Biography of linda chavez thompson

Linda Chavez-Thompson was elected executive vice president of the AFL-CIO at the federation’s 1995 convention and was re-elected to a new four-year term in 2005. She was the first person to hold the post of AFL-CIO executive vice president, and she was the first person of color to be elected to one of the federation’s three highest offices.

A native of Lubbock, Texas, Chavez-Thompson is a second-generation American of Mexican descent. She brought to her work 35 years of experience in the labor movement, beginning in 1967 with her first work for the Laborers’ local union in Lubbock. She went on to serve in a variety of posts with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in San Antonio, Texas, and became an international vice president in 1988, a post she held until 1996. She also served from 1986 to 1996 as a national vice president of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, AFL-CIO. In 1993, Chavez-Thompson was elected and served a two-year term as one of 31 vice presidents on the Executive Council of the national AFL-CIO.

As executive vice president of the federation, Chavez-Thompson represented the labor movement as a member of the board for several national organizations, including the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. She also served as a member of the Board of Governors for the United Way of America and as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. In 2001, she was elected president of ORIT, the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers, which is the Western Hemispheric arm of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.

As the number three person at the American Federation of Labor and Congress Industrial Organizations, better known by the acronym AFL-CIO, Linda Chavez-Thompson is in a powerful position. She can turn the ears of politicians, labor union leaders, and the media. She can also put fear into corporate leaders dead set against unionism. When Chavez-Thompson talks labor, people listen. She is the first woman and the first minority to hold this position. One of eight children born to a second generation Mexican-American family in Texas, Chavez-Thompson left school in ninth grade to pick cotton. She never returned. Instead she learned on the job—analyzing job contracts and legislature, leading strikes, and mediating worker grievances. Lack of formal education did not prevent her from ascending the ranks of labor and becoming not only a role model, but also a powerful force in the reinvigoration of a labor movement that has been waning since the 1950s. Since her appointment to the executive council of the AFL-CIO membership numbers are up. Her message reaches laborers because she is one of them. A garbage worker quoted in U.S. News and Report summed up her success, "This little lady knows what hard work is," he said, "and if anybody is going to be able to represent us, she can."

Linda Chavez was born in Lubbock, Texas on August 3, 1944, the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants. Her parents worked as sharecroppers to support their eight children. Like her siblings, Chavez-Thompson began working at an early age to supplement her family's meager income. She was just ten when she began picking cotton for 30 cents an hour in the small town of Lorenzo. A few years later, she was asked by her father to leave school to work for the family full-time while her brothers continued their education. His reasoning was that education was not as important for a girl, since she would eventually marry and become a housewife. I

Mexican-American union leader

This article is about a Democrat and a union activist. For the Republican and anti-union commentator, see Linda Chavez.

Linda Chavez-Thompson (born August 3, 1944) is a second-generation Mexican-American and union leader. She was elected the executive vice-president of the AFL-CIO in 1995 and served until September 21, 2007. She was also a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee from 1997 to 2012 and served as a member of the board of trustees of United Way of America. She was the Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Texas in the 2010 election.

Early life

Chavez-Thompson's place of birth is unclear. Although she has been described by some sources as an "illegal immigrant", other references contend that she was born in Lorenzo in Crosby County in West Texas and reared in Lubbock. Her father was a sharecropper, and she was one of seven children. At the age of 10, she took a job hoeing cotton in the fields in Lorenzo for the summer. It was a job she worked at for the next nine years. She also picked cotton for several years. She dropped out of high school at age 16 to help support her family, and married at the age of 20. She gave birth to a daughter in 1964 and a son in 1976. She divorced her first husband in 1984 and the next year married Robert Thompson, the long-time president of the Amalgamated Transit Local 694 in San Antonio. He died in 1993 of complications of lung cancer.^[

© Latinas in History 2008

Linda Chávez-Thompson was born into a cotton sharecropping family in Lubbock, Texas. Because it was necessary for the children to help support the family, schooling became sporadic, dependent on the crops and economic and agricultural cycles. In 1963, at the age of twenty, Chávez-Thompson married and embarked on her first “adult” job, cleaning other people’s houses. Chávez-Thompson joined the Laborers’ International Union in 1967 and became secretary for the Lubbock local. Four years later Chávez-Thompson was employed at the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). In 1995 Chávez-Thompson’s bid for elective office within the union proved successful. She became the first Latina executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, a position she holds today. She sits on the board of governors of the United Way and is a vice-chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, a member of the executive committee of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, and a member of the board of trustees for the Labor Heritage Foundation.