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 is the first person to hold the post of AFL-CIO executive vice president, and she is 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 brings to her work 35 years of experience in the labor movement, beginning in 1967 with her first work for the Laborer's 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 represents 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 serves 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.

Read Linda Chavez-Thompson's guest commentary below on the meaning of respect at work.

Bad Bosses Begin with Disrespect

By Linda Chavez-Thompson

With more than 3,000 submissions to Working America's "Bad Boss" contest, it's clear that there are a lot of bad bosses out there, and most of us have had one at some point in our lives.

The bad boss that sticks out in my mind is not my own, but my father's.

My father was a sharecropper on a cotton farm in Lubbock, Texas.  One summer, when I was about 10 years old, he took me out to the fields to show me how to water the cotton.

At that time, my father was the biggest man in my life, the all-powerful dad.  I felt a lot of awe towards him, and even though he was strict, he was also very loving.

He was going about his normal summertime work, and I was helping him (as much as I could at the age of 10), when his boss drove up in his pick up truck.

My dad told me to go ahead and get in our truck.

The boss man came over to him, and I stayed in the truck, watching through the window.

In west Texas, you always take your hat off when you're talking to other people, and my dad had taken his hat off and was holding it in front of his chest.

When the boss got out of his truck, he started yelling and screaming at my father.

I was absolutely terrified to see him berating my father this way, and even though I didn't know why it was happening, I knew that it was wrong.

I watched my tall, proud father literally shrink in humiliation.  He was embarrassed, I'm sure, that his daughter, who idolized him, was watching him be degraded in such a way.

When the haranguing was finally over, the boss man drove off, and my father finished doing what he needed to do.

When he climbed in the truck with me, he was silent--he never uttered one word of explanation about what happened.

I, unfortunately, could not forget, and today the image still burns in my head: my tall, proud father being reduced to nothing by his angry, screaming boss.

I decided there was no excuse for a boss to treat another human being that way, and I've stuck with that belief to this day.

Now, as I travel the country talking with workers, or read the submissions from the "Bad Boss" contest, I hear the same story over and over again.

A office assistant is berated by her boss for picking the wrong lunchmeat, a sales clerk has to endure sexual harassment while calling in the nightly numbers, a group of engineers misses their paychecks only to see the "struggling" boss has bought a new luxury car.

All of these stories, whether they come from restaurants, office parks, shop floors or cotton fields, boil down to the same basic issue--respect.

It's the same when workers want to form a union in their workplace.  Sure they want to make more money, yes they want cheaper health care, or more time off so they can spend time with their families.  But what's really at the heart of their fight, why they are willing to stand up to their bosses and in some cases risk their livelihoods, is because they want respect.

Workers want respect for the job that they do, respect for the dedication and time that they put in, and respect for the fact that they are an integral part of the organization, without which it would cease to operate.

It's ironic that in our consumer-driven society, the one thing workers want more than anything else cannot be bought.  It can only be won when people have enough respect for themselves to stand up, the respect of their co-workers, peers, and even their bosses, soon follows.

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