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Farm workers' Labor Day photo by Andrew Mariman By GREG STILES Most Americans observed Labor Day a week ago. Several hundred migrant farm workers celebrated their own version of the holiday Sunday at Medford's Hawthorne Park. Dagoberto Morales, director of the Center for Farmworker Advocacy (UNETE), called it a day to remember the oft-forgotten people who help put food on American tables. "We recognize the hard work that (farm workers) perform each day, often for low wages and under difficult working conditions," Morales said. He estimated there are 7,000 resident farm workers in Jackson County and that number swells to about 12,000 during harvest. "Right now we have an overload of 2,000 workers," Morales said. The workers are spread out among 27 labor camps from Carpenter Hill to Sams Valley. But even while family orchards are disappearing from the local landscape because of financial strains, Morales laments the per-bin payment to pickers of $14 this year, compared to $16 in 2000. Morales works in a local mill, but formerly worked for Bear Creek Corp. and Naumes Inc. He moved to the Rogue Valley from Woodburn in 1988 and has been with UNETE since 1996. UNETE has an office at 33 N.Central Ave., No. 149, Medford. Morales also plans a trip to Washington, D.C., later this month to discuss immigration issues with a Mexican delegation. This is the fourth year farmworkers - both resident and migrant - have been honored by UNETE. The event took on a new twist Sunday when it was combined with the Copa Campesina Soccer Tournament, featuring teams from the local La Liga del Valle. There were also information and craft booths, singers, dancers, food vendors, Cesar Chavez banners and folks simply enjoying a respite from the hot sun beneath the park's venerable shade trees. Juvenala Gaona calls Woodlake, Calif., home. The 32-year-old numbered among the many migrant workers closely following this week's state visit by Mexican President Vicente Fox. This is Gaona's first harvest in Southern Oregon. He has been here for 25 days and expects to be here another three weeks before returning to California, where he's picked primarily limes and oranges. "The pears are a little heavier," Gaona said through an interpreter. "But the work is pretty much the same." Gaona is single and said making the rounds from harvest to harvest would be difficult for a family man with a wife and children. "There's no privacy when you're housed with other men," he said. "Having a family requires a place of your own. I don't know of place like that." While Gaona isn't contemplating marriage at the moment, he hopes to acquire legal status. "Then I could start planning for the future," he said. President Bush is weighing the possibility of offering temporary work permits to millions of illegal Mexican immigrants in the U.S., opening the door for some to apply for permanent resident status. The Mexicans favor what they call "regularizing" the status of roughly 3.5 million Mexicans working in the U.S. illegally. Fox said that shouldn't mean "rewarding those who break the law" but that Congress should be willing to approve some system that would give undocumented laborers the "legal means" to work in the U.S. One of the sponsors for Sunday's event was Service Employees International Union, whose West Coast vice president is Eliseo Medina, who the Wall Street Journal credited with playing a pivotal role in bringing together the parties involved in the debate over immigration overhaul. Although the atmosphere in the park was relaxed, there's little doubt that Morales longs for the day when farmworker's will get a larger slice of the profit they help produce. He hopes to expand the event to the point that it will attract big-name artists who would, in turn, draw more participants capable of bringing about political change. "Then maybe," Morales said, "the boys working in the orchards will have benefits. "The big companies take over as the small companies go out of business. When the big companies take over, they don't talk about benefits. Rather than sharing the profits, they only think about investing in other things." Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.