High-wages and secure jobs for farmworkers can only come by discarding the old deportation/guestworker model, and instead supporting families with legalization, family-based visas, and unions and labor rights.
The choice confronting the Biden administration is whether to expand an immigration program prioritizing grower profits over workers’ and immigrants’ rights, or to reinforce an immigration system based on family reunification and community stability.
Under the current system, “the lungs of the Earth are being plowed up and bulldozed to plant more corn and soybeans so that more animals can be raised in confinement.” "Farmers need to follow the lead of India’s farmers and make our voices heard.”
“The proposal to reduce the 60-hour overtime threshold threatened to regulate New York’s family farms out of existence,”
The protests in Punjab are happening at a time when the agrarian economy is under stress. With increasing uncertainty, previously antagonistic groups across classes, castes & gender are coming closer, building a broader base for the agitation & beyon
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This week the COVID-related strike in Washington state’s Yakima Valley quadrupled in size, as workers walked out at three more apple packinghouses with two main demands for safer working conditions and an extra $2 an hour in hazard pay.
Farm-to-table's sincere glow distracts from how the production and processing of even the most pristine ingredients — from field or dock or slaughterhouse to restaurant or school cafeteria — is nearly always configured to rely on cheap labor. Work very often performed by people who are themselves poor and hungry.
Immigrant rights activists have developed a strategy to defeat deportations. Those arrested are encouraged to refuse to sign the “voluntary departure," and insist upon having legal counsel. All persons inside the U.S. have a right to counsel (not only citizens). If some 20%- 30% of those arrested begin to refuse to sign, the jails will fill within days – even the private prisons. If those arrested insist on legal counsel, the courts will be overloaded.
More than 30,000 farm workers are being brought to Canada from the Caribbean, Mexico and South East Asia to do the jobs that no one wants to do, they are treated as sub-human and forced to return home, many times as injured bodies.
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