Mourning the passing of farm worker champion Jerome Waldie

United Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez and Paul Chavez, president of the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation, today issued the following statement from the farm worker movement headquarters at La Paz in Keene, Calif.

 
There was hardly anyone in public life in California who was more respected by Cesar Chavez and the farm workers than Jerry Waldie. It was with deep sadness that the Chavez family and the farm worker movement learned of his passing on April 3. When Jerry Waldie ran for governor in the 1974 Democratic primary, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers endorsed him even before the union supported Jerry Brown in the fall general election.
 
Jerry may be best remembered for working to impeach Richard Nixon as a Member of Congress, but we will never forget how, as a member of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board during the early and mid-1980s, Jerry valiantly resisted dismantling enforcement of California’s pioneering 1975 farm labor law by Republican Gov. George Deukmejian. “The hope once offered by the Agricultural Labor Relations Act has faded,” Jerry wrote in a Los Angeles Times commentary on Sept. 4, 1983 (“Deukmejian Sows a Briar Patch”). “By subverting its process, the governor and his agents are cutting off farm workers’ access to the law.”
 
No one fought for the farm workers with greater skill or integrity or believed in grass roots, participatory democracy for everyone more than Jerry Waldie. His memory is alive in our hearts.
 
Viva la Causa!