A Labor Heroine from the Heart of Texas
She's American labor's highest ranking woman and Latino, but her inspiration began at home.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Everything AFSCME’s Linda Chavez-Thompson needs to know (just about) she learned growing up near Lubbock, Texas.
The AFL-CIO executive vice president learned about hard work and low wages hoeing cotton for nine summers. She started working in the fields at age 10 for 30 cents an hour instead of the 50 cents her sister and parents earned. The next year, she was paid the adult rate.
She learned the importance of sharing. As the second girl in a family of eight, Chavez-Thompson generally got clothes her older sister had outgrown. But the tomboy who climbed every tree, fell through the ice in the pond and tore up all her dresses probably didn’t send much that was useful down to her younger sisters.
Her first job action took place in the family when her sisters and brothers decided their mother should not work in the fields. "She was killing herself," says Chavez-Thompson. "I got the job of telling our father."
And she learned how it feels to be helpless in the face of the "system" on her very first day of school when the teacher changed her name. "I went to school in the morning as Lydia, and I came back as Linda," she recalls. No one ever explained why the change was made, but it was not unusual for teachers to change Mexican-American students’ names.
By the mid-1960s when she was hired as a secretary for the Laborers local in Lubbock, Chavez-Thompson knew that workers and their families often needed help. She pitched in to get them that help wherever possible. She served as interpreter for the Mexican-American members who made up 60 percent of the membership. She revamped the hiring hall procedure that put the members into jobs. A few years later, "200 city employees dropped in the local’s lap because they were tired of the way they were being treated."
The position of the public employee was frustrating to Chavez-Thompson because unlike the Laborers, public workers in Texas do not have a contract spelling out work rules and pay rates.
Chavez-Thompson began to work with these new members. "The public employees didn’t have anybody except me to help them." Then a strange thing happened: "I began to love this thing called public employees/public sector." And she was on the road to AFSCME.
Being a woman union leader in the 1970s was not easy. Being a woman union leader in the "good ole boy" state of Texas was even harder. Chavez-Thompson kept having to prove herself. But her most difficult — and painful — experience came when a former mentor turned on her. His tactics took a personal edge, including a year of "anonymous" — and widely circulated — letters attacking her work and her personal life.
"I can laugh about it now," she says, "but I wasn’t doing a lot of laughing about it then. His attack on me took a dig at my self-confidence. He tore at my own self-respect."
It took a crisis — and workers who needed her — to rebuild her faith in herself.
"In 1980, a group of 33 workers literally took their jobs in their hands and walked off their jobs at the college district because they were so abused," she recalls. They were fired. The district hired her former mentor; his opinion was used to justify the firings.
"I had the lives of 33 people in my hands," says Chavez-Thompson. "If I could put a marker on what made me or broke me as far as my abilities or skills or talents, it was that moment."
The firings came a month before the college community district elections. "We put 33 campaign workers on the ground and won big. We got these people their jobs back, seniority, back pay, the whole thing. And then there was no holding me back."
Chavez-Thompson became business manager of AFSCME Local 2399 in San Antonio and went on to the founding executive director post of Texas State Council 42. She was elected AFSCME International vice president in 1988.
Then, in 1994, she received a call from AFSCME Pres. Gerald W. McEntee. He asked her to be part of the AFL-CIO’s New Voice slate and run for a position that didn’t even exist at that time — executive vice president (EVP). It would mean leaving Texas, leaving her children and grandchildren. But — in typical fashion — once she decided to run, Chavez-Thompson poured her all into the five-month campaign.
During that time, the leaders of most of the other AFL-CIO unions came to respect her and decided to fight for her. "That was the bottom line at 10:30 Wednesday night" before the election as the New Voice slate tried to negotiate a unified plan of action. "The other side said, ‘No’ on the EVP position," she says. "And, to a one, the International presidents who were behind the slate said, ‘No EVP, no deal.’ And the position was created."
Now Chavez-Thompson crisscrosses the country talking with and listening to union members. Sometimes she talks about her 9-month-old granddaughter, Lydia. "We need to change America. We need to change America for our children," she says, "so that what happened to me 47 years ago will never happen to her. She will be able to carry her name to whatever she’s going to be."
Grandma will make sure of it.
By Susan Ellen Holleran
