SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS May 2, 2006
Growers, field workers march together
Virtually all the shops on Watsonville's Main Street were closed Monday. And most of the fertile fields of the Pajaro Valley lay idle as farmworkers and farmers joined hands to send a message about the urgent need for immigration reform. Growers, packers and shippers along the Central Coast prepared for Monday's demonstrations by operating a shortened schedule, giving workers the day off or simply asking their workers to work on Sunday instead. ``It's inspiring,'' said James Bogart, president of the Grower-Shipper Association of Central California. ``It's great to be tugging on the same end of the rope.'' Bogart said he couldn't recall another debate of this magnitude in which labor and management were on the same side. He said the agricultural community has been saying for a long time that ``if immigration reform consists of nothing other than enforcement and shutting down the borders and making workers and employers felons, you might as well shut the ag industry down.'' In the nearby Salinas Valley and elsewhere in the state, employers made similar contingency plans, said Dave Kranz of the California Farm Bureau Federation. About 10,000 people filled the streets of Watsonville, a heavily Latino city of 50,000, for a two-hour march that took them to tiny Pajaro in Monterey County -- and back again. Undocumented farmworker Eduardo Rodriguez, 36, of Watsonville, said he was surprised and thrilled to see his supervisors marching alongside him. Edward Ortega, a Pajaro Valley strawberry farmer, chose to give his workers the day off. Raspberry grower John Eiskamp of J.E. Farms asked his workers to work Sunday instead. ``The feeling among farmers is that a guest-worker program is desperately needed and long overdue,'' Ortega said. ``All of us in the farm community have been pushing for a program for 20 years, but nothing has happened.'' Rodriguez, a raspberry picker who has lived in this country illegally since 1996, said he would prefer an amnesty program -- but that a guest-worker program is certainly better than the status quo. ``Right now we have to leave our families back home,'' said Rodriguez, who has a wife and three children in Oaxaca. ``That's not right.''
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