FLOC leader gives advice to fourth graders who wrote his biography

After speaking to a fourth-grade class at Maumee Valley Country Day School Tuesday, Toledo-based labor activist Baldemar Velasquez now has his own biography.

“We noticed there were no biographies about him, so we wanted to make the first one,” 10-year-old Kaya Watkins said.

The 24 fourth graders first visited Mr. Velasquez at the Farm Labor Organizing Committee's headquarters in Toledo last fall. They were “moved by his life story” and decided to channel their enthusiasm into writing it themselves.

Ten-year-old Layla Fogarty said her class wanted to learn more about Mr. Velasquez when they heard he met Cesar Chavez.

“We were impressed with what he was telling us, so we started making a book and writing about him,” she said.

“It got really far and we got really into it. After we started drawing pictures, it became a book, so we wanted to celebrate it and give it to him.”

The fruit of their labors: a shiny, hardcover book they wrote and illustrated themselves. Sitting in a circle around Mr. Velasquez on Tuesday, they took turns reading each chapter to him aloud.

Mr. Velasquez, 76, spent his childhood as a migrant worker picking produce in farm fields throughout Ohio and Michigan. He told the students that his family of 11 often endured inhumane conditions, once living in a chicken coop with no running water.

“When I was your age working in the hot, humid weather, it seemed like there was no purpose in life,” he told the class. “The only purpose was the end of the row you had to finish, and when you finished that one, there was another one just like it.”

Mr. Velasquez is known for his successful organizational efforts against the Campbell Soup Co. in the 1980s, at one point leading workers on a 500-mile march from Toledo all the way to Campbell headquarters in Camden, N.J. After years of refusing to back down, the company finally relented, raising farmworkers’ wages and improving working conditions.

The fourth graders made sure to include that part in their book.

“The march convinced the Campbell Soup Company not to use children for farming,” the students read. “It also convinced them to include migrant housing and day care for children while their parents worked.”

Spurred by his childhood experiences, Mr. Velasquez has fought for more than five decades to secure fairer treatment for migrant workers.

“How do we hold each other accountable to do the right thing for everybody, not just ourselves? That’s what we did with the Campbell Soup Company,” Mr. Velasquez said.

“If what the opposition wants is just and good, and it doesn’t take advantage of other people, then you can come to an understanding.”

There has to be a way for everyone to live together, he added, and be able to meet their family’s basic needs.

Mr. Velasquez and his father founded FLOC, an arm of the industrial labor union AFL-CIO, in 1967. Today it has more than 23,000 members, and Mr. Velasquez still serves as its president.

In a last word of advice, Mr. Velasquez told the class his persistence through countless obstacles ended up being the key to his success.

“What I thought was a curse was actually a gift,” he said. “When bad things happen to you, that’s your testimony that you can share with other people later in life. If you don’t learn to overcome, stick with it and never give up, then you’re going to succeed.”