PCUN president fights for fairness

Yesterday, the Salem Stateman Journal interviewed Ramon Ramirez, President of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United). PCUN is Oregon’s union of farmworkers, nursery, and reforestation workers, and Oregon’s largest Latino organization.

PCUN president fights for fairness

He is motivated by discrimination he saw against parents
By Thelma Guerrero-Huston • Statesman Journal
August 25, 2008

By the time Ramon Ramirez took over the helm at PCUN in 1995, he already had achieved an unprecedented success: In 1991, he led the first-ever union-organized strike in Oregon agriculture.

He followed that up in 1998 when he signed three collective-bargaining contracts with separate Oregon growers, a first in the state's agricultural history.

Ramirez's drive for fair wages and decent working conditions for some of the state's most marginalized workers is fueled by the discrimination that he witnessed against his U.S.-born mother and immigrant father and their workplace exploitation in his home state of California.

Ramirez recently met with the Statesman Journal at his office in Woodburn to talk about PCUN — the Spanish acronym for Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United — and other topics. >>continue

Posted in: Human Rights,PCUN,Ramon Ramirez,Worker Rights