“We are here because they are trying to take from those who are poor for the benefit of the rich,” said Ramon, a longtime member of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) at a Moral Monday demonstration in Raleigh, N.C., this summer.
“Education, health care, voting rights—all these things they are trying to take from the poor,” he explained.
Over 900 people have been arrested in the Moral Monday movement for refusing to leave the state capitol building in protest.
They range from the unemployed, the elderly, and stay-at-home moms to professors and religious leaders — and members of the state’s largely Latino farmworker movement.
Among the arrested were Baldemar Velasquez, national president of the Ohio-based FLOC, and members and leaders of North Carolina FLOC, among them Justin Flores and Raul Jimenez.
“Bienvenidos a la lucha,” Velasquez told the Moral Monday crowd, the day he came to Raleigh to be arrested for civil disobedience. “Welcome to the struggle.”
“I’ve led hundreds of marches and demonstrations in my 44 years of organizing,” said Velasquez, flanked by Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP. “But today I come as a follower, a simple soldier to join this movement.”
“Us farmworkers have been excluded in some way from every labor law passed in this country at the state and federal level,” Velasquez said. “But we won’t let these laws dictate whether or not we can form unions and protect ourselves in the workplace.”
“And we won’t stand by and let this legislature pass laws that hurt our communities.”
Velasquez said the Moral Monday movement was important to FLOC because it is currently organizing 15,000 tobacco cutters in North Carolina, “the most exploited workers in the state.” He got cheers from the crowd.
The Moral Monday protestors also warmly supported North Carolina FLOC organizers when they called on the state to issue drivers licenses for farmworkers, with or without papers.
When Velasquez and other FLOC members were led from the General Assembly in handcuffs they were greeted by massed demonstrators chanting, “Thank you! Thank you!”
