trouble are kids who get out of school and don’t have anything to do from 3 to 6 in the afternoon.” Almost by accident, some started coming to FLOC. They came up with a training program, helped give them a sense of belonging, life skills, the beginnings of conflict resolution and negotiating skills.
Soon a county commissioner came to see what was happening, and before long the Homies program won a $250,000 grant.
That doesn’t mean they have lost sight of their main mission. FLOC has been fighting hard to win better conditions for tobacco workers in North Carolina, attempting once again to negotiate a three-way contract with R.J. Reynolds, tobacco farmers and workers.
“I’m concerned about the poor people. That’s who I represent,” Velasquez said. “The middle class, I support, God bless ‘em, but I have to look out for the poor. Too many people don’t want to get their hands dirty.”
Baldemar Velasquez is 72 now, and has been at this almost all his life; he has nine grandchildren he loves to take camping.
Does he ever see himself retiring?
“This isn’t really a job, it’s a life, a calling,” he said.
“When you older and have the kind of experience we’ve gained over the years, I think you have an obligation to share it.”
