We ask you to send your support now. With your support, we’ll continue--against all odds--to move our community and our society forward by:

Building the Movement: our most basic responsibility.
· 80 farm and reforestation workers founded PCUN; since then over 5,000 more have joined.
· Members have paid a total of $1,445,000 in dues and services; supporters have contributed another $809,000!
· We've truly become a movement, growing from one organization with four staff in 1985 to nine “sister” organizations with over thirty staff today. Our movement is organizing to advance workplace justice, immigrants rights, affordable housing, education equity, economic and leadership development, political power, and civic participation.

Making a tangible difference: better conditions for farmworkers every day.
· Immigration. PCUN's Farmworker Service Center has helped more than 4,000 farmworkers and family members attain lawful permanent resident status.
· Minimum wage increases. PCUN has helped double the state minimum wage ($3.35 in 1985; $7.25 in 2005!), defeat all of agribusiness' many attempts to exclude farmworkers, and educate and support thousands of farmworkers to challenge wage violations.
· Paid rest breaks. This past February, Oregon became one of only five states to require paid breaks for farmworkers, a right most other U.S. workers have enjoyed for decades!

Transforming the politics on farmworker issues: a fair labor system, not charity.
· Overcoming industry intransigence. We call it their “HELL, NO!” posture on anything related to unionization. Oregon major agribusiness no longer says “HELL, NO!” and has now largely acquiesced to accepting workers’ right to organize. The key struggle now is workers’ right to unionize, meaning achieving a collective bargaining agreement after demonstrating that workers want union representation.
· Organizing Latinos as a progressive political force. PCUN co-founded and collaborates with Voz Hispana Causa Chavista, now Oregon's largest Latino voter network. Voz Hispana just helped elect the first progressive state representative from Woodburn ever!

Where we go from here: preparing for the next twenty years.

Our highest priorities remain enacting a fair legalization program for undocumented immigrants and institutionalizing a just and effective farmworker collective bargaining system in Oregon. We have made steady progress in recent years--and in 2004--toward these goals. Major--perhaps decisive--developments are likely in 2005.

Reaching a milestone like our 20th anniversary calls upon us to deepen our commitment and re-double our efforts to facilitate the development of current and emerging leaders in our movement. In 2003 we started--and in 2004 made permanent--an innovative and effective new strategy we call “Capaces” (“we are capable”), bringing together the staffs and key leadership of our nine sister organizations for joint training, peer relationship building, and collaboration, all to foster deeper unity and to more proactively and collectively ready ourselves for greater leadership responsibilities.

The farmworkers, and the staff and leaders of our movement continue to give of ourselves, contributing to achieving a more just society. Support from people of conscience remains fundamental to our movement's survival, to our strength, and to our success. Together, we have become an even more powerful force.

We hope to count on you and we deeply value your support. Please contribute today so that our movement's power can endure and grow.

Yours, in unity,

Larry Kleinman
Secretary-Treasurer