Facing Diversity

No one person better reflects the new diversity of the American labor movement than Linda Chavez-Thompson.

"AFSCME is the kind of place where, when you complain about a glass ceiling, they hand you a jackhammer and tell you, 'Go for it,'" Linda Chavez-Thompson told the delegates.

In AFSCME, Chavez-Thompson rose to the rank of International vice president. She was the first Latina elected to the AFL-CIO Executive Council, and last year became the first-ever executive vice president of the AFL-CIO.

"Make no mistake about it. On that day when I was elected, each and every one of you was elected," she said.

As a top officer of the AFL-CIO, she crisscrossed the country in the "America Needs a Raise" campaign, which invited workers to town meetings. "We've heard workers like a 65-year-old woman in Seattle, who has to work three jobs just to survive. She is mainly a home care provider, but she even had to take on a paper route at her age so she could pay the bills," said Chavez-Thompson.

Chavez-Thompson knows the difficulties that working people face. She is the daughter of a sharecropper and her first job was picking cotton in her native Texas at 30 cents an hour.