Baldemar Velasquez has been fighting for five decades to improve wages and working conditions for farm workers and migrants.
Based in Toledo, the now 76-year-old labor leader is perhaps best-known for organizing a successful tomato-picking boycott against Campbell Soup Co. in the mid-’80s that yielded big economic gains for the area’s many local farm workers as well as the mom-and-pop tomato growers that once dotted the region.
His organizing vehicle is the union he created in 1967: the Farm Labor Organizing Committee headquartered at 1221 Broadway St. in Toledo, now an affiliate of the AFL-CIO.
As union president, he is still going strong. The avid runner who plays a mean guitar and coached his children’s sports teams at Toledo Christian School just won a breakthrough contract at a sweet potato packing shed in remote Rocky Mount, N.C.
Provisions include an 8 percent wage increase and unique benefits such as seniority rights to reclaim jobs after a layoff, a grievance procedure with binding arbitration over discipline, paid breaks, paid bereavement leave, and time-and-a-half overtime pay after a 40-hour week.