¡Join the fight!
This just continues to goad me. 
Last week, leaders of the food justice movement -- -- including Eric Schlosser and Robert Kenner, producer and director of the hard-hitting new documentary "Food, Inc." -- sent a strongly worded letter to Chipotle, the fastest growing company in fast-food, demanding that they live up to its claims of "Food with Integrity" and "work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers as a true partner in the protection of farmworkers' rights."
Now it's your turn to get in on the action. Add your name to the letter to Chipotle CEO Steve Ells demanding real "food with integrity" and an end to the human rights crisis in Florida's tomato fields. Go to http://action.americanrightsatwork.org/campaign/chipotle to participate in this email action. Read more...
A new foodumentary, Bananas! (trailer), has Dole Food Co.'s full attention. From the LA Times: Read more...
“Any just national labor law reform must include farm workers and domestics,” [UFW General Counsel Jerry] Cohen wrote to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, stating an obvious and compelling truth. “If not now, when?”
-- from NY Times Op-Ed piece Read more...
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and, this week, the Bandana Project begins a major push in the U.S.. From CNBC:
Residents of 25 states and three other countries will take a stand against the sexual exploitation of farmworker women and other low-wage female immigrant workers in April as part of the "Bandana Project," a partnership between the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and community groups, universities and other advocacy organizations to raise awareness and educate these women about their rights. Read more...
It occurs to me that young people today may not know who Cesar Chavez was, what an important role he played right along with Martin Luther King in embracing a nonviolent approach to protest.
In 1965, with grape growers slashing payments to farmworkers in the middle of the grape harvest, Cesar Chavez and his National Farmworkers Association called a strike.
Our friends over at Student Action with Farmworkers is launching National Farmworker Awareness week this week (March 29 - April 4).
In light of this, w're following Farmworker Justice's work on the new Department Labor (DOL) and its relationship with sad Bush policies. Read more...
Final changes to H-2A agricultural guestworker program are out. This program, which covers just 2% of the farm workforce as a means to legitimize migrant labor in agriculture, has been in dire need of an overhaul for years, according to both pro-business and pro-migrant groups.
But these current revisions to the H-2A regulations are not pretty, according to Farmworker Justice: Read more...
No issue in agriculture is more controversial or more timely than immigration policy. Immigrants do the largest amount of work in most areas of our food system, from the fields to the slaughterhouses, from the canneries to restaurants. The recent campaign of mega-raids by Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), most dramatically in Postville, Iowa, has disrupted links in the food chain and the communities in which their workers live, and has pointed out our deep reliance on immigrants, both documented and undocumented, to keep us all fed. Read more...
