A week before President George W. Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox meet in Texas to discuss immigration issues, leaders of America's two largest farm labor unions open an office on Thursday, March 17 in Monterey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico.

Toledo, Ohio-based Farm Labor Organizing Committee President Baldemar Velasquez and Arturo Rodriguez, president of the California-based United Farm Workers of America, will mark the opening of FLOC's Monterey office as the first concrete step in a ground-breaking Sept. 16, 2004 agreement between FLOC and the North Carolina Growers Association which covered 7,500 Mexican guest workers who labor in that state's fields. It is the first time legally imported immigrant farm workers have been unionized under the U.S. government's existing H-2A guest worker program.

Under provisions of the FLOC-grower contract, FLOC is now overseeing the applications of more than 7,500 Mexican farm workers requesting visas to work in North Carolina.

The FLOC office in Monterey will inform Mexican workers about their rights under the H-2A program in North Carolina and enforce their seniority and recruitment rights won through the new agreement with growers. FLOC members in North Carolina will be the only H-2A guest workers entitled to file complaints through a grievance procedure that protects agricultural laborers and lets them quickly resolve their concerns. Grievances may also be filed in Mexico during the off-season.

FLOC and the UFW are also chief proponents of the AgJobs bill in the U.S. Congress (S. 359 and H.R. 884) that would allow undocumented farm workers to earn the right to permanently stay in America by continuing to work in agriculture. Sens. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) reintroduced the bill in the U.S. Senate on Feb. 10, 2005. Last year's AgJobs measure was cosponsored by 63 senators, including many Republicans.

Who: FLOC President Baldemar Velasquez and UFW President Arturo Rodriguez,.

What: Opening an office in Monterey, Mexico to protect the rights of Mexican guest workers being legally imported to labor in North Carolina fields under an historic FLOC contract with growers.

When: 11 a.m. on Thursday, March 17, 2005.

Where: Plaza Dorada, Ave. Hidalgo Poniente 480 No. 22, Monterey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico.