Some labor historians say this new militancy resembles the 1930s, when a huge strike wave helped lead to landmark pro-labor legislation and one of the biggest bursts of unionization in American history.
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.
“Today, the court recognized that farmworkers are entitled to the same rights as all other workers in New York state,” said Rebecca Fuentes, lead organizer with the Workers’ Center of Central New York.
Workers—organized, militant and backed by a contract—can reveal what the fair-trade label often hides.
A national growers’ lobby has sued the U.S. Department of Labor to freeze the wages of H-2A workers at a level barely above minimum wage.
By romanticizing local farms and assuming that ‘local’ means ‘moral,’ many miss the fact that whether produce is sent to a giant warehouse or a ‘farm to table’ restaurant, the farmworkers are denied the protections granted all other hourly workers.
Despite opposition from agribusiness, the UN Human Rights Council Declaration adopted a declaration of peasant rights. This can provide a legal basis for peasant organizations to challenge neo-liberal austerity measures.
“Over the last year,” Goldstein charges, “Rep. Goodlatte has made it his mission to create a massive new guest worker program of millions of captive workers who have even fewer labor rights than the current workers they would replace
Honoring Larry Itliong and a generation of radicals whose political ideas are as relevant to workers now as they were in 1965. This article is from the (forthcoming) May/June 2018 issue. Published in honor of May Day.
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