Eliseo Vasquez Medina (born January 24, 1946) is a Mexican-American labor union activist and leader, and advocate for immigration reform in the United States.
[1] The family settled that year in Delano, California, where his father, mother, and two oldest sisters began working as produce pickers in the fields.
[10][14] His experiences during the DiGiorgio organizing campaign attracted Chavez's notice, and Medina was sent to Chicago to lead the union's boycott of grapes in that city.
[15] 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.
[16][17] He was so shy that he often could not speak during interviews or press conferences, but he built one of the most successful boycott operations in the country, which ultimately helped force the growers to sign historic contracts in 1970.
[1] 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.
[22] 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 halls.
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).
[23] 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.
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 negotiations immediately.
[27] If negotiations stalled, Medina's back-up strategy was ask union members to perform their jobs sloppily and then leave work.
[1][20][28] In 1977, Medina was elected Second Vice President of the UFW (replacing Philip Vera Cruz), which added credence to these assumptions.
[30] 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.
[1] At a UFW executive board meeting shortly before he resigned, Chávez publicly criticized Medina for proposing that the union hire full-time organizers.
[33] After leaving the UFW, Eliseo Medina worked for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees for two years, helping organize workers in the University of California.
[1] In 1986, Eliseo Medina was appointed executive director of SEIU Local 2028, a public employee union based in San Diego, California.
[36] Medina was an active vice president, overseeing many successful union organizing campaigns in the right-to-work Southwest and Deep South.
[38] 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.
[37] 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.
[1] 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.
[43] In November and December 2013, Medina undertook a 22-day hunger strike, at the age of 67, to draw attention to the need for action on immigration reform.