While some growers were willing to negotiate, big canners such as the Campbell Soup Company were unwilling to pay the higher prices which would accompany a unionized workforce.

Six years later, not much had changed even though FLOC had conducted a well-publicized 560-mile march from Toledo to Campbell Soup headquarters in Camden, New Jersey, in 1983.

Rogers developed a corporate campaign strategy which included a resolution and well-publicized demonstration at a Campbell Soup shareholder meeting. "

'You had these little nuns get up at stockholders' meetings saying I have one share and you're a dirty so and so,' says John Dunlop, secretary of labor in the Ford administration, who was involved in the FLOC battle.

In February 1986, FLOC, the growers and Campbell's announced a collective bargaining agreement which recognized FLOC as the workers' representative and provided for wage increases, grievance resolution, health insurance, and committees to study pesticide safety, housing, health care, and day care issues.

The strategy was successful: The higher Mexican wages and benefits closed the price differential, and Midwestern growers no longer threatened to break their pact with FLOC.

The union successfully sued the Ohio Highway Patrol (OHP) in September 1996 for stopping Hispanic migrant workers without justification and, in some cases, confiscating green cards.

The union sought to protect its gains in the cucumber fields by organizing migrant workers in the nation's second-largest cucumber-growing region—North Carolina.

[2] FLOC began organizing cucumber pickers and pickle processing workers in North Carolina in the early 1990s.

Four FLOC organizers were arrested on August 12, 1998 after visiting workers at a tobacco farm in Nash County, North Carolina.

[2][11][15] The Mount Olive agreement marked the first time an American labor union represented guest workers.

On April 10, 2007, FLOC organizer Santiago Rafael Cruz was found bound and beaten to death in the group's office in Monterrey, Mexico.

However, when Mexican police announced that a suspect had been arrested in Cruz's death, they stated "he died for failing to deliver on a shady $4,500 promise to provide visas for the friends of his alleged killer".

[18] The group's Monterrey offices had been broken into several times in the past year, and union staff members had received a number of threats.

The Commission immediately granted the petition, which requires that the Mexican government provide FLOC members and staff with adequate law enforcement and security while in Mexico.

FLOC President Velasquez and Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) met with officials from office of the Attorney General of Mexico to resolve problems with the implementation of the new security measures.

FLOC president Baldemar Velazquez spoke of the tragic and preventable deaths of at least four migrant tobacco workers in the summer of 2006 in North Carolina.

Nevertheless, tobacco corporations have the power to change this system and directly improve the lives of the workers who harvest their product.

FLOC seeks to change the abusive structure of the procurement system through a multi-party agreement between the corporation, the growers and the farmworkers.

Soon after the meeting, FLOC and their allies flooded the streets of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and held a long march to both celebrate their first victory and to continue the ongoing pressure against R.J.R.

Since 1971, FLOC has offered educational programs, established food and fuel cooperatives, and run legal clinics for both members and non-members.

[2] While FLOC has a good working relationship with the United Farm Workers (UFW), neither union has sought merger with the other.