Paul Ortiz is a first generation university student and a third-generation US military veteran. His work in the labor movement began with the United Farm Workers of Washington State’s 8-year boycott of Chateau Ste. Michelle wines that resulted in a union contract in 1995 that is still in force. With his wife Sheila Payne, Paul has worked in support of struggles including the Farm Labor Organizing Committee’s Mt. Olive Pickle Boycott, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Campaign, Fight for $15, Black Lives Matter, and El Gran Paro Estadounidense on International Workers’ Day, 2006, the largest General Strike in the History of the Americas. Paul pursued his history graduate studies at Duke University in the 1990s. During this period he served on the board of Student Action with Farmworkers, the Institute for Southern Studies, the North Carolina Farmworkers’ Project and other organizations. Paul has been a university instructor since 2001 beginning with his tenure as an assistant professor of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Between 2008 and 2024, Paul was director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and a history professor at the University of Florida. He is currently a Professor of Labor History at the ILR School at Cornell University.
Paul is a former AFL-CIO local union president, and a current member of the American Association of University Professors/American Federation of Teachers. He has served as faculty advisor to activist student organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society, YDSA, MEChA, PorColombia, the Venezuelan Student Association, Chispas, Students for Bernie, Student Farmworker Alliance, and many others.
Paul is the author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States and Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida. In addition to offering courses on African American, Latinx, oral history and social movement history, he has led hundreds of labor and working class history workshops and seminars with unions, community groups, apprenticeship programs, and other organizations. He is currently working on a book under contract with Beacon Press titled, A Social Movement History of the United States.