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The sun was up and already beating strong when Baldemar Velásquez awakened inside the concrete block building to a stinging sunburn and tingling numbness in his hands and fingers.

With no air-conditioning in the farm labor camp, there would again be little escape this day from the unrelenting summer heat. Before long, his entire body felt drenched in sweat.

Worst of all, it was barely 8 a.m. There were still nearly 10 hours of tobacco picking ahead in the humidity-drenched fields of North Carolina, which leads the nation in heat-related farm worker deaths.

And so began a typical day for the 61-year-old labor organizer during his week-long visit to a tobacco farm that concluded Aug. 4 with a return home to Sylvania Township.

In essence, his trip was a fact-finding mission, one that involved as much participation as observation. Mr. Velásquez lived and worked alongside a group of about 14 migrant workers, picking tobacco plants at the most brutal time of the year.

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READ : In his words: Baldemar Velásquez journals his experiences during a recent trip to North Carolina

“My feeling is that if I’m going to represent somebody, I better do the work that they’re doing to know what they’re going through,” he said last week upon his return.

The work in the fields was utterly exhausting. Yet Mr. Velásquez managed to gather the energy and thoughts each evening to write a daily journal of his experiences. His entries, condensed and edited by The Blade, accompany this article.

The founder and president of the Toledo-based Farm Labor Organizing Committee, Mr. Velásquez is focusing on securing improvement in pay, benefits, and working conditions for the thousands of temporary guest workers who journey to the United States for seasonal jobs in tobacco fields. He would not disclose his location in North Carolina, citing concerns about growers’ relationships with RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co.

The majority of tobacco field workers in North Carolina have their permanent homes in Mexico. Some are employed there legally for the growing season through the U.S. government’s H2-A agricultural work visa program. But many others are undocumented.

Depending on the farm they’re at, they are paid from $50 to $150 a day, according to Mr. Velásquez.

A PRIMER ON TOBACCO FARMING

Tobacco is a green plant that typically stands 4 to 6 feet high. It grows about 20 leaves and has small pink flowers.

Before its harvest, the upper part of the plant is cut off, or “topped,” when it starts to produce flowers. This is done so the plant’s leaves grow larger and heavier.

Soon after topping, new leaf shoots, or “suckers,” will appear, and these too must be taken off the plant to ensure the choicest leaves. The plant is then harvested 70 to 90 days after its transplant to the field by either picking off the leaves or cutting the stalk.

Field workers must use care when handling tobacco plants wet with rain or morning dew; the nicotine, if absorbed through skin, can result in poisoning.

Known in the medical fi eld as green tobacco sickness, the malady is called a different name in the tobacco field: “The Green Monster.”

Symptoms can include dizziness, weakness, nausea, and vomiting, and sometimes fluctuations in blood pressure or heart rate. The illness can last one to two days, and in serious cases require hospitalization.

In his view, tobacco workers struggle at the bottom of a three-tiered production chain that’s presided over by agricultural corporations such as RJ Reynolds, a subsidiary of Reynolds American Inc.

Second to corporations are the growers, whom he describes as being at the financial mercy of the corporations that buy their crops.

Mr. Velásquez said his immediate goal is to get RJ Reynolds to agree to three-way labor talks between FLOC and farmers from tobacco states such as North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and South Carolina.

If the tobacco company will agree to pay the growers more for their tobacco, his reasoning goes, the growers in turn will be able to give higher wages and better benefits to the farm workers.

FLOC represents about 6,000 immigrant farm workers in the “right-to-work” state of North Carolina. In contrast to “closed shop” states such as Ohio, workers at unionized businesses in right-to-work states cannot be required to join a union.

Mr. Velásquez said he also wants to introduce Ohio’s cucumber and tomato growers to the system North Carolina’s growers use for sharing the benefits of legal migrant labor.

It can cost nearly $1,000 to bring in one H2-A visa worker, so the expense is usually too much for one farmer to pay for a single harvest, he said.

He suggests that Ohio growers band together and share visa costs by forming an equivalent of the North Carolina Growers Association, which is the nation’s largest user of the H2-A visa program.

“The growers here in Ohio cannot on their own bring in H2-A workers because it’s too expensive for a short-term crop,” he said.

The son of second-generation farm workers, Mr. Velásquez was born in Texas and grew up helping his parents in the field as they trekked each season to northern states such as Ohio and Michigan to help harvest tomatoes, sugar beets, strawberries, cherries, and other crops.

His family settled in Putnam County in 1954. As a 20-year-old Bluffton College student in 1967, he founded FLOC in an effort to mend the type of discrimination and injustices he felt his parents experienced as migrant laborers.

Its motto, Hasta La Victoria, means “toward the victory.” Mr. Velásquez has often been compared to the late Cesar Chavez, who founded the United Farm Workers in 1962 in California.

In 1986 FLOC’s seven-year boycott of the Campbell Soup Co. resulted in a historic, three-way agreement with the company, FLOC, and its tomato growers in Ohio and Michigan.

More recently, a five-year boycott by FLOC of the Mt. Olive Pickle Co. ended in 2004 with another three-way agreement. This one involved the North Carolina Growers Association and covered nearly 8,000 workers at farms for a variety of products, though mostly pickles.

Mr. Velásquez said FLOC now has about 12,000 members, with the majority in Ohio and North Carolina and others in Michigan, Tennessee, Virginia, and South Carolina.

He and FLOC supporters this spring visited Reynolds American’s company headquarters in Winston-Salem, N.C., for its annual shareholders meeting.

Corporate officials, however, refused to meet with FLOC. An RJ Reynolds spokesman said there is no point because tobacco field workers are employed by individual farms, not RJ Reynolds.

“We will not negotiate with FLOC on a collective bargaining agreement,” spokesman David Howard said last week. “If workers want to be represented by a union, they and their employer should negotiate with the union.”

But Mr. Velásquez isn’t buying the tobacco company’s answer.

“That’s the same thing that Campbell Soup and Mt. Olive Pickle said before we negotiated with them — they all start out with that line,” he said.

The spokesman also disputed Mr. Velásquez’s assertion that RJ Reynolds uses undocumented migrant laborers, noting again how field workers are employees of the growers.

He underscored that all growers under contract with the company must abide by state and federal labor laws.

“None of our contract growers have been cited … for any major violations,” Mr. Howard said. “The bottom line is RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co. supports safe and fair conditions for any worker in any industry.”

Mr. Velásquez, again, begs to differ.

Contact JC Reindl at:jreindl@theblade.com or 419-724-6065.

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