UFW signs pact with Mexican state for guest workers on U.S. farms

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/871903.html

By Susan Ferriss - [e-mail]

Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, April 18, 2008
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A4

The United Farm Workers union has signed an agreement with a Mexican state to help recruit guest workers to labor on U.S. farms legally – and under union contract.

"If this is something that's going to be utilized more in the future, then we've got to get in on it," UFW President Arturo Rodriguez said of the H-2A guest worker program. "We're looking for enlightened employers who are willing to sit down and do this with us."


Minerva Torrez walks behind a mechanized tomato-planting machine pulled by a tractor, making sure the plants enter the soil correctly, on a farm in Yolo County. José Luis Villegas / [e-mail]


The agreement was signed in early April in the western state of Michoacan, which has a long history of migration to California and is governed by the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution.

The agreement is a significant example of the UFW's acceptance that foreign laborers are an inevitable part of U.S. agriculture. The union was founded in the 1960s as an ardent foe of the old bracero farm guest worker program with Mexico.

In 1986, however, the UFW helped farmworkers obtain legal status during an amnesty. Over the last decade, the UFW has also joined farm groups to lobby Congress to pass a bill allowing farm laborers to receive conditional legal status and then green cards if they continue to work in agriculture for three to five more years.

Even if they achieve passage of that proposal, the UFW and growers say, legal workers would eventually move out of the fields, and others would be needed.

FULL story and more photos at link.