An organizer’s documented history of labor relations in California makes its way to Stanford.

Happy Saturday. Are you working today? Thirty percent of Americans—in reality likely more—work on the weekend. 

Agata Popęda here. If you do work on the weekend, I hope you get your rest breaks, meal breaks and overtime pay if you worked 40 hours already that week.

While the practice of implementing labor laws is a constant struggle and labor unions tend to have bad reputation in the U.S.—as they don’t fit the vision of self-regulating, self-adjusting capitalism that should lift all the boats—reading my colleague Celia Jiménez’s article on community organizer Sabino Lopez from Salinas made me think once again about all the hard work that laid foundations for our common rights as employees.

The history of the United Farm Workers’ struggle in California to get agricultural workers contracts with good wages, mandated rest periods, clean drinking water in the fields and more, is easy and convenient to forget from the business perspective. The creation of the union was a result of a series of strikes in 1965, when Filipino-American and Mexican-American farm workers in Delano, California, initiated a grape strike and National Farm Workers Association, led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, joined the effort. 

Lopez is part of this legacy, being involved with UFW and other organizations, such as California Rural Legal Assistance, which represents California agricultural workers who face labor injustice. 

To learn more about Lopez’s activism and the papers he gathered during his career—now on the way to Stanford University’s archives—read the article in this week’s issue of the Weekly or check it out online. Celebrate the rich history of negotiating labor relations in California and meet a local who was part of it all.