Replanting People

Immigrant workers earn a piece of an organic farm

A year after the trade agreement took effect, Tortoledo joined hundreds of thousands of migrant farmers in a desperate search for work. Some drifted to northern Mexico to pick tomatoes for seven dollars a day. But others, like Tortoledo, endured often treacherous journeys to the U.S. to earn farmworker wages that were higher than Mexico's, yet still kept families below the U.S. poverty levels.

Tortoledo is a thoughtful man with an affable grin. Throughout his uprooting, he has held fast to the spirit of a homegrown proverb that he and his compañeros are quick to quote: No hay mal que por bien no venga—no bad comes without a good.

Today was Tortoledo's turn to experience the good. By eleven a.m., he and twenty-seven other campesinos had put away their tools, gathered at a barracklike farmstand, and, in a formal presentation, become the first farmworkers in the nation to receive certificates for an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP).

Their employer, Swanton Berry Farm, an eighty-acre organic vegetable, kiwi, olallieberry, and strawberry farm near Santa Cruz, is by no means the first employer to offer ESOPs, a common form of employee ownership. But it is the first farm in the nation to extend the program beyond family members—and to reach some of the nation's most needy candidates, including workers on organic farms.

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this is a real good episode... It is worth watching.