Retired 92-year-old farm worker will get $76,891 pension check; UFW appeals to workers who don’t know they qualify

One of UFW founder Cesar Chavez’s achievements was creation in the 1970s of America’s first–and only–functioning pension plan for field laborers. UFW President Arturo Rodriguez, pension plan Administrator Douglas L. Blaylock and Ambassador Marta Lara of the Mexican Consulates will hand a check to retired farm worker Francisco Flores Martinez at the Thursday event as Martinez family members look on.

Martinez, 92, didn’t know he was eligible for pension benefits from the union’s Juan de la Cruz Farm Workers Pension Fund. In addition to the lump sum retroactive payment of $76,891 before taxes, Martinez will receive $1,682 each month for the rest of his life and his wife, Miguelina Ulloa Zamora Martinez, 61, will be eligible for surviving spouse benefits of $841 per month for the rest of her life from the joint union-management pension plan. Martinez lives in Mexicali, Mexico and is currently visiting his family in Oxnard.

The UFW and the pension fund, with support from the Consulate General of Mexico, are launching a broad campaign to contact Mexican farm workers who, like Martinez, may be eligible for benefits under the Juan De la Cruz Farm Workers Pension Plan but aren’t aware they–or their spouses–qualified for pensions when they worked under union contracts. Martinez labored picking lettuce with a UFW agreement under which California Coastal Farms in Salinas contributed to the pension plan between 1976 and 1985.

The pension plan is financed by contributions from growers for every hour worked by a union member covered by the pension plan under UFW contract. Since 1989, it has provided cost-of-living increases and other adjustments and bonuses. The pension plan was named for Juan de la Cruz, a 60-year old grape striker shot to death on a Kern County picketline in 1973. Chavez died on April 23, 1993.