The challenge

In the United States, immigrants are arriving in the greatest numbers proportionately in the Northwest, South, and Plains states. This scenario can foster tensions, because in many communities in these regions, long-time residents have little experience with immigrants.

The Woodburn-Salem area of Oregon is an example. The area is home to some 40,000 farmworkers, 98 percent of whom are immigrants. Indeed, Latinos now comprise a majority of Woodburn’s 20,000 residents, making it the largest city in Oregon where a majority of residents are people of color. Most lack formal education and speak limited or no English. And many are unprotected by state and federal collective bargaining laws, which do not apply to farmworkers. The newcomers have more problems: They frequently receive less than the minimum wage, and they experience major health problems from pesticide exposure and workplace injuries. Most also live in substandard, overcrowded, and over-priced housing. As a result, they suffer higher rates of preventable or remediable social, economic, and health problems.


Seeds of commitment

Ramón Ramírez was born and raised in East Los Angeles. Growing up, he saw and experienced the discrimination, fear, exploitation, and repression that dominated his family’s and friends’ daily lives. Inspired by the work of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, he became active in the Chicano movement’s opposition to the Vietnam War at the age of 15 and later joined the Chicano and farmworker movements. There, he witnessed ordinary people overcoming fear, taking leadership, and serving as examples of humility and service, to ultimately make a difference.

Convinced that farmworker conditions would improve only when farmworkers themselves had a genuine role in their workplace and their communities, Ramírez co-founded PCUN with Cipriano Ferrel, who served as the union’s president until his sudden death in 1995. Ramírez was then asked to take Ferrel’s place—“something I did not welcome and feared I would fail at.” Yet he has exceeded his own expectations, he says, “by involving and relying on my fellow workers and leaders, by challenging others to assume their share of responsibility…and by recalling the examples of leaders like Cipriano, who led with great dignity, humility, and honesty.”


Accomplishments

Even before he took on his union’s presidency, Ramírez had achieved tangible results. In 1991, he led the first-ever union-organized strike in Oregon agriculture, and in 1998 he signed collective bargaining contracts with three different growers—a first in the state’s agricultural history. Since then, Ramírez has addressed hundreds of unions, religious congregations, and student and community groups, promoting PCUN’s international boycotts.

Because of the 14-year campaign by Ramírez and his fellow union leaders, workers under PCUN collective bargaining agreements made significant gains. They include protection against discipline or discharge for other than just cause; a grievance procedure; seniority rights; improved wages; paid breaks and overtime; leaves of absence; the right to refuse to work under unsafe conditions; access to pesticide information; protections against summary eviction from, and a voice in, the operation of work-site housing; and union recognition. Significantly, none of these gains was required by Oregon law. The state’s agribusinesses have also now publicly abandoned their categorical rejection of farmworker collective bargaining rights, leading Ramirez to view future large-scale bargaining as “no longer a far-off dream.”

Through his leadership, the FHDC (Farmworker Housing Development Corporation) has built 108 units of affordable housing and has has completed construction of the Cipriano Ferrel Education Center, which will provide a Head Start and multi-purpose education facility for FHDC's Nuevo Amanecer project residents and Woodburn's Latino Community. He has also worked to develop a strong immigrant rights coalition, which has defeated anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative action proposals in the Oregon State Legislature. Using organizing and education, PCUN has re-framed the public policy debate on farmworker conditions for the 21st Century.


His Leadership style

In the tradition of his heroes Chávez, Huerta, and Ferrel, Ramón Ramírez uses his position to reduce the barriers that obstruct others from realizing their own leadership potential. He seizes every opportunity, for example, to send emerging and potential leaders to meetings and conferences. And in one-on-one conversations, especially with youths, he shares his own background, experiences, and mistakes in order to demystify the leadership process. He says he views the raising of public consciousness, the forging of alliances, and collaborative leadership as necessities, not simply useful strategies.

Ramírez says he believes that people, especially those who are marginalized and oppressed, have a deep desire to reduce injustice. Most are capable of taking leadership positions, he says, but are deterred by fear of retaliation, lack of self-confidence and support, inadequate understanding of how the system works, and by the time and energy consumed by the struggle for daily survival. He uses his leadership position to reduce the barriers that obstruct others from acting on their own leadership instincts. Direct and disarming, Ramírez tries to “identify and articulate the progress manifest in every situation” because, as he explains, “that’s the raw material for sustaining hope.”


The future

Ramón Ramírez considers his future challenges to include the implementation of a collective bargaining process for Oregon farmworkers; solidification of the immigrants’ rights movement in the Northwest; the creation of new connections or stronger existing ones among regional networks and national Latino and labor organizations; and the nurturance of new leaders. He also plans to establish an internal “leadership institute” for rank-and-file workers and youth.


More about Ramón Ramírez and PCUN

“It’s wrong that the only workers in this state that don’t get meals and breaks are farmworkers.”
— Dan Gardner, Oregon labor commissioner

“Once just another kid from East L.A., he grew up ashamed of his Mexican roots, embarrassed to eat a taco and answered to the Americanized RAY-mun. Now he’s the guy wielding the bullhorn on the Capitol steps in Salem…Although the social ground has been plowed and the times have changed, some parallels exist between what Ramírez and PCUN are doing and what César Chávez was trying to do with the United Farm Workers 40 years ago.”
— The Oregonian, March 4, 2002