Peter Cervantes-Gautschi, Co-Director
Peter has been a labor activist since 1965, starting as a young farm worker in Southern California. He has organized for HERE, SEIU, and CWA, headed two prominent labor councils, started two low-wage worker organizations, and co-founded several labor-community coalitions, membership organizations and political action committees.
In the early 1980s, he started studying both successful social justice movements and value-added processes of corporations. In 1995 and 1996, Peter toured the United States and Mexico, interviewing leaders of 80 low-wage unions and worker centers. He wrote a discussion paper on the challenges to organizing low wage workers based on the interviews and his own experience. A discussion of the paper’s findings among representatives of organizing-oriented worker centers and unions in the U.S. and Mexico led to the founding of Enlace.