Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN)
Larry Kleinman
300 Young St.
Woodburn, Ore. 97071
(503) 982-0243

Even in winter, the fields of the broad, verdant Willamette Valley agricultural area south of Portland look rich and bountiful. But like farm areas everywhere, they lure poor migrant workers who are willing to work under poor conditions for low wages.

PCUN, a farm-worker organizing project not unlike Toledo's FLOC, is a grass-roots effort to organize farm workers as advocates for their own rights. Based in a tiny building that was once a Methodist Church, the organization's name (translated, "Tree planters and farmers united") reflects its mission to the row crops, nursery and reforestation industries that make up the region's agricultural mix.

PCUN was formed in 1985, the outgrowth of an earlier (1977) organizing effort that provided legal defense for illegal immigrants, a need that shifted after the new federal immigration law.

However, a legal-aid service -- Service Center for Farmworkers -- continues within the organization as one of its main programs. The organization also provides tax assistance for its members, virtually all of whom are Mexican, many from the rural Oaxaca province; and membership brings a $3,000 accidental-death benefit, a surprisingly important thing to poor people who do sometimes-dangerous work far from their home.

PCUN's ultimate goal is to establish collective-bargaining agreements with the area's growers and eliminate the system of "brokers" who now serve as middle-men, providing farmers with teams of workers who serve at the broker's pleasure. It also works legislatively to bring farm workers under the minimum-wage law (instead of piecework rates) and to abolish exemptions that eliminate farm workers from the protection of most of the state's labor laws. They also successfully challenged a state law that forebade workplace picketing in farm labor disputes.

Although the problems here seem to mirror FLOC's challenges with the pickle and tomato processors in Northwestern Ohio, Kleinman says a key difference hampers PCUN: While FLOC was able to focus organizing efforts on the three large processors that are central to the Ohio agricultural economy, there is no similar "target" in the Willamette Valley, where the brokers are typically small entrepreneurs serving diverse markets.

Their major plan this coming summer is to bypass the brokers by setting up PCUN's own hiring hall to offer farmers groups of union workers directly, rather than through the brokers.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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