Chapter 11. The Union
Trying to organize North Carolina farmworkers
I was not expecting his reference to slavery. Fernando Torres is a veteran H-2A worker at a North Carolina farm that grows tobacco, sweet potatoes, and soybeans. I asked him one day how things could be better for H-2A farmworkers like himself. He replied that it was an interesting question, and he wanted to take some time to think about it. Six hours later, I got my answer.
“Me gustaría que fuera más parejo,” he wrote to me on WhatsApp. I would like it to be more equal.
“Acepto que venimos a trabajar, pero en ocasiones nos ven como unos esclavos, no como personas que, por nuestras manos, los patrones tienen lo que tienen.”
I accept that we come here to work, but sometimes the bosses see us as slaves, not as people who, by our hands, have what they have.
It was an eloquent observation: The work of a farmworker is the very reason that North Carolina growers can live in nice houses, spend free time with their families, and enjoy other privileges an H-2A farmworker can only dream of. Fernando would like growers to recognize this fact and treat their farmworkers accordingly, and not, as he sometimes feels, like enslaved human beings.
I asked him for an example of when he feels enslaved.
“Pues a veces los patrones exigen de más el trabajo, por ejemplo, ahora que estamos en el camote quieren todo rápido y en las salidas no dejan descansar a los compañeros quieren que den vuelta al surco rápido y pues uno es humano, el cual se cansa.”
Well, sometimes the bosses demand more work, for example, now that we are harvesting sweet potatoes, they want everything fast. They do not let us rest. They want us to turn the furrow quickly. Because one is human, one gets tired.
Humans get tired. Workers need rest. To deny it is, by definition, inhumane. Yet this team of sweet potato harvesters, according to Fernando, is not getting enough rest. I did not confirm Fernando’s specific claim. But he didn’t seem to exaggerate other things we communicated about over the season, so I found his claims plausible, especially when I watched a video from another worker at an entirely different North Carolina farm.
The video showed more than a dozen farmworkers, each bending at the waist to scoop potatoes out of the dirt and into a red harvesting bucket as they worked their way down freshly plowed furrows of soil. The workers’ arms seemed to move as quickly as possible—this was not a leisurely operation. When a bucket was full, the worker ran it to a nearby truck, then tossed it up to another worker, who emptied it, then tossed it back down to the waiting man so he could run to get more. Those two or three seconds, waiting for the man on the truck to empty, then return his bucket, was his only opportunity to catch his breath. Otherwise, he worked at full speed, running between furrow and truck and refilling his bucket as fast as he could. All the workers here ran. Might they be working at a piece rate, I wondered, where more buckets meant more money? No. The mayordomo where the video was taken confirmed to me they haven’t worked at a piece rate for years. There was no financial incentive to run. The only apparent incentive was to please their supervisor and keep their jobs.
In our WhatsApp exchange, Fernando also described their crowded labor camp house, where thirty men shared two bathrooms, two showers, and two stoves. I’ve not been inside his camp buildings, though I have been to his camp several times and seen the exteriors of the houses. And I’ve seen inside other camps with ratios of men to toilets along those lines. Fernando also wrote of reporting problems with the vehicles that shuttle them from place to place, only to be ignored, and then later, when the vehicles broke down, being chastised for not reporting it earlier.
Historically, low-paid workers in the United States and many other countries have developed a solution to addressing grievances like Fernando’s. This is, of course, the labor union. When workers are unionized, they can speak as one to air grievances without fear of retaliation. In some parts of the country, especially in northern and western states, unions help workers air grievances as a matter of routine. In the southeast? Not so much.
But here’s the thing: Fernando is, technically, represented by a union. His employer is a member of the North Carolina Growers Association. This entitles him, as one of roughly ten thousand workers on an NCGA contract, to grievance procedures spelled out in a collective bargaining agreement—a union contract—between his employer and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, or FLOC. Those grievance procedures are designed for just the sort of situation Fernando described to me. He is not the only one in this boat. There are thousands of farmworkers in North Carolina who, on paper, should benefit fully from the FLOC contract but who, in reality, do not.
To understand FLOC, one must know something about Baldemar Velasquez. Born in Texas in 1947 to migrant farmworker parents, he grew up poor. He told interviewer Bill Moyers his bed was a couch shared with his brother and numerous rats. At mealtime, he added, the two boys would count the beans on their plates to be sure each was getting the same number. Sensing his parents were being cheated by their employers, he used math skills acquired at school, calculating the number of rows in an acre of sugar beets, to prove it. By the age of twelve, Baldemar says he was already thinking of how he could help farmworkers everywhere escape poverty and oppression.
At the age of twenty, he founded FLOC in Ohio. There, he launched a boycott of the Campbell Soup Company with the help of Cesar Chavez, the legendary labor organizer and cofounder with Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers labor union. Eight years later, Campbell’s reached an agreement that recognized FLOC as a union and provided its tomato pickers with wage protections, medical and hospitalization insurance, and other benefits. Nothing like that had happened before in that part of the country. FLOC chalked up similar successes with Campbell’s Vlasic pickle subsidiary, as well as the H. J. Heinz Company, another well-known American food processing company that depends on farmworkers.
Bolstered by his successes in Ohio, Baldemar took his mission to North Carolina. Here, in 1999, he launched a boycott of the Mt. Olive Pickle Company, accusing it of securing cucumbers from growers who mistreated their workers. The company not only denied the charges but characterized them as misinformation. The company did not hire farmworkers, its president noted, and therefore was not accountable for how workers picking its cucumbers were treated. The rebuttal fell on deaf ears at FLOC headquarters in Dudley, a tiny town about an hour southeast of Raleigh. With the help of allied organizations and energized advocates, the FLOC did all they could to get consumers to stop buying Mt. Olive pickles, hoping to force the company to take responsibility for the treatment of key workers in the supply chain.
One of those advocates was Lori Fernald Khamala. Born in 1977 in Charlotte, North Carolina, and raised a Quaker, she attributes her passion for social justice to that religious upbringing, a passion that did not take long to turn into action. In the second grade, she wrote a play about Rosa Parks, whose 1955 refusal to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, was a key moment in the US civil rights movement. Speaking today about what came next for the grade-school playwright brightens up Lori as if it had happened yesterday.
“Rosa Parks was a very old woman when I was in the second grade,” she told me, “But she came to Charlotte, and I got to meet her and shake her hand!”
In the late 1990s, Lori studied abroad in Mexico. There, in the tiny town of Alista, she noticed something peculiar: There were no young men there. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in the early 1990s, had, by numerous accounts, devastated the town’s corn-based economy by allowing US corn growers to sell their grain, whose cost of production was heavily subsidized by US taxpayers, at an artificially low price. Men of farmworking age had lost their jobs, forcing them to go north to the United States for work, leaving their families behind.
Lori would meet displaced Mexican farmworkers just a few years later as an intern at Student Action with Farmworkers. One time, visiting a labor camp with a FLOC delegation, her conversation with the workers there did not last long. An irate grower chased them away. “You can’t be here talking to my guys!” Lori recalls the woman shouting, which made her wonder: Why couldn’t these men have visitors at their homes on their time off work? And why did the woman refer to these human beings as if they were possessions? The experience only deepened her commitment to helping farmworkers.
In 2001, the twenty-four-year-old Quaker took a job as state coordinator for the National Farmworker Ministry, a faith-based organization supporting the organizing of farmworkers. She worked out of a tiny office in the basement of the Eno River Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, a church in Durham, North Carolina. For the next three years, this was her base for organizing prayer vigils, joining pickets, and seeking endorsements for the boycott of Mt. Olive pickles.
Lori’s efforts, combined with those of scores of other energized farmworker advocates like her, were unrelenting. And those efforts were not limited to North Carolina. In an email exchange, Baldemar noted how "most of the pressure came from the associate members in Toledo who marched, picketed and got the regional Kroger chain stores, the Meijer food chain stores in NW Ohio and SE Michigan to remove Mt. Olive Pickles from their stores." Associate memberships are available to non-farmworkers who wish to support the union.
In 2004, the pickle company agreed to recognize the union. And the NCGA agreed to sign a collective bargaining agreement, or CBA, with FLOC. It was the first time that farmers in this historically antiunion state had ever signed a union contract. Like most CBAs, this one put numerous measures in place to ensure that workers could raise and resolve grievances without putting their jobs at risk.
In fifty-nine pages, with minimal legalese, the CBA spells out numerous terms of an agreement between employer and employee. The employer here is the NCGA and any of its member farms, and a worker is any farmworker who signs an H-2A contract with the NCGA. There are some basic things you might expect in any such agreement, such as an agreement to follow H-2A rules, health and safety laws, and so on. Some things are very specific to the H-2A program, such as the order in which workers are considered for openings each year, with priority going to workers with seniority and a good work history, and very specific reasons why a worker might not be hired back—leaving before the end of a contract period without a good reason, for example. The seniority measures are meant to thwart any blacklisting. The contract also spells out a grievance procedure, with details such as how long a worker has to report an issue, and an escalation procedure for unresolved grievances.
The Mt. Olive victory gave Baldemar Velasquez more than just a powerful agreement for workers in North Carolina. It allowed him to open an office in Monterrey, Mexico, where most H-2A farmworkers coming to work in the United States stop for visa processing. There, in 2007, the young organizer Santiago Cruz began working for FLOC. His duties included helping prospective workers apply for H-2A jobs, informing them of their rights under the NCGA contract, and encouraging them to join the union. For just 2.5 percent of their weekly wages, Santiago would explain, they could be dues-paying members of FLOC, supporting its mission on their behalf.
FLOC’s presence in Monterrey, now personified by Santiago, did not sit well with Mexican farm labor contractors. These entrepreneurs recruit workers inside Mexico for H-2A jobs in the United States, often charging illegal recruiting fees. Workers often borrow money to pay these fees, turning them into indentured servants. FLOC posed a clear threat to the contractors’ status quo. Nor was FLOC welcomed by business leaders and local officials in Monterrey, who for years had fought off the unionization of workers in the area.
Nobody at FLOC will ever forget what happened to Santiago in April 2007. That’s when somebody bound his hands and feet and beat him to death. He had worked at FLOC for less than a month. The crime remains unsolved but is widely believed to have been meant as a message to FLOC and anyone else wishing to organize workers: Stay away.
Baldemar shaped a different message. To audiences on a speaking tour, Santiago’s killing—inside FLOC, they refer to it as an assassination—exemplified one of the reasons Mexican farmworkers traveling to the United States need FLOC’s help: Someone must help them fight the corruption they face in Mexico in their effort to simply earn wages so they can feed their families. One day Baldemar delivered that message at the law school of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. One student in the audience listened especially close.
Justin Flores was born in 1984 in Puerto Rico where his father worked in HR for the clothing manufacturer Hanes. In time, the family found its way to North Carolina, where Justin took advantage of in-state tuition to attend college. After completing his law degree at UNC, he hesitated before taking the state bar exam. He wasn’t sure he wanted to practice law in North Carolina, or indeed, if he wanted to practice law at all. In 2009, recalling Baldemar speech, a fellow student put him in contact with the union president who offered him a six-month job at FLOC, helping to prepare for the union’s next quadrennial convention. Justin took the job, found his calling, and stayed on. At the next convention, in 2013, members elected him vice president, second in command only to Baldemar. He was reelected to that post in 2017. Justin never did take the bar exam.
With Baldemar living in Ohio, upon election to VP, Justin became the most senior member of FLOC’s North Carolina staff, which varied in size but at any time might consist of half a dozen or so employees. Among their chief responsibilities was the administration of the NCGA contract. This mostly involved helping workers resolve grievances that might range in severity from a broken washing machine to wage theft. With several hundred farms across the state, each an independent operation, some cooperative with the union and some openly hostile, this by itself was a full-time job for the skeletal staff. And it wasn’t their only job. They also devoted hours to organization, or the enlisting of new union members.
“We’re smaller than many unions but trying to do a lot,” Justin told me, “With no comms department, no legal department, no organizing department—just a few people trying to do it all.”
One of the reasons for FLOC’s meager budget is the challenge of enlisting dues-paying members. North Carolina is a right-to-work state. In 1947, the state made it illegal to require union membership as a condition of employment. As such, while all ten thousand or so NCGA farmworkers are entitled to benefits under the contract, their paying of dues is voluntary. Even when a worker does join the union, collecting those dues can be a challenge. Not every grower will deduct union dues from a farmworker’s paycheck, some are lax in making payments and need reminding, and so on.
This helps explain why farmworkers like Fernando Torres realize little or no tangible benefit from FLOC's presence in North Carolina. While he and every other NCGA farmworker is party to the contract, only those who pay 2.5 percent of their weekly pay to FLOC as dues are considered members with rights, for example, to vote at their quadrennial conventions.
FLOC nowadays is not what it used to be. According to their annual report filed with the federal government for 2023, FLOC has 396 dues-paying members in North Carolina, or about 4% of eligible workers. This is down from the roughly six thousand, or 60%, who reportedly signed up following the signing of the CBA twenty years ago. Assuming an average contract length of six months, at the 2023 H-2A pay rate for North Carolina, each dues-paying member presumably pays around $350 to FLOC for a total dues inflow of just under $150,000. FLOC must get by on this, plus other sources of income, for example the Campaign for Migrant Worker Justice, a 501-3(c) that acts as a fundraising arm for FLOC, and contributions from the NCGA in accordance with the CBA. But its operating budget is greatly diminished.
In keeping with the CBA, FLOC might be called on to provide services to not just the small number of dues-paying members but to potentially any of nearly ten thousand NCGA workers. It’s a bit like running an insurance company where only one in twenty policyholders pays a premium, yet any policyholder might file a costly claim. This situation is not unique to North Carolina. Across the United States, there are more workers represented by a union than those who sign up as members. But North Carolina stands out, nonetheless. In 2022, only 2.8 percent of workers here belonged to a union; only South Carolina, at 1.7 percent, had fewer union members.
“In reality,” Justin told me when we met over coffee, “we’re understaffed and can only go to so many farms and deal with so many grievances a year. If a union member calls and a nonunion member calls, the union member will get priority.”
Baldemar wishes that more workers on the NCGA contract appreciated how they benefit from FLOC whether they pay dues or not. He stressed this point in our email exchange:
There is a stark difference between workers under FLOC's CBA and those who are not and perhaps those who benefit often forget that these guarantees were hard fought for, that their brothers and sisters experience something completely different on different farms… H-2A workers not covered under FLOC's CBA must vie each season for a visa, many pay hundreds of dollars in illegal fees to secure a spot, and if their farmer or supervisor is abusive, they cannot transfer farms, rather if they speak up, they are at a risk of being deported.
Some NCGA farmworkers know about FLOC but also know, from experience or by reputation, not to bother asking for help. Some steer clear for another reason. I asked NCGA farmworkers at a few camps for their impressions of FLOC. Some told me they either didn’t know about FLOC or didn’t understand the benefits of joining the union. One told me their grower simply forbade it. This is an employee who is party to a contract with a federally recognized union, entitled by law to all provisions of that contract, telling me his employer did not want his workers to even think about their union. So they don’t.
So it is that, for many reasons, and despite FLOC making history in 2004, a fleetingly small number of North Carolina twenty-five thousand H-2A farmworkers benefit in a tangible way from the existence of this union.
Naturally, FLOC wants to grow. One way is to convince more workers already covered by the NCGA contract to sign up as members. Another is to sign new contracts with non-NCGA growers, expanding their potential membership. Convincing new employers to sign a FLOC contract is not easy.
In early 2016, having filed a lawsuit against a prominent grower, accusing him of underpaying his workers and other offenses, they saw an opportunity. Lawyers for the plaintiff farmworkers offered to settle the lawsuit out of court if the grower would agree to a collective bargaining agreement with workers on his farm, that is, to let his workers unionize with FLOC. This would keep him out of court.
Later that year, however, the Republican-controlled legislature in Raleigh proposed Senate Bill 615. Among its provisions, the bill would make it illegal to enter into a settlement agreement that included union recognition. It also banned agreements that required an employer to deduct union dues from an employee’s paycheck, limiting FLOCs ability to collect dues from its handful of existing members. Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, signed the bill into law in July the following year as part of the North Carolina Farm Act of 2017. No longer would North Carolina growers agree to recognize FLOC to settle a lawsuit, even if they wanted to. They could not. It was illegal.
In 2017, despite FLOC’s setbacks, the halo over Baldemar Velasquez could not have shone brighter. He was, and remains, the most recognized farm labor activist since the era of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. In May of 2017, to help laud his achievements, celebrated author Sandra Cisneros headlined FLOC’s fiftieth anniversary celebration in Toledo, Ohio; both she and Baldemar had received coveted MacArthur Foundation fellowships in the late 1990s. At the FLOC quadrennial convention in 2017, also in Toledo, Baldemar was reelected as its president. But at the age of seventy, having led FLOC since its founding in 1967, he surprised nobody when he signaled it would be the last such time he would stand for reelection.
“One of my main initiatives right now is to bring forth the young leadership that we have in FLOC,” he told a reporter for the Toledo newspaper The Blade. “I’m going to be around for a few more years and surround them with the help and support that I wish I had when I was their age.”
To “the young leadership” he was referring to, this was welcomed news. Justin and the rest of the staff at Dudley admired Baldemar. And they accepted the natural distance between a visionary leader living in one state and staff on the ground in another. But according to Justin, they were disagreeing with him on how to handle more and more issues, such as the delicate matter of whether a grower should be compelled to bring back older workers, say those over age 60. The North Carolina staff tended to side with the worker in such cases, whereas Baldemar, it seemed to them, tended to overly favor the grower.
The deepening schism is traceable to an ideological difference. When trying to make things better for farmworkers, one can focus on the worker and the resolution of individual grievances, or on the bigger system and how to improve it such that there are fewer grievances in the first place. Ideally, one does both, as FLOC very clearly has. But if there is a perception of tilting too far one way or the other, especially when operational resources are scarce, then conflict is inevitable. By 2017, the folks at Dudley felt Baldemar was focusing too much on growers and not enough on workers.
Justin and other staff members saw a light at the end of the tunnel. 2021 would be an election year. In 2020, FLOC had considered postponing the convention due to Covid, but Baldemar agreed with his staff they should proceed with the convention as planned. So Baldemar would only be at the helm for another year. Let’s let him go out the way he wants to go out, his staff decided. He’s done a lot and deserves it.
But then, Baldemar changed his mind. At least, it appeared that way. In January 2021, he surprised his staff with news he was running for reelection as FLOC president after indicating in 2017 that this would be his last term. The staff now had a choice. They could either go another four years with Baldemar at the helm, or they could support a challenger. So it was that in April of 2021 Baldemar got a surprise of his own. Leticia Zavala, a longtime staffer, let it be known inside FLOC that she was running for president too. Sometime after her announcement, Baldemar decided to postpone the convention after all. The election would be held a year later, in September 2022, in Toledo, Ohio.
The longtime union president had good reason to worry about Leticia’s candidacy. She had spent much of her life at FLOC. Born in 1979 in Zacapu, a small town in the Mexican state of Michoacán, her family migrated to the United States in 1985 and immediately joined one of the traveling migrant streams of farmworkers. She was six.
“We would do the strawberry and citrus harvest in in Florida,” she explained to me in an interview. “Then we would go up to Ohio and do the cucumber and tomato harvest and then we would sometimes go to Michigan or Pennsylvania for apples.”
As a child and teenager, Leticia Zavala admired Baldemar Velasquez and considered him a family friend. In time, she became more and more active with FLOC, eventually becoming its lead organizer in North Carolina. In 2017 she was elected to the union’s executive board. With her lifetime history and countless visits to farmworkers at their camps, Leticia was well known and trusted by many of FLOC’s rank-and-file members.
Despite the prospect of a contested election, one thing happened in 2021 that lifted the spirits of FLOC staff and supporters: In September, a federal judge struck down one of the two measures of the state’s 2017 Farm Act. It was unconstitutional, Judge Loretta Biggs declared, to prohibit settlement agreements that included union recognition. It was still okay to ban agreements requiring mandatory deduction of union dues from paychecks, but FLOC could continue to employ union recognition as a bargaining chip when negotiating to settle lawsuits with growers.
Phew, they thought at Dudley. Half a win was better than none.
On March 17, 2022, Leticia Zavala publicly announced her candidacy for president of FLOC. And she did more than throw her hat into the ring. She and her supporters named a slate of three candidates, one each for president, vice president, and secretary-treasurer. They also organized a committee and gave it a name: El Futuro Es Nuestro, or It’s Our Future (IOF). On their website, they made it clear their platform put workers first:
[We] are ready to take on the challenges that farmworkers are facing and advocate for members’ priorities, from Covid protections, to addressing grievances with the NC Growers Association, to fighting corruption on the journey from Mexico to the United States.
If this were to be a democratic election, the IOF leaders decided, the 2022 convention must be held in North Carolina. September is a peak time for tobacco workers. Having to take two unpaid days off work to travel seven hundred miles each way to the convention in Toledo would make it difficult for many union members to cast their votes. Most FLOC conventions had been held in Toledo, but in 2013, the convention was held in North Carolina, so there was precedent for the request. The IOF committee gathered signatures of nearly three hundred farmworkers, asking that the convention be held in North Carolina. Baldemar turned them down, citing questions about the authenticity and legitimacy of the signatures and concerns about the added cost of holding the convention in North Carolina.
At the election in Toledo, Baldemar collected 135 votes compared with Leticia’s 21, the latter being almost exactly the number of member farmworkers who made an overnight trek to Toledo to vote for her. After the convention, each candidate would issue conflicting analyses of the participating voters. According to Baldemar, 124 were farmworkers or former farmworkers, and 32 were “mostly immigrant and strong White [supporters].” According to Leticia and her committee, however, fewer than 25 of the voters were dues-paying members of the union. The rest were mostly associate members, not farmworkers, who by paying thirty dollars were entitled to vote.
After the election, Leticia filed a formal complaint with the US Department of Labor’s Office of Labor-Management Standards. She alleged that Baldemar “sought and gained an undemocratic advantage for his supporters and campaign by holding an in-person election in Ohio.” This was right around the time Baldemar fired her. He also fired Maria Mejia, another of Leticia’s supporters. He had fired Justin Flores and three other supporters of Leticia earlier in the year.
Baldemar appeared unfazed by what happened at the convention. According to an article published in the National Catholic Register a month after the convention:
Velasquez said he won’t “lose sleep” over this latest battle. “I’ve had other people who didn’t like me, didn’t like my decisions, things like that,” he said. “Did I make the right decision all of the time? No. But I’ve made more right ones than wrong ones.”
Before the wrenching year of 2022 came to a close, FLOC would suffer a defeat in its battle with state lawmakers. In December, not three months after the divisive convention in Toledo, a federal appeals court upheld both provisions of the 2017 Farm Act that had been aimed apparently at FLOC. The state was allowed to ban not only settlements that would force a grower to collect union dues, but also settlements that required a grower to recognize a union. No longer could FLOC use that bargaining chip when negotiating settlements to its lawsuits against growers.
In June 2023, the US Department of Labor sided with Leticia Zavala in her complaint against Baldemar Velasquez, concluding that FLOC “failed to provide its members with a reasonable opportunity to vote,” adding that the Toledo location and length of time for voting put North Carolina members at a disadvantage. Baldemar agreed to hold a new election—this one to be supervised by the office of the US Secretary of Labor. In return, the DOL agreed to postpone legal proceedings against the union.
FLOC held a new election on September 26, 2024, two years after the disputed one, with members this time able to cast votes in North Carolina. Leticia Zavala, however, was not on the ballot. She had decided not to run again for president of the union, and IOF leadership had decided not to support any candidates. IOF was maturing into a farmworker advocacy and support organization, apart from FLOC, with 300 North Carolina farmworker members and programs of its own.
Baldemar received 210 votes, far more than the 19 cast for his only opponent, farmworker Luis Zamora Vasquez. Again, the US Department of Labor investigated allegations of misconduct, and again they found some. Two months after the election, they concluded that FLOC at two campaign events had violated prohibitions against using union resources to promote a candidate. Considering Baldemar’s decisive margin of victory, however, the DOL determined the number of eligible voters at these events was insufficient to affect the outcome of the election. They would not pursue civil action to set aside the 2022 election.
With the threat of legal action by the DOL out of the way, Baldemar Velasquez could resume his leadership of FLOC, his legacy mostly untarnished. Even recent detractors admire what he has done in support of farmworkers. Leticia Zavala herself made this clear.
“We're firm believers of unions and unionism,” she told me. “Going against Baldemar does not mean that we're going against the union. And it doesn't mean that we oppose or discredit all the great work that he did, right? It's just that it's not working anymore.”