Eliseo Medina
Encyclopedia
Eliseo Vasquez Medina is a Mexican American
labor union
activist and leader, and advocate for immigration reform in the United States. From 1973 to 1978, he was a board member of the United Farm Workers
. He is currently an international vice president of the Service Employees International Union
, the first Mexican American to serve on the union's executive board.
, Zacatecas
, Mexico
, to Eliseo and Guadalupe Medina, both farm workers. In the 1940s and 1950s, his father was employed as a farmworker
in the United States, sometimes as an undocumented worker
and sometimes as a "bracero
" (documented Mexican worker brought to the U.S. temporarily to work in agriculture). His mother's parents had been killed in the Mexican Revolution
, and his mother had a strong sense of social justice
which she passed to her children.
In 1954, the family moved to Tijuana
and Medina's father worked as an undocumented worker in the U.S. for two years. His mother refused to allow the family to enter the United States until their father had obtained legal entry for them. The family settled that year in Delano, California
, where his father, mother, and two oldest sisters began working as produce pickers in the fields. Eliseo and the other two youngest children were enrolled in public school. Although he spoke only Spanish
when he entered school, he soon excelled not only in English but in his grades as well. He worked as a picker on the weekends and during school vacations to help earn money for his family. He graduated from the eighth grade with honors. After being told that Hispanic students should only take industrial arts
classes in high school, Eliseo quit school and became a grape and orange picker permanently.
He broke his leg when he was 19 years old, which left him unemployed for six months. On September 16, 1965, he participated in the first strike meeting held by the United Farm Workers (UFW), a meeting which began the Delano grape strike
. Although it took almost all the money he had (he literally broke open his piggy bank
to pay his membership dues), he joined the union that day. Within weeks, he had become a "strike captain," helping organize the picketers and others who arrived to support the strike each day. In the spring of 1966 (the strike having ended with the end of the picking season), Medina sought UFW help in getting a job, but was recruited by Dolores Huerta
to be a union organizer
in the UFW's attempt to form at union at the DiGiorgio Corporation
. He met César Chávez
as he was leaving the union office. He learned organizing techniques from Fred Ross
, a community organizer
and founder of the Community Service Organization
. He was beaten by Teamsters
organizers (who were vying with the UFW for the farmworkers) during the DiGiorgio organizing campaign. His experiences during the DiGiorgio organizing campaign led to his emergence as a top UFW leader.
and San Francisco, California
, helping to ensure that non-union grapes were not shipped overseas and that wine made from non-union grapes was not sold in stores. He worked closely with Dolores Huerta, and was jailed. In the fall of 1967, César Chávez sent him to Chicago
, Illinois
, to launch the Midwestern
segment of the national boycott
that formed the second part of the Delano grape strike. He was so shy that he often could not speak during interviews or press conferences, but he successfully launched the boycott and raised several thousand dollars for the UFW. In January 1968, Medina crossed the nation with a school bus of farmworkers to build support in the Northeast
for a secondary boycott of products made from Delano grapes. He concluded that Ross' organizing techniques did not translate well into urban areas and to secondary boycotts, and he began developing his own techniques and ideas about building support among non-farmworkers based on his Chicago experiences. Medina returned to the Midwest, and began holding sit-in
s in supermarket chains to publicize the farmworkers' plight, encourage consumers to stop eating table grapes, and pressure stores to stop carrying the produce. Many supermarket chains stopped selling grapes. He extended the boycott to S&W Fine Foods
, which stopped supplying table grapes (and which led DiGiorgio to negotiate its first contract with the UFW). He won widespread praise for his Midwest campaign.
In 1971, Dorothy Johnson joined the UFW boycott campaign in Chicago based on Medina's reputation. She followed Medina to California, Florida, Ohio, and back to California again. The couple were married at Medina's mother's house in Delano in 1976.
Medina also achieved a critical victory for UFW in Florida
. In 1971, The Coca-Cola Company
signed a contract with the union covering its Florida operations, and H.P. Hood and Sons
followed soon after for workers at its Florida Citrus brand operations in the state. In 1972, a coalition of agricultural owners and right-to-work advocates successfully encouraged state legislators to introduce a bill that would ban union hiring hall
s. Since the UFW relied heavily on hiring halls to control who worked in the fields, the ban would have humstrung the union in Florida and made it impossible for it to ensure that only union members received work. Eliseo Medina had already helped the UFW organize striking sugar cane workers in the state by publicizing the slave-labor conditions they worked under and the horrible sanitary situation in the fields (which included a typhoid outbreak). However, César Chávez had ordered him to return to California. The UFW's contracts with grape growers in the Coachella Valley
were expiring, but the growers were signing sweetheart contracts
with the Teamsters rather than negotiating with the UFW. A strike against the Coachella Valley growers had erupted, and Medina successfully led the farmworkers in opposing the Teamsters and settling the strike. Medina returned to Florida to try to stop the hiring hall bill. Although he had been counseled to merely water it down, Medina sought to stop the bill altogether. Medina, who had little political lobbying experience, implemented a massive letter-writing campaign and had an orange worker who had been forced to work on a slave gang testify before the state legislature. The bill was defeated.
César Chávez was ready to reignite the grape boycott, however, so he ordered Medina to shutter the UFW's Florida operations and had him move to Ohio
to begin boycott operations there. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO had given the UFW a charter as an affiliate of the national labor federation. The charter required the UFW to establish a constitution and hold leadership elections. Medina almost did not make it onto the board. He had agreed to run on Chávez's slate, but when a grassroots group of farmworkers formed their own slate to run against Chávez's hand-picked board, Medina naively agreed to be on the challenger slate as well (believing that workers ran their union). He was dropped from the Chávez slate, but after Manuel Chávez (César's cousin) explained to Medina what his actions meant, Medina rejoined the Chávez slate. On September 23, 1973, Eliseo Medina was elected for the first time to the UFW Board of Directors.
In early 1978, Medina was appointed the UFW's organizing director. In his first three months in office, the union won 13 elections and added more than 3,000 new members. He also changed the way the UFW approached strikes. In the past, the union would strike but end the walkout once the union had won the organizing election (held under the procedures of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act
). Employers would then file numerous appeals to the election, and over the many months (and sometimes years) it took for the appeals to be heard the union's support would vanish. Medina's new strategy was to keep the workers on strike even after the organizing election was won; this pressured employers to waive their legal right to appeal, recognize the union, and enter collective bargaining neogtiations immediately. If negotiations stalled, Medina's back-up strategy was ask union members to perform their jobs sloppily and then leave work. The employer would institute a lockout
, a strike would begin, and the employer would return to the bargaining table to get the harvest in.
Eliseo Medina was considered by many to be a successor to César Chávez. In 1977, Medina was elected Second Vice President of the UFW (replacing Philip Vera Cruz), which added credence to these assumptions. He was also probably the only member of the UFW who could have successfully challenged Chávez for the presidency of the union. UFW co-founded Dolores Huerta said, "He would have been president if he'd stayed." But Medina did not stay. For the past several years, Medina had been having serious disagreements with Chávez about the low level of worker input into the union's direction. Additionally, Medina felt Chávez was trying to turn the union into a poor people's social movement, a policy change Medina also disagreed with. "We were so close, and then it began to fall apart... At the time we were having our greatest success, Cesar got sidetracked. Cesar was more interested in leading a social movement than a union per se," he later said. Medina was also frustrated by Chávez's insistence that all UFW staff be unpaid volunteers, a policy not conducive to building a professional, long-lasting union. At a UFW executive board meeting shortly before he resigned, Chávez publicly criticized Medina for proposing that the union hire full-time organizers. Medina later said:
Medina resigned his union position in August 1978. The final straw appears to have been Chávez's dismantling of the union legal department. Medina wasn't alone in leaving, however. Between 1978 and 1981, many of the UFW's top leaders and staff left the union or were forced out, including Secretary-Treasurer and UFW co-founder Gilbert Padilla, UFW chief organizer Marshall Ganz
, legal department director Jerry Cohen and most of his staff, and union health services program director Jessica Govea.
for two years, helping organize workers in the University of California
. He later organized public employees in Texas
for the union.
In 1986, Eliseo Medina was appointed executive director of SEIU Local 2028, a public employee union based in San Diego, California
. Medina turned around the "failing" local: Membership soared from 1,700 to 10,000, and then Local 2028 absorbed a far larger independent union which had been SEIU's rival for decades.
Medina divorced his first wife in the mid-1990s. In 1995, he married widower and former UFW organizer Liza Hirsch Du Brul.
In 1996, Medina ran against token opposition for the position of international vice president on the SEIU executive board. He won, becoming first Mexican American
elected to an international office at SEIU. Medina was an active vice president, overseeing many successful union organizing campaigns in the right-to-work
Southwest
and Deep South
. He was a critical supporter of the Active Citizenship Campaign, an effort in the mid-1990s led by Miguel Contreras
and others to boost Latino voting in Los Angeles County (and which led to the election of Antonio Villaraigosa
as Mayor of Los Angeles
in 2005). He played a critical role in SEIU's successful strike and organizing campaign at the University of Miami
in 2001, engaging in a hunger strike
in support of the janitors being organized there. In 2005, he brought the Latino voter project Mi Familia Vota to Arizona, where he and others led a successful effort to enact by referendum
a rise in the state minimum wage
. He led SEIU's successful campaign to convince the AFL-CIO
to abandon its long-standing policy of opposition to illegal immigration and to support legalization of undocumented workers. Since the late 1990s, his views immigration have been largely been adopted by the American labor movement, and he was the Change to Win Federation
's chief lobbyist on immigrant rights in 2006. Medina was the guiding force behind SEIU's Justice for Janitors
in the 1990s and 2000s, and pushed the union to organize home healthcare workers by seeking legislative changes that would make the government the "employer of record" for these employees (allowing them to be easily organized by the tens of thousands). In 2000, he oversaw a Justice for Janitors organizing effort tied to collective bargaining negotiations that led to the largest wage increases in the history of the program, and in 2001 helped negotiate an employer neutrality and card check
agreement between SEIU and the large Catholic Healthcare West
hospital chain which led to thousands of new healthcare workers joining the union. As of 2006, he oversaw the activities of SEIU locals in 17 Southwestern and West Coast
states.
As of 2010, Medina was an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America
.
Mexican American
Mexican Americans are Americans of Mexican descent. As of July 2009, Mexican Americans make up 10.3% of the United States' population with over 31,689,000 Americans listed as of Mexican ancestry. Mexican Americans comprise 66% of all Hispanics and Latinos in the United States...
labor union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
activist and leader, and advocate for immigration reform in the United States. From 1973 to 1978, he was a board member of the United Farm Workers
United Farm Workers
The United Farm Workers of America is a labor union created from the merging of two groups, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee led by Filipino organizer Larry Itliong, and the National Farm Workers Association led by César Chávez...
. He is currently an international vice president of the Service Employees International Union
Service Employees International Union
Service Employees International Union is a labor union representing about 1.8 million workers in over 100 occupations in the United States , and Canada...
, the first Mexican American to serve on the union's executive board.
Early life
Medina was born in HuanuscoHuanusco
The municipality of Huanusco is located in the southwestern portion of the Mexican state of Zacatecas.Its coordinaates are 21° 46' north latitude and 102° 58' west longitude. The average elevation of the municipality is 500 meters above sea level and the municipality covers an area of roughly...
, Zacatecas
Zacatecas
Zacatecas officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Zacatecas is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 58 municipalities and its capital city is Zacatecas....
, Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, to Eliseo and Guadalupe Medina, both farm workers. In the 1940s and 1950s, his father was employed as a farmworker
Farmworker
A farmworker is a person hired to work in the agricultural industry. This includes work on farms of all sizes, from small, family-run businesses to large industrial agriculture operations...
in the United States, sometimes as an undocumented worker
Illegal immigration
Illegal immigration is the migration into a nation in violation of the immigration laws of that jurisdiction. Illegal immigration raises many political, economical and social issues and has become a source of major controversy in developed countries and the more successful developing countries.In...
and sometimes as a "bracero
Bracero Program
The Bracero Program was a series of laws and diplomatic agreements, initiated by an August 1942 exchange of diplomatic notes between the United States and Mexico, for the importation of temporary contract laborers from Mexico to the United States.American president Franklin D...
" (documented Mexican worker brought to the U.S. temporarily to work in agriculture). His mother's parents had been killed in the Mexican Revolution
Mexican Revolution
The Mexican Revolution was a major armed struggle that started in 1910, with an uprising led by Francisco I. Madero against longtime autocrat Porfirio Díaz. The Revolution was characterized by several socialist, liberal, anarchist, populist, and agrarianist movements. Over time the Revolution...
, and his mother had a strong sense of social justice
Social justice
Social justice generally refers to the idea of creating a society or institution that is based on the principles of equality and solidarity, that understands and values human rights, and that recognizes the dignity of every human being. The term and modern concept of "social justice" was coined by...
which she passed to her children.
In 1954, the family moved to Tijuana
Tijuana
Tijuana is the largest city on the Baja California Peninsula and center of the Tijuana metropolitan area, part of the international San Diego–Tijuana metropolitan area. An industrial and financial center of Mexico, Tijuana exerts a strong influence on economics, education, culture, art, and politics...
and Medina's father worked as an undocumented worker in the U.S. for two years. His mother refused to allow the family to enter the United States until their father had obtained legal entry for them. The family settled that year in Delano, California
Delano, California
Delano's climate is characteristic of the San Joaquin Valley. The weather is hot and dry during the summer and cool and damp in winter. Frequent ground fog known regionally as "tule fog" can obscure vision. Record temperatures range between 115°F and 14°F...
, where his father, mother, and two oldest sisters began working as produce pickers in the fields. Eliseo and the other two youngest children were enrolled in public school. Although he spoke only Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
when he entered school, he soon excelled not only in English but in his grades as well. He worked as a picker on the weekends and during school vacations to help earn money for his family. He graduated from the eighth grade with honors. After being told that Hispanic students should only take industrial arts
Industrial arts
Industrial Arts is an umbrella term originally conceived in the late 19th century to describe educational programs which featured fabrication of objects in wood and/or metal using a variety of hand, power, or machine tools...
classes in high school, Eliseo quit school and became a grape and orange picker permanently.
He broke his leg when he was 19 years old, which left him unemployed for six months. On September 16, 1965, he participated in the first strike meeting held by the United Farm Workers (UFW), a meeting which began the Delano grape strike
Delano grape strike
The strike began when the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, mostly Filipino farm workers in Delano, California, led by Philip Vera Cruz, Larry Itliong, Benjamin Gines and Pete Velasco, walked off the farms of area table-grape growers, demanding wages equal to the federal minimum wage...
. Although it took almost all the money he had (he literally broke open his piggy bank
Piggy bank
Piggy bank is the traditional name of a coin accumulation and storage receptacle; it is most often, but not exclusively, used by children. The piggy bank is known to collectors as a "still bank" as opposed to the "mechanical banks" popular in the early 20th century. These items are also often used...
to pay his membership dues), he joined the union that day. Within weeks, he had become a "strike captain," helping organize the picketers and others who arrived to support the strike each day. In the spring of 1966 (the strike having ended with the end of the picking season), Medina sought UFW help in getting a job, but was recruited by Dolores Huerta
Dolores Huerta
Dolores C. Huerta is the co-founder and First Vice President Emeritus of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO , and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.-Early life:...
to be a union organizer
Union organizer
A union organizer is a specific type of trade union member or an appointed union official. A majority of unions appoint rather than elect their organizers....
in the UFW's attempt to form at union at the DiGiorgio Corporation
DiGiorgio Corporation
DiGiorgio corporation was a fruit-growing corporation and eventual conglomerate in the 20th century. Once a vast company, owning much of California's central valley farm land, and multi-billion dollar corporation, a massive restructuring in the 1990s limited its breadth...
. He met César Chávez
César Chávez
César Estrada Chávez was an American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist who, with Dolores Huerta, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers ....
as he was leaving the union office. He learned organizing techniques from Fred Ross
Fred Ross
Fred Ross was an American community organizer. He founded the Community Service Organization in 1948, which, with the support of the Industrial Areas Foundation, organized Mexican Americans in California. The CSO in San Jose, CA gave a young Cesar Chavez his first training in organizing, which he...
, a community organizer
Community organizing
Community organizing is a process where people who live in proximity to each other come together into an organization that acts in their shared self-interest. A core goal of community organizing is to generate durable power for an organization representing the community, allowing it to influence...
and founder of the Community Service Organization
Community Service Organization
The Community Service Organization was an important California Latino civil rights organization, most famous for training Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta...
. He was beaten by Teamsters
Teamsters
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is a labor union in the United States and Canada. Formed in 1903 by the merger of several local and regional locals of teamsters, the union now represents a diverse membership of blue-collar and professional workers in both the public and private sectors....
organizers (who were vying with the UFW for the farmworkers) during the DiGiorgio organizing campaign. His experiences during the DiGiorgio organizing campaign led to his emergence as a top UFW leader.
UFW
Medina began working full time for the UFW in 1967. He worked in Los AngelesLos Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...
and San Francisco, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, helping to ensure that non-union grapes were not shipped overseas and that wine made from non-union grapes was not sold in stores. He worked closely with Dolores Huerta, and was jailed. In the fall of 1967, César Chávez sent him to Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
, to launch the Midwestern
Midwestern United States
The Midwestern United States is one of the four U.S. geographic regions defined by the United States Census Bureau, providing an official definition of the American Midwest....
segment of the national boycott
Boycott
A boycott is an act of voluntarily abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with a person, organization, or country as an expression of protest, usually for political reasons...
that formed the second part of the Delano grape strike. He was so shy that he often could not speak during interviews or press conferences, but he successfully launched the boycott and raised several thousand dollars for the UFW. In January 1968, Medina crossed the nation with a school bus of farmworkers to build support in the Northeast
Northeastern United States
The Northeastern United States is a region of the United States as defined by the United States Census Bureau.-Composition:The region comprises nine states: the New England states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont; and the Mid-Atlantic states of New...
for a secondary boycott of products made from Delano grapes. He concluded that Ross' organizing techniques did not translate well into urban areas and to secondary boycotts, and he began developing his own techniques and ideas about building support among non-farmworkers based on his Chicago experiences. Medina returned to the Midwest, and began holding sit-in
Sit-in
A sit-in or sit-down is a form of protest that involves occupying seats or sitting down on the floor of an establishment.-Process:In a sit-in, protesters remain until they are evicted, usually by force, or arrested, or until their requests have been met...
s in supermarket chains to publicize the farmworkers' plight, encourage consumers to stop eating table grapes, and pressure stores to stop carrying the produce. Many supermarket chains stopped selling grapes. He extended the boycott to S&W Fine Foods
Del Monte Foods
Del Monte Foods is an American food production and distribution company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Del Monte Foods is one of the country's largest producers, distributors and marketers of branded food and pet products for the U.S. retail market, generating approximately $3.6...
, which stopped supplying table grapes (and which led DiGiorgio to negotiate its first contract with the UFW). He won widespread praise for his Midwest campaign.
In 1971, Dorothy Johnson joined the UFW boycott campaign in Chicago based on Medina's reputation. She followed Medina to California, Florida, Ohio, and back to California again. The couple were married at Medina's mother's house in Delano in 1976.
Medina also achieved a critical victory for UFW in Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
. In 1971, The Coca-Cola Company
The Coca-Cola Company
The Coca-Cola Company is an American multinational beverage corporation and manufacturer, retailer and marketer of non-alcoholic beverage concentrates and syrups. The company is best known for its flagship product Coca-Cola, invented in 1886 by pharmacist John Stith Pemberton in Columbus, Georgia...
signed a contract with the union covering its Florida operations, and H.P. Hood and Sons
HP Hood
HP Hood LLC is an American dairy company based in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. Hood was founded in 1846 in Charlestown, Massachusetts by Harvey Perley Hood. Recent company acquisitions by HP Hood have expanded its reach from predominantly New England to the broader United States...
followed soon after for workers at its Florida Citrus brand operations in the state. In 1972, a coalition of agricultural owners and right-to-work advocates successfully encouraged state legislators to introduce a bill that would ban union hiring hall
Hiring hall
In organized labor, a hiring hall is an organization, usually under the auspices of a labor union, which has the responsibility of furnishing new recruits for employers who have a collective bargaining agreement with the union....
s. Since the UFW relied heavily on hiring halls to control who worked in the fields, the ban would have humstrung the union in Florida and made it impossible for it to ensure that only union members received work. Eliseo Medina had already helped the UFW organize striking sugar cane workers in the state by publicizing the slave-labor conditions they worked under and the horrible sanitary situation in the fields (which included a typhoid outbreak). However, César Chávez had ordered him to return to California. The UFW's contracts with grape growers in the Coachella Valley
Coachella Valley
Coachella Valley is a large valley landform in Southern California. The valley extends for approximately 45 miles in Riverside County southeast from the San Bernardino Mountains to the saltwater Salton Sea, the largest lake in California...
were expiring, but the growers were signing sweetheart contracts
Sweetheart deal
The term sweetheart deal or sweetheart contract is used to describe an abnormally favorable contractual arrangement. A golden parachute is an example of a type of sweetheart deal...
with the Teamsters rather than negotiating with the UFW. A strike against the Coachella Valley growers had erupted, and Medina successfully led the farmworkers in opposing the Teamsters and settling the strike. Medina returned to Florida to try to stop the hiring hall bill. Although he had been counseled to merely water it down, Medina sought to stop the bill altogether. Medina, who had little political lobbying experience, implemented a massive letter-writing campaign and had an orange worker who had been forced to work on a slave gang testify before the state legislature. The bill was defeated.
César Chávez was ready to reignite the grape boycott, however, so he ordered Medina to shutter the UFW's Florida operations and had him move to Ohio
Ohio
Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...
to begin boycott operations there. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO had given the UFW a charter as an affiliate of the national labor federation. The charter required the UFW to establish a constitution and hold leadership elections. Medina almost did not make it onto the board. He had agreed to run on Chávez's slate, but when a grassroots group of farmworkers formed their own slate to run against Chávez's hand-picked board, Medina naively agreed to be on the challenger slate as well (believing that workers ran their union). He was dropped from the Chávez slate, but after Manuel Chávez (César's cousin) explained to Medina what his actions meant, Medina rejoined the Chávez slate. On September 23, 1973, Eliseo Medina was elected for the first time to the UFW Board of Directors.
In early 1978, Medina was appointed the UFW's organizing director. In his first three months in office, the union won 13 elections and added more than 3,000 new members. He also changed the way the UFW approached strikes. In the past, the union would strike but end the walkout once the union had won the organizing election (held under the procedures of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act
California Agricultural Labor Relations Act
The California Agricultural Labor Relations Act is a landmark statute enacted by the state of California which became law on June 5, 1975, and which establishes collective bargaining for farmworkers in that state....
). Employers would then file numerous appeals to the election, and over the many months (and sometimes years) it took for the appeals to be heard the union's support would vanish. Medina's new strategy was to keep the workers on strike even after the organizing election was won; this pressured employers to waive their legal right to appeal, recognize the union, and enter collective bargaining neogtiations immediately. If negotiations stalled, Medina's back-up strategy was ask union members to perform their jobs sloppily and then leave work. The employer would institute a lockout
Lockout (industry)
A lockout is a work stoppage in which an employer prevents employees from working. This is different from a strike, in which employees refuse to work.- Causes :...
, a strike would begin, and the employer would return to the bargaining table to get the harvest in.
Eliseo Medina was considered by many to be a successor to César Chávez. In 1977, Medina was elected Second Vice President of the UFW (replacing Philip Vera Cruz), which added credence to these assumptions. He was also probably the only member of the UFW who could have successfully challenged Chávez for the presidency of the union. UFW co-founded Dolores Huerta said, "He would have been president if he'd stayed." But Medina did not stay. For the past several years, Medina had been having serious disagreements with Chávez about the low level of worker input into the union's direction. Additionally, Medina felt Chávez was trying to turn the union into a poor people's social movement, a policy change Medina also disagreed with. "We were so close, and then it began to fall apart... At the time we were having our greatest success, Cesar got sidetracked. Cesar was more interested in leading a social movement than a union per se," he later said. Medina was also frustrated by Chávez's insistence that all UFW staff be unpaid volunteers, a policy not conducive to building a professional, long-lasting union. At a UFW executive board meeting shortly before he resigned, Chávez publicly criticized Medina for proposing that the union hire full-time organizers. Medina later said:
- At a time when we should have been focused on consolidating and building the union, we got involved in a lot of things that drew attention from what I felt was our priority mission. ... My interest was building a farmworkers union. The goal was not building a farmworkers movement per se. It created a lot of tension.
Medina resigned his union position in August 1978. The final straw appears to have been Chávez's dismantling of the union legal department. Medina wasn't alone in leaving, however. Between 1978 and 1981, many of the UFW's top leaders and staff left the union or were forced out, including Secretary-Treasurer and UFW co-founder Gilbert Padilla, UFW chief organizer Marshall Ganz
Marshall Ganz
Marshall Ganz is a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He worked on the staff of the United Farm Workers for sixteen years before becoming a trainer and organizer for political campaigns, unions and nonprofit groups...
, legal department director Jerry Cohen and most of his staff, and union health services program director Jessica Govea.
SEIU
After leaving the UFW, Eliseo Medina worked for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal EmployeesAmerican Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is the second- or third-largest labor union in the United States and one of the fastest-growing, representing over 1.4 million employees, primarily in local and state government and in the health care industry. AFSCME is part of the...
for two years, helping organize workers in the University of California
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
. He later organized public employees in Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
for the union.
In 1986, Eliseo Medina was appointed executive director of SEIU Local 2028, a public employee union based in San Diego, California
San Diego, California
San Diego is the eighth-largest city in the United States and second-largest city in California. The city is located on the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, immediately adjacent to the Mexican border. The birthplace of California, San Diego is known for its mild year-round...
. Medina turned around the "failing" local: Membership soared from 1,700 to 10,000, and then Local 2028 absorbed a far larger independent union which had been SEIU's rival for decades.
Medina divorced his first wife in the mid-1990s. In 1995, he married widower and former UFW organizer Liza Hirsch Du Brul.
In 1996, Medina ran against token opposition for the position of international vice president on the SEIU executive board. He won, becoming first Mexican American
Mexican American
Mexican Americans are Americans of Mexican descent. As of July 2009, Mexican Americans make up 10.3% of the United States' population with over 31,689,000 Americans listed as of Mexican ancestry. Mexican Americans comprise 66% of all Hispanics and Latinos in the United States...
elected to an international office at SEIU. Medina was an active vice president, overseeing many successful union organizing campaigns in the right-to-work
Right-to-work law
Right-to-work laws are statutes enforced in twenty-two U.S. states, mostly in the southern or western U.S., allowed under provisions of the federal Taft–Hartley Act, which prohibit agreements between labor unions and employers that make membership, payment of union dues, or fees a condition of...
Southwest
Southwestern United States
The Southwestern United States is a region defined in different ways by different sources. Broad definitions include nearly a quarter of the United States, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah...
and Deep South
Deep South
The Deep South is a descriptive category of the cultural and geographic subregions in the American South. Historically, it is differentiated from the "Upper South" as being the states which were most dependent on plantation type agriculture during the pre-Civil War period...
. He was a critical supporter of the Active Citizenship Campaign, an effort in the mid-1990s led by Miguel Contreras
Miguel Contreras
fernando Contreras was an American labor union leader. He "was known as a king-maker for both local and state politicians."...
and others to boost Latino voting in Los Angeles County (and which led to the election of Antonio Villaraigosa
Antonio Villaraigosa
Antonio Ramón Villaraigosa , born Antonio Ramón Villar, Jr., is the 41st and current Mayor of Los Angeles, California, the third Mexican American to have ever held office in the city of Los Angeles and the first in over 130 years. He is also the current president of the United States Conference of...
as Mayor of Los Angeles
Mayor of Los Angeles, California
The mayor of Los Angeles is the chief executive officer of the city. He is elected for a four-year term and limited to serving no more than two terms. Under the California Constitution, all judicial, school, county, and city offices, including those of chartered cities, are nonpartisan...
in 2005). He played a critical role in SEIU's successful strike and organizing campaign at the University of Miami
University of Miami
The University of Miami is a private, non-sectarian university founded in 1925 with its main campus in Coral Gables, Florida, a medical campus in Miami city proper at Civic Center, and an oceanographic research facility on Virginia Key., the university currently enrolls 15,629 students in 12...
in 2001, engaging in a hunger strike
Hunger strike
A hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance or pressure in which participants fast as an act of political protest, or to provoke feelings of guilt in others, usually with the objective to achieve a specific goal, such as a policy change. Most hunger strikers will take liquids but not...
in support of the janitors being organized there. In 2005, he brought the Latino voter project Mi Familia Vota to Arizona, where he and others led a successful effort to enact by referendum
Referendum
A referendum is a direct vote in which an entire electorate is asked to either accept or reject a particular proposal. This may result in the adoption of a new constitution, a constitutional amendment, a law, the recall of an elected official or simply a specific government policy. It is a form of...
a rise in the state minimum wage
Minimum wage
A minimum wage is the lowest hourly, daily or monthly remuneration that employers may legally pay to workers. Equivalently, it is the lowest wage at which workers may sell their labour. Although minimum wage laws are in effect in a great many jurisdictions, there are differences of opinion about...
. He led SEIU's successful campaign to convince the AFL-CIO
AFL-CIO
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, commonly AFL–CIO, is a national trade union center, the largest federation of unions in the United States, made up of 56 national and international unions, together representing more than 11 million workers...
to abandon its long-standing policy of opposition to illegal immigration and to support legalization of undocumented workers. Since the late 1990s, his views immigration have been largely been adopted by the American labor movement, and he was the Change to Win Federation
Change to Win Federation
The Change to Win Federation is a coalition of American labor unions originally formed in 2005 as an alternative to the AFL-CIO. The coalition is associated with strong advocacy of the organizing model...
's chief lobbyist on immigrant rights in 2006. Medina was the guiding force behind SEIU's Justice for Janitors
Justice for Janitors
Justice for Janitors is a social movement organization that fights for the rights of janitors across the US and Canada. It was started in 1985 in response to the low wages and minimal health-care coverage that janitors received...
in the 1990s and 2000s, and pushed the union to organize home healthcare workers by seeking legislative changes that would make the government the "employer of record" for these employees (allowing them to be easily organized by the tens of thousands). In 2000, he oversaw a Justice for Janitors organizing effort tied to collective bargaining negotiations that led to the largest wage increases in the history of the program, and in 2001 helped negotiate an employer neutrality and card check
Card check
Card check is a method for American employees to organize into a labor union in which a majority of employees in a bargaining unit sign authorization forms, or "cards," stating they wish to be represented by the union...
agreement between SEIU and the large Catholic Healthcare West
Catholic Healthcare West
Catholic Healthcare West is a California-based not-for-profit public benefit corporation that operates hospitals in California, Arizona, and Nevada. As such, it is exempt from federal and state income taxes...
hospital chain which led to thousands of new healthcare workers joining the union. As of 2006, he oversaw the activities of SEIU locals in 17 Southwestern and West Coast
West Coast of the United States
West Coast or Pacific Coast are terms for the westernmost coastal states of the United States. The term most often refers to the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Although not part of the contiguous United States, Alaska and Hawaii do border the Pacific Ocean but can't be included in...
states.
As of 2010, Medina was an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America
Democratic Socialists of America
Democratic Socialists of America is a social-democratic organization in the United States and the U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International, an international federation of social-democratic,democratic socialist and labor political parties and organizations.DSA was formed in 1982 by a merger of...
.