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2 episodes with immokalee workers
2 episodes with immokalee workers
2 episodes with immokalee workers
3 episodes with immokalee workers
4 episodes with immokalee workers
2 episodes with immokalee workers
2 episodes with immokalee workers
2 episodes with immokalee workers
Subscribe to Stories of Resistance podcast hereToday, March 31, is Cesar Chavez Day. The day, celebrating the birth and life of the great U.S. farmworker labor leader. In 1962, Cesar Chavez co-founded the United Farm Workers, alongside Dolores Huerta. The organization would go on to wage strikes and boycotts, winning tremendous victories for workers picking the crops in the fields of California and elsewhere in the United States. In 1969, he was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. In 1970, Chavez and the UFW won higher wages for grape pickers, after a 5-year-long California grape strike.Chavez's legacy lives on.But that legacy is also complicated. Cesar Chavez and the UFW fought for immigration reform, but also fought undocumented immigration (and pushed for deportations), under the pretext that undocumented migrants were used to drive down wages and break UFW strikes. This is our special Cesar Chavez Day bonus episode of Stories of Resistance — a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, we'll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.Below are the links mentioned in the close of this episode:United Farm Workers of America website: https://ufw.org/Coalition of Immokalee Workers: https://ciw-online.org/2014 Cesar Chavez Biopic:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1621046/Footage of United Farm Workers grape strike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azbxTAGgs2EWritten and produced by Michael Fox.If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael's reporting, and support at www.patreon.com/mfox.Subscribe to Stories of Resistance podcast hereHelp TRNN continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer.Sign up for our newsletterFollow us on BlueskyLike us on FacebookFollow us on TwitterDonate to support this podcast
What to do with the Van Wezel? The committee that will make recommendations on the historic performing arts hall got a good look at the elephant in the room: Rising sea levels and intensifying storms.Then: The race for height continues in downtown Sarasota. Ramon Lopez gives us updates on two twin-tower proposals: the Hyatt Hotel makeover and the Mira Mar luxury condo project.Next: The current political atmosphere is tough for immigrant farmworkers. Even so - or maybe because of it - the Coalition of Immokalee Workers just started a tour of Florida to find new allies.Finally: “Women of Resistance” started as a series of paintings. Now it is morphing into a series of dances you will be able to see in Bradenton next week.
After massive flooding last year, Sarasota County is asking the City of Sarasota to take over stormwater management. That would end an agreement that began in the last century.Then: You'd think a forest that brings back turtles and birds would be a welcome addition to the neighborhood. It's not for one homeowners' association in suburban Manatee County that actually ripped out a microforest.Next: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers created a successful model that's not only good for immigrant tomato pickers, but also for farmers and grocery store and restaurant chains. As deportation talk is reaching fever pitch, the Coalition is reaching out to new allies across Florida.Finally: Red Tide produces a neurotoxin, and that may affect your brain health. WSLR News reporter Joanne Mills reports about groundbreaking research happening in Sarasota.
Donald Trump's threatened tariffs would be another nail in the coffin for Florida's citrus industry.Greg Asbed from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers joins us on this episode to discuss the history of working conditions for agriculture workers, especially tomato pickers, in southwest Florida. The CIW was instrumental to enacting one of the most effective programs to improve working conditions for agriculture workers in U.S. history, the Fair Food Program. If you're interested in working conditions for agricultural workers in Florida, the limited edition "Big Sugar" podcast is essential listening revealing the historic and ongoing abuses of workers by Florida sugar companies. The weekly "Seeking Rents" podcast examines corporate power and influence run amok in Florida and our politicians' complicity with corporate power to the detriment of citizens.
#194: Greg Asbed and Gerardo Reyes Chavez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers tell the story of their movement's origins, including the injustices faced by farmworkers in Florida's tomato fields that led to slavery lawsuits. As they continue to apply pressure through corporate boycotts and public campaigns, they reflect on what has worked, what has changed, and all that still needs fixing since their early win enrolling Taco Bell into the Fair Food ProgramThe Coalition of Immokalee Workers is a human and worker rights organization founded in 1993 by farmers experiencing injustice in Florida's tomato fields. In 2011, CIW launched the Fair Food Program, negotiating one penny more per pound of tomatoes sold to Taco Bell to pay for the implementation of improved conditions for farmworkers. CIW was also able to convince Taco Bell, Walmart and other large scale food system players to source from farms complying with a code of conduct. To date, their program has spread throughout the US and beyond, and they still work tirelessly to encourage more entities to stop sourcing from bad actors.https://ciw-online.org/To watch a video version of this podcast please visit:https://www.realorganicproject.org/coalition-immokalee-workers-successful-boycotts-episode-one-hundred-ninety-fourThe Real Organic Podcast is hosted by Dave Chapman and Linley Dixon, engineered by Brandon StCyr, and edited and produced by Jenny Prince.The Real Organic Project is a farmer-led movement working towards certifying 1,000 farms across the United States this year. Our add-on food label distinguishes soil-grown fruits and vegetables from hydroponically-raised produce, and pasture-raised meat, milk, and eggs from products harvested from animals in horrific confinement (CAFOs - confined animal feeding operations).To find a Real Organic farm near you, please visit:https://www.realorganicproject.org/farmsWe believe that the organic standards, with their focus on soil health, biodiversity, and animal welfare were written as they should be, but that the current lack of enforcement of those standards is jeopardizing the ability for small farms who adhere to the law to stay in business. The lack of enforcement is also jeopardizing the overall health of the customers who support the organic movement; customers who are not getting what they pay for at market but still paying a premium price. And the lack of enforcement is jeopardizing the very cycles (water, air, nutrients) that Earth relies upon to provide us all with a place to live, by pushing extractive, chemical agriculture to the forefront.If you like what you hear and are feeling inspired, we would love for you to join our movement by becoming one of our 1,000 Real Fans!https://www.realorganicproject.org/1000-real-fans/To read our weekly newsletter (which might just be the most forwarded newsletter on the internet!) and get firsthand news about what's happening with organic food, farming and policy, please subscribe here:https://www.realorganicproject.org/email/
Series: Labor Day Special Episode Episode Description: “Suffering doesn't have to be part of the food we eat. Workers feed every family in this country, and it is only fair that everyone, everywhere should do something to make sure that farm workers have the same ability to feed their families with dignity and respect. And it doesn't take much. It takes for us to have these conversations.” —Gerardo Reyes Chávez The food we consume is often built upon the backs of a vulnerable workforce struggling to maintain their dignity and basic rights. While we enjoy the convenience and affordability of our food, we must reckon with the unseen sacrifices made by the men, women, and children who toil in the fields, a sobering reality that challenges us to consider the true price we pay for the food we consume. Gerardo Reyes Chávez is a seasoned farm worker and community organizer who has dedicated over 25 years to advocating for the rights of agricultural laborers. As a long-time member of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), Gerardo has been instrumental in the development and implementation of the groundbreaking Fair Food Program, which has dramatically improved working conditions and wages for tens of thousands of farm workers across the United States. Tune in as Justine and Gerardo relate the stark contrasts between farm workers' cultural expectations and the harsh realities they face in the agricultural industry, the systemic nature of the abuses and exploitation they endure, the outsized power of major food brands driving industry consolidation and wage stagnation, the innovative and persistent approach of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in targeting this systemic change, the potential for replicating successful models like the Fair Food Program, and the critical importance of building solidarity and collective action between consumers, advocates, and the farm worker community to address the deep-rooted challenges in the food system. Connect with Gerardo: Gerardo Reyes Chávez is a distinguished farmworker advocate and a key leader of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). With a background in farm labor that began at the age of 11 in Zacatecas, Mexico, Gerardo has dedicated his life to improving the conditions and rights of farmworkers. He has worked in the fields of Florida, picking a variety of crops including oranges, tomatoes, blueberries, and watermelon. As a leader in the CIW, Gerardo has played a pivotal role in the development and implementation of the Fair Food Program, which aims to protect workers from exploitation and improve labor conditions. His efforts include facilitating community meetings, educating workers about their rights, and attracting new buyers to support the program. Gerardo is also actively involved in addressing issues such as wage theft and modern-day slavery, ensuring that farmworkers' voices are heard and their rights are upheld. Gerardo's work has been recognized nationally and internationally, and he frequently speaks at events to raise awareness about the challenges faced by farmworkers and the importance of ethical labor practices. Website Facebook X Connect with NextGen Purpose: Website Facebook Instagram LinkedIn YouTube Episode Highlights: 00:50 Farmer vs Farm Worker 08:02 Overcoming Challenges and Abuse 15:41 The Role of the Coalition 20:32 Change the Farming Community 23:25 Suffering Should Not Be A Part of Our Food
On this week's episode, we talk to Alysha Shivji, a postdoc researcher, who got her PhD in Business and Human Rights, located in Nottingham, UK. We learn about the worker-driven social responsibility model and what led Alysha to get her PhD in human rights. Alysha talks a bit about her PhD research where we learn about the Coalition of the Immokalee Workers, and how Taco Bell fits into this discussion on human rights. Alysha also shares with us an interesting approach to discovering human rights issues within corporate supply chains. We get to hear a little bit about Alysha's work as a Teaching Assistant at her University and she gives us hope for the students entering into business PhD programs. She also teaches us a little bit about the ideas around decolonizing business school, what that means and who's leading that charge. This is an amazing episode full of academic information shared in an accessible context, that will leave you feeling hopeful and informed! Alysha is Zahra's long long time best friend. She is currently a Postdoc research fellow at the University of Nottingham. Last year she got her PhD in Business and Human Rights from the University of Manchester. Her research and life interests include workers' rights, corporate accountability, decolonial studies, surfing, ice cream, the sun and dogs. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers https://ciw-online.org/ The Decolonizing Business School Manifesto https://www.bayes.city.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/656110/manifesto-for-decolonizing-the-business-school-curriculum.pdf Tony's Chocolate (100% slave free chocolate) - https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en Check out our Substack for transcripts and bonus content! Follow us on social media Twitter: @ThoughtfulWRPod Instagram: @ThoughtfulWellnessRevolution Email us at ThoughtfulWellnessRevolution@gmail.com Theme song: Katy Pearson
On The Good Place, Michael and Shawn battle before the Judge over whether the complexity of modern life, coupled with the four humans' progress, require a reassessment of the point system. Chidi comes up with the idea of a new experiment involving different humans, and the Judge tweaks the ground rules before ordering Michael and Shawn to comply. On the podcast, Daniel Kirzane and Jon Spira-Savett scamper widely across Torah and Talmud in our own tweak of the podcast's ongoing attempt to synthesize points, intentions, and teshuvah in an elegant way. We discuss whether life was in fact less complex in the past, and whether the way we ourselves (and others) tell our stories looking back can actually change the point value of our actions retroactively. Also, Daniel tells us about being one of the #tomatorabbis, supporting the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in a successful campaign that has transformed the ethics of tomato consumption in the past decade! Click here for show notes.
For our 2nd Sukkot themed episode, we examine the harvest side of the holiday as Rabbi Shira and Joshua welcome on Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a key leader for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida. Gerardo has been working in the fields since he was eleven years old and shares the difficult perspective of being a worker of the land and their continuing struggle for basic human rights. Episode Timecodes: (07:05) Interview with Gerardo Reyes Chavez (37:10) Rabbi's Shira's Guided Meditation
A Passion to Serve Host Don Kuchnicki speaks with Uriel Zelaya-Perez, National Faith Co-coordinator with the Alliance for Fair Food and Leonel Perez, activist with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. During the interview they discuss the Fair Food Program (FFP) as well as their current boycott of the Wendy's restaurant franchise. This episode is in both English and Spanish. Coalition of Immokalee Workers: Coalition of Immokalee Workers (ciw-online.org) Alliance for Fair Food: Alliance for Fair Food
As climate change progresses, more people will be forced from their homes and into exploitative environments. In the United States, this is particularly true of farmworkers.The climate crisis is, undeniably, a labor issue too.“like you i woke up in the dark. but i was reaching for animals, trying to beat the heat. like you sunrise usually found me in the middle of doing something. i didn't call it prayer, but i did believe that if i did it every day we would exist.”In today's episode, we hear the poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs read from her book, “DUB”, as she unlearns the separation between her work and that of her great-grandfather's. She shows us how poetry can help us imagine another way of relating to life on earth. We then travel to the agricultural fields of Immokalee, Florida. where Lupe Gonzalo is a senior staff member at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. She tells us about her experience working tomato fields, the work she does now fighting for farmworker rights, and the need to unlearn the systems of separation between land, food, and people. Take Action:Find more of Alexis Pauline Gumbs' work at alexispauline.comTo learn more about the Coalition of Immokalee Workers go to ciw-online.orgFollow them on twitter @ciw to learn about upcoming marches and boycotts and take part.
Did you know that images are powerful influencers on how we think about food, people and national policies? Join Food Sleuth Radio host and Registered Dietitian, Melinda Hemmelgarn, for her interview with Shana Klein, Ph.D., art historian, assistant professor of art history at Kent State U. and author of The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion. Klein discusses the role of visual imagery in the acceptance and promotion of fruit, national expansion, and racism focusing on five key fruits: grapes, oranges, bananas, watermelon and pineapple. Sales of her book are generously contributed to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. To see more of Klein's deconstructed images of food: @thefruitsofempire Related website: https://sites.bu.edu/gastronomyblog/2022/01/25/spring-2022-pepin-lecture-series-in-food-studies-gastronomy/
Episode links: Cornell Farmworker Program website Episode transcript: PAUL TREADWELL: Welcome to Extension Out Loud, a podcast from Cornell Cooperative Extension. I'm Paul Treadwell. KATIE BAILDON: And I'm Katie Baildon. PAUL TREADWELL: We got a chance to sit down and talk to-- KATIE BAILDON: We talked to Mary Jo Dudley. She's senior extension associate and director of the Cornell Farmworker Program in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. PAUL TREADWELL: The format of this episode is the result of us wanting to give Mary Jo a platform to explain the Farmworkers Program in some detail. MARY JO DUDLEY: My name is Mary Jo Dudley. I'm the director of the Cornell Farmworker Program, which is a university-wide program. And my faculty appointment is in the Department of Global Development, which is in the College of Ag and Life Sciences. The Cornell Farmworker Program has quite a long history. It actually started under the name of the Cornell Migrant Program over 54 years ago when students, in order to graduate, needed to work on a farm. So for students who were from farming families, they would work a full semester on a different farm. But students who hadn't grown up on a farm would work a full year on a farm. The program was born out of student activism. Because at this time, a Cornell alum donated a large apple orchard in Wayne County to the university, and it became one of the first experiment stations. So many students worked on that farm, and they lived in migrant housing and worked alongside migrant farm workers who, at that time, were primarily Southern Blacks. This had a deep impact on the students. They were surprised about the situation of farm workers, in particular migrant farm workers. And they went to the Cornell Faculty Senate, along with their faculty mentors, and the senate approved a resolution that Cornell should have a program specifically dedicated to the needs of farmworkers and their families. So with that background, our program really focuses on farmworker-identified needs and opportunities. The program is dedicated to improving the living and working conditions of farmworkers and their families. But we also seek recognition for their contributions to society and their acceptance and full participation in local communities. So this includes things like equal protection under the law, earning a living wage, living in safe and comfortable housing, and more importantly, receiving respect as workers and as individuals to allow them to participate fully in their communities. So how do we understand what farmworkers need? And the way that we approach this is direct interviews with farmworkers in the format of a needs assessment. The interviews examine where the workers originate. Why do they migrate? How do they get here? How do they find their employment? What is their job? What is their day to day? What do they enjoy about their job? What do they find challenging? What do they do during their time off? How do they interact with others in local communities in the rural areas? And what are their goals for the future? And this aspect of understanding where they came from, why they came, how they located employment, and what their goals are for the future drives the agenda of the Cornell Farmworker Program, because we look at how people assess where they are today and where they'd like to be in one year, five years, 10 years. And so we can look at the current challenges and go from there to how to address those challenges. So who are the farmworkers in New York state? Currently, most of the farmworkers are undocumented workers that come from rural areas of Mexico and rural areas from Guatemala. And we have a small portion of workers who come from Jamaica through the temporary guestworker program. When we talk about farm workers, we often talk about seasonal or year-round and temporary guestworkers who come through the H-2A program. And those workers come with a visa with a beginning date and an end date. And they also have a very specific wage rate, which is higher than the New York state minimum wage for farmworkers. The 2017 ag census estimated that New York state has approximately 56,000 hired farmworkers and an additional 40,000 unpaid workers, which typically refer to family members. In addition, we have over 1,100 workers who work in packing plants, in the apple packing plants and in other packing plants. So when we talk about farmworkers, it's important to think about, who are we including in that pool? In New York state, we had a major transition around 2000. And preceding 2000, about 2/3 of our workers were migrant workers, people who followed the season and followed the crops. And about a third lived year round. But starting in 2000, that shifted dramatically. So currently, we have about 2/3 of the farmworkers live year round, and about a third migrate. And that's directly associated with the changes within the dairy sector, in which a workforce that had been a family workforce or locals, neighbors, cousins transitioned to an immigrant workforce, with those workers coming primarily from rural Mexico and Guatemala. And that is a heavily undocumented population. If we look at agriculture in New York state, because of our prevalence as leaders nationwide in apple production-- we're the second-largest apple-producing state, in pumpkins, in maple syrup. We're the third-largest dairy-producing state, and we're third in cabbage, grapes, cauliflower, and fourth in crops including pears, tart cherries, sweet corn, snap beans, squash, and we're fifth in onions. These are all very labor-intensive crops. So traditionally, that large group of farmworkers were referred to as migrants, those people who followed the crops. So they would begin in Southern states and work in harvest activities in Southern states and follow the harvest up the coast. For those who were what we call the Eastern migrant stream, they would work in the Carolinas, come to New York state. And once the harvest had been completed in New York state in November, typically around Thanksgiving, they would return to Southern states. We saw a change in this since 2000, where rather than follow crops, there was a transformation within the farmworker population where they would work on more than one farm and engage in agricultural production activities following the season of the year. So we find in upstate New York, we have people in the winter months-- January, February-- who are tying grapes, and later in the spring, they might be planting apple trees. And then, later, they are pruning apple trees, for example. And they will eventually move on to harvest activities and post-harvest packing plants. So by working in different farms on different commodities, they can basically find employment in agriculture year round. And agriculture has always been an entry point for recent immigrants because you don't need to know how to read and write in English to do agriculture. So if we look historically, it began with former African-American sharecroppers, and we've had any number of immigrants coming to the US that entered employment through farmwork, Italian immigrants, Finnish immigrants, German prisoners of war, coal miners. The [INAUDIBLE] who traveled the freight trains often lived from doing agricultural work. This changed with the introduction of guestworker programs. So the guestworker programs were actually a newer version of what is called the [SPANISH] program. When we have a labor shortage, and we can certify that there's a labor shortage, we can bring workers from other countries to do that work. And they come with a work visa referred to as H-2A temporary guestworker visa. And their visas are issued with a beginning date and an end date. Initially, we saw workers who were coming from Jamaica and other Caribbean Islanders. Later, we had US workers coming from Puerto Rico under contracts. They didn't have the visa because they didn't have to worry about citizenship. And currently, our H-2A guestworker program has workers from Mexico, Jamaica, and Guatemala. So in the '80s, between the 1980s and the 2000s, farmwork became an area for entry into the workforce for recent refugees. We had Haitians who arrived in Florida because of changes in Haiti. We had Guatemalans and Salvadorans who fled violence in Central America as well as coming from the other sides of the globe, refugees from Bangladesh, Southeast Asian women, Cambodian women. So it's important to understand that immigrants have always been a critical part to farmwork. For those workers who have lived in New York state for an extended period of time, they have created families here. Many of them have US-born children. That dynamic changes in that this pattern of migration-- moving north and south, returning to home countries-- has diminished significantly. It also raises different priorities among the farmworker population. The primary priority that we have learned about through our research is the heavy weight of immigration concerns among this heavily undocumented population. But those who have children also want to understand how to navigate in their communities-- what is appropriate in our actions with schools, how to locate daycare centers. We don't have statistics on how many people have families and how many people do not. But in general, those people who are living and work in fruit and vegetable year round are more likely to have family members. And dairy workers, which are obviously year-round workers, may or may not have family members. The major factor in this is that dairy workers typically have employer-provided housing. So some employers are not interested in housing a family, and their housing might not be appropriate for anything other than single men. So it varies tremendously. And we don't have statistics and don't intend to collect statistics on that because that changes constantly every day. But what I would say is that as we see more families, the interest in learning how to navigate in their communities comes to the fore. Most of the farmworkers who are here currently are here to work. And that's something that our research showed, that the farm workers come to work. And when you talk about their future, their plan is to return home. They don't come to stay. Over time, their personal situation may change. As they marry or they have children, that may change. But what motivates them to come is either they are fleeing violence, or it's an economic reality that they cannot earn money where they are from. And they come here to work, to earn money, to pay back the debts that are incurred with coming here, and to create a nest egg so they have something to go back to. They may purchase land. They may purchase animals. They may build a house. However, their primary priority while they are here is the workplace. They want to be successful in the workplace, they want to understand opportunities for advancement in the workplace, and they want to be involved in a positive workplace. So we did a large research project that we worked with producers and farmworkers to look at, what is a positive workplace? And on our website, we have the results of that research plus tips and tools for creating positive workplaces. And the tips and tools for creating positive workplaces revolve around establishing good communication coupled with mutual respect. So typically, in our interviews, in our needs assessment interviews, farmworkers will identify interest in how they can improve relations in the workplace with their employers, with their co-workers. And it's a challenge because, for many of them, their co-workers are also their housemates. But in understanding the workplace and understanding the need to communicate well with others in rural communities, they're interested in learning English. And they're interested in opportunities to learn English that are fluid and flexible because they may not have a constant time off. And most don't have their own transportation, and public transportation in rural areas is unreliable. So one thing they talk about is they want to understand what services are there and how they can access that. But since immigration is at the top of the list, it's important to understand that we live in an area of intensive immigration enforcement. And over the years, immigration debates have been stalled. We're now in a new era where we're talking about the Farm Modernization Act, which would provide an accelerated option for legalization of farm workers. But until that passes, farm workers talk a lot about the presence of law enforcement officials in rural areas that identify them as potential undocumented workers. And so this risk of having law enforcement come to your house or stop you while you're going shopping is a very real risk. And that can lead to deportation and lead to separation of undocumented workers from their US-born children. The ACLU refers to this as the Constitution-free zone of the United States, those areas in which immigration enforcement can take place without any necessary catalyst. And so the question of immigration is very central to the discussion about farmworkers. Some of them ask, are they supporting local economies? Are they doing work that others won't do? And our research points to the fact that they come to work, not to stay. Many ask, why don't they just apply for a visa? And there is no visa for workers on dairy farms. What we see is a situation where workers are doing physically demanding work in all kinds of weather. In our research, they discuss social, economic, linguistic, and geographic isolation. It's a relatively young workforce. In our research, they discuss challenges to adapting to new communities. That includes things like language, cultural norms and expectations. Many of the farm workers note that we talk a lot about time. We're out of time. We're running out of time. We don't have enough time. And so that's part of what they always find interesting. Of course, the challenges of living in rural, geographically isolated areas where there is no public transportation, the desire to have a positive workplace, to communicate well with your co-workers, to understand how to negotiate for changes in the workplace. And for those who now have families, they're interested in how to interact with schools, daycare. And as immigrants, many of them express loneliness, missing their family, missing home. I think one of the aspects that is often not visible is while the general public has a sense that this is very physically demanding work, they may not have as close a sense of the dangers associated with the work, for example, dangers associated with using ladders or equipment, and both mechanical equipment on fruit and vegetable farms and equipment in milking parlors, equipment in processing and packing plants. It's dirty work, and there are dangers associated with working with large animals on dairy farms. Another aspect, which is very prevalent in our conversations with farmworkers is that they work in both extremely hot and extremely cold temperatures. All of you who have experienced an upstate winter understand what it would be like to spend hours in February tying grape vines to a wire. And as we talked about a little bit before, the challenge is that many of them now have US-born children. In fact, in the US, there are over 4 million US-born children with one or more undocumented parent. And since the undocumented parent runs the risk of deportation, the possibility for family separation is very high. So part of what we do is we support farmworkers in addressing these needs and fill in the gaps. We have students who go to farms during the farmworker's day off and tutor them in English as a second language. And I'll talk a little bit about some of the other things. COVID-19 really changed the game with farmworkers. Our priority was maintaining ongoing communication with farmworkers. So we had to nearly, overnight, transition from face-to-face, on-farm workshops to developing a system where we could quickly communicate with a large number of farm workers. We developed a system of text messaging to 3,000 farm workers that we had their personal cell phone numbers. And we had their personal cell phone numbers because they have participated in an activity with us in the past few years. We do many on-farm workshops about how to navigate within an intensive immigration-enforcement environment. We do many workshops where we assist families in assigning temporary guardians for their US-born children. And so we had those numbers, and we utilize that system to begin communicating with farmworkers about critical issues. PAUL TREADWELL: And you're listening to Extension Out Loud, the podcast from Cornell Cooperative Extension, and our conversation with Mary Jo Dudley. As we talked to Mary Jo, the issue of the pandemic came up. And this section really looks at our farmworkers and the challenges they faced in dealing with this crisis, including isolation, access to health care, and issues of food security. So you had a database of 3,000 numbers that you could rely on. Can you talk a little bit about what it took to build the trust to be able to develop a database like that? Because obviously, farmworkers aren't just going to give any random visitor their cell phone number. MARY JO DUDLEY: That's right. So I personally have been working with farmworkers for over 16 years. And that means regularly going to farms, regularly interacting with people. We do workshops. We do training activities. We do troubleshooting. Our workplace relations project-- we interview farm owners and managers and ask them how their workplace has changed over time, and what are the challenges as well as the benefits. And then, separately, we meet with farmworkers and talk about what it's like to work in that workplace. We analyze what they are both saying, and we host an all-farm meeting in which we address the challenges that they face. And we have developed, as I mentioned earlier, a series of tips and tools that are available for farm employers as well as farm workers. One of the things that this research highlighted was that workers often did not have a face-to-face interview with their employer. They came to work on the farm, they shadowed another worker, but they never had that, welcome to the farm. This is what we're doing here. And so we put together a bilingual tool which is a worker orientation checklist that farmers can use. When you have a new worker, did you talk about benefits? Did you talk about how to ask for time off? Did you talk about scheduling? Did you talk about training opportunities? So that's an approach in which we interacted with hundreds of farmworkers. And in the immigration arena, many of the farmworkers who came here without proper documentation have US-born children. However, in order to create a legal document that assigns a temporary guardian for their US-born children, they have to have a current federal photo ID from their own government. So 13 years ago, we started working with the Mexican and the Guatemalan consulates to bring them to upstate New York so farmworkers could get those necessary documents without running the risk of traveling from the North Country to New York City, where the possibility of being detained was very, very high. So in a recent mobile consulate event that we had with workers from Guatemala, we had 400 people come in a single day. And so when they come, we collaborate with partners. And during that event, clinic was present to give free health consultations. We have pro-bono immigration attorneys on site in case people have immigration questions. We have workplace safety people on site to share resources. And so over the years, many farmworkers have attended either an on-farm workshop, a research project, a consulate activity. And so that's how we have so many personal phone numbers, because we asked them if they would like to be informed of workshops, consulate visits, et cetera. So obviously, of those phone numbers, a certain percentage no longer were active. But once we went through, we found that we had this way to communicate with about 3,000 farmworkers. When COVID presented itself, we had to interrupt our face-to-face interactions. And so we started initially sending, via WhatsApp or text message, links to videos in Spanish, in Mam, in other indigenous languages about the transmission of COVID-19 and how to protect oneself. We also organized Spanish language calls with a trusted medical professional, Dr. Canario, who's the medical director of Finger Lakes Community Health. And these calls were simply Q&A. But this system allowed not only for us to communicate information to farmworkers, but they could communicate back to us. They could text us back and let us know if they needed masks, if they needed additional medical advice, if they needed legal referrals, and for many, if they needed food. So we transitioned our activities. We worked with a group of local volunteers, the Bryant Park mask sellers, who sold masks. And we have distributed now about 8,000 masks to farmworkers. But at the beginning of the pandemic, none of us were familiar with masks, and farmworkers had a lot of questions about how to wash them, how to dry them, et cetera. So we included with the masks a bilingual graphic which showed how the mask should be worn, how it can be washed. And on the reverse side, we included the phone numbers for all the federally designated migrant health clinics. So if it's a mask that we distributed in this area, it has the phone number for Finger Lakes Community Health, or if it's in Western New York, Oak Orchard Community Health. Or if it's in the Hudson Valley, it was then Sun River Community Health. Because we had this two-way text messaging system, we started getting requests for food for people who, during quarantine, could not leave the farm. That's not a typical activity that we had ever undertaken in the past, but we needed to develop a an emergency response to that. And fortunately, we had a farmer who donated a large amount of beef. We worked with CCE to store that beef, and we worked with the local food kitchen, with Loaves & Fishes, to cook those meals. And so we were picking up a hundred fully-cooked meals every week and delivering those. During the season, we also had farmers who provided produce. So we would deliver to those people who were in quarantine a box of shelf-safe food, produce, and cooked meals. However, this really underscored food insecurity within the farmworker population, not only during quarantine, but because their children were not attending schools. While the schools might offer the continuation of meals that could be picked up at the school, most of the farmworkers didn't have transportation to go to the school to pick up the meals. So it underscored how much reliance vulnerable families had when school lunches and breakfasts were no longer available to their children. During COVID, we undertook another activity. We have always supported farmworkers with legal clinics, but we could no longer do face-to-face clinics. So we would get a text message from a farmworker family that had a legal need. We would conduct a legal intake over the phone and then match that farmworker with a pro-bono immigration or family law attorney in their area. The immigration attorneys often receive funding to serve a specific geographic area. And then we would have virtual legal clinics. The attorney would be at their kitchen table. The farmworker would be at their kitchen table. The translator would be at their kitchen table. And in order to facilitate that, we had to teach farmworkers how to download Zoom on their phones. So my students would do dry runs with farmworkers who were going to go to a legal clinic, and practice before the clinic. And this allowed for farmworkers to receive that necessary support, those people who were in immigration and deportation proceedings to receive the necessary support. And Governor Cuomo put into place the possibility for virtual notarization, so legal documents could be notarized via Zoom or FaceTime. So we were allowed to continue with those families who were interested in assigning temporary guardians for their US-born children. A parent who's undocumented who is facing deportation proceedings will often put into place a temporary guardian to avoid that those children become wards of the state. And they can name an individual that they know and trust. We did 10 virtual legal clinics, quite a bit of background work to make those happen. In addition to signing legal papers such as temporary guardianship, we also put together a packet of information for those people who were going to serve as a guardian, which includes all the information about the children-- their teacher, their pediatrician, their dentist, allergies, likes, dislikes. And we also used COVID to tweak our service directory. We have a Spanish and English language searchable database of services that are organized by geocode. So you put in your address, and you can look at the services, things such as housing, legal services, education, English classes, job training, safety, health services. And it's not just a simple list, but each service indicates, do they provide translation? If so, in what languages? Do they provide transportation? If so, how do you organize it? What is the general fee structure? And what are the documents that are required for one to access those services? Because you don't want to send an undocumented person to a government service where there are mandatory reporters. So we did a lot of revamping of our website. We have a Spanish language website, which is [INAUDIBLE], which is cell phone accessible. And also, during COVID, we developed visual materials on new regulations. There were state regulations, COVID farm safety regulations. There was not an easy way for those regulations to be communicated to farmworkers. So we developed an audiovisual animated video to share that information with farmworkers. Many things changed. The Driver's License, the Green Light Law was passed, so immigrants, regardless, could have access to driver's licenses. However, the DMV closed, so we mailed out a lot of Spanish-language driver's manuals so people could study for the written test. Also, right before COVID, the law that provides the Farm Labor Fair Laborer Practices Act, which revises the New York state labor law to include new protections for farmworkers, farmworkers and domestic workers were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, which is the federal, which provides the right to organize, guaranteed workers' comp, et cetera, guaranteed day of rest. And that was changed in July of 2019, where the New York state labor law was revised through this legislation. So that raised a lot of new information. One of the things that we've been doing is, how do you take complex information and make it accessible to an immigrant low-literacy population? So I'm just going to show you this. As I said, the labor law affecting farmworkers changed, and it has many components. So how do you communicate it? [AUDIO PLAYBACK] - If you're a farmworker in New York state, there's a new law that you should know called the New York State Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act. This video explains what this new law means to you. This material was produced by the Cornell Farmworker Program at Cornell University. Pause this video at any moment to take note of the information. This law went into effect on January 1, 2020. To whom does it apply? This applies to all farmworkers in New York state with or without legal status. Under the new law, you have eight rights that could be beneficial to you. Right number one, the right to 24 hours of consecutive rest per week-- you could choose to work during your day of rest, but your employer can't force you to work. If you're unable to work for 24 consecutive hours due to weather or crop conditions, this counts as your day of rest. You should always keep track of the hours you worked and make sure that your pay stub reflects the exact number of hours worked. PAUL TREADWELL: To watch the full video, please visit bit.ly/cfb_video or see the link in our show notes. Now, back to our conversation with Mary Jo. MARY JO DUDLEY: I wanted to show that to you because we're using this animated form-- and this is the English version, and we obviously have the Spanish version-- to communicate complex topics. As you note, this new law came into effect January 1, 2020. And we faced a stay-at-home order two months later. And it was critical because there are certain aspects of this law, including paid sick leave, paid family leave, that became very critical during COVID. How would farmworkers be paid for the time that they were in quarantine, or the time that they were ill, or the time that they were caring for a sick family member? So what this required is a different way of working, but the priority being to maintaining ongoing communication with farmworkers and this two-way communication, which included our text messaging system as well as regularly scheduled health related calls in Spanish with Dr. Canario. And our most recent one was about vaccines-- why do you need it-- and a Q&A-- what are the challenges with vaccines? And general calls with farmworkers that were regularly scheduled, where they could just talk about issues that they were facing. So we went from in-person, face-to-face regular communications to developing a system to maintaining communication, using text messages, WhatsApp, Zoom calls, and regular telephone calls. The concrete when your life is primarily focused on your work-- certain aspects of that take on greater importance, for example, your housing. If you're working 60 hours a week, and you go home to a house where you don't have hot water, or the house is falling apart, you never rest. But if you go back to a house that you're comfortable in, you're able to rest. And one interesting aspect of farmwork is that many of the farm employers provide housing because there's no other housing available in rural areas. So the quality of the housing is extremely important to those that work on farms for their general satisfaction and their well-being. KATIE BAILDON: Historically, farmworkers have not been protected under the National Labor Rights Act, right? But then there are some protections at the state level now because of the new legislation. Is that right? MARY JO DUDLEY: When the National Labor Relations Act was passed, at that time, that was still a time of the Jim Crow laws in the South. And so that worker protection which gives the right to overtime pay, the right to a day of rest, the right to organize-- in order to get the support of the Southern Congress people, rather than explicitly state a racial exclusion, they excluded two kinds of workers who were typically Black, domestic workers and farmworkers. Since that is federal regulation, the only way that can be changed is states can amend their labor law. And in 1990, I think, New York state amended its labor law with relation to domestic workers. Other states, as you know, have amended their labor law with respect to farmworkers, such as California. And that adjustment of labor regulations, when you have the right to organize-- that evolved into the birth of many labor unions. United Farm Workers, based in California, was an entity that focuses-- has focused on organizing farmworkers. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee in Ohio focuses on organizing farmworkers. The typical union structure-- since many states' farmworkers did not have the right to organize, some states formed farmworker organizations that didn't use the typical union structure. So for example, I don't know if you've ever heard of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. That was a coalition of farmworkers in Immokalee that, rather than focusing their energy on changing the relations between worker and employer, they joined forces and targeted those that were making the most money from their labor. And so they put forth a campaign, which was called A Penny A Pound, for those that were buying tomatoes. And they focused on Taco Bell, Whole Foods, Burger King. And eventually, they were able to convince those people who bought the tomatoes to pay a penny more per pound. And that extra income was distributed among the workers. We can turn back to-- the United Farm Workers, many years ago, had a grape boycott. And so that was a consumer boycott, where consumers were encouraged not to buy grapes grown in California. Or the Farm Labor Organizing Committee had the tomato soup boycott. They encouraged consumers not to buy Campbell Soup until they changed their relationships with farmworkers. So there are different ways to think about organizing, and there are ways that farmworkers have organized informally for many years. Probably the most predominant is there's an organization of dairy workers. It's called [SPANISH], and they have organized. But before organizing around changing the labor law with its provisions for farmworkers, they focused on driver's licenses, the Green Light campaign. So those workers said, we can't have a driver's license. We have US-born children. If something happens to our children in the middle of the night, we have no way to legally attend to their medical needs. Similarly, we have no way to legally arrive at our parent-teacher conferences. If you don't have a driver's license, and you live in rural areas of New York state or any other state where there's no reliable public transportation, most of the farmworkers rely on an informal system of transportation. It's called [SPANISH]. They will hire a local unemployed or underemployed individual to give them a ride to town. And that ride to town may cost $50. So this is still an issue for us right now as we're encouraging farmworkers to access COVID-19 vaccines, is the transportation aspect. So there's a two-prong approach. One is the federally designated migrant health clinics go directly to farms and vaccinate all workers. Or in some areas, CCE has hosted joint vaccination clinics with the County Health Department. But we need to ensure that there's appropriate and accessible transportation for farmworkers to arrive at those clinics. The most successful model that we've seen is where the employers transport their workers. So there was an outbreak of COVID among a group of Guatemalan workers for whom Spanish is their second language. And their employer told them that people would be coming from the county health department to ask them questions in Spanish, probably in some version of Spanish, and that they should speak to them truthfully. Someone arrived at their house. They gave their real name, their address, and that person took photographs of them and of their house. The next day, they appeared in the local newspaper, photographs of undocumented immigrants that tested positive to COVID-19, with their address in front of their house. The only option for those individuals is to flee, whether they're violently ill or not, because that kind of information is an invitation for ICE to go to that location. That week, we had various reports of ICE picking up other farmworkers in the area, who had worked on the same farm for 20 years, who had US-born children, and took them to our federal detention center in Batavia that had a significant number of COVID-19 cases, and their bail was posted at $19,000. Make of it what you will. But did that person do that intentionally? I imagine not. But it illustrates the gap between an understanding of-- that would be a HIPAA violation if that was a health provider, right? But it was a journalist. And they didn't know who it was. They didn't know the difference, right? In the current context of anti-immigrant sentiments, it fueled the fire. And we saw this in rural areas where social media, Facebook postings, et cetera, pointed to immigrants, and farmworkers specifically, as bringing COVID to their area. Farmworkers are essential workers. They worked despite statewide stay-at-home directives. They had higher exposure to infection. And initially, they did not have access to PPE. KATIE BAILDON: On a final note, Mary Jo shared with us what brings her hope for this work. PAUL TREADWELL: And it's really an interesting section because it's-- after listening to the lead-up to this part, it really seems like hope is a challenge to maintain. But Mary Jo had some words about that. So we hope you've enjoyed this conversation, and here's Mary Jo. MARY JO DUDLEY: I think it's hopeful that the New York state labor law has been revised to provide protections for farmworkers. And as long as we can communicate that in an effective way, that opens up options for better well-being for farmworkers. I think that the partnership and the trust that we've developed with farmworkers allows us to work together to create approaches and materials that respond to both immediate and long-term needs among this population. I believe that through the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people in New York state and other states perhaps changed their perspective towards food, it opened the question of, who is producing this food? Who is milking the cows? Who is harvesting our vegetables? And so I have hope. And I have hope that we're now talking about immigration reform specifically for farmworkers. Because if we could find a way to diminish the fear associated with living undocumented in the US, we open up opportunities to be more creative. PAUL TREADWELL: Thanks for listening to this episode. Extension Out Loud was produced and edited by Paul Treadwell with help from Katie Baildon. KATIE BAILDON: For more about this episode, including show notes and more, visit extensionoutloud.com, and be sure to subscribe to Extension Out Loud on your favorite podcast directory.
Today, h.e.r.LIFE Blogcast host Rachel Malak sits down with Lupe Gonzalo and Natalia Naranjo (translator) of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to discuss the Fair Food Program and the Wendy's fast food Boycott. First introduced to Rachel by a Fordham CMS class (Communication & The Food System with Prof. Garrett Broad), the topic at hand is workers' rights. Today, we learn about how the CIW has established a widely accepted program to protect vulnerable farm workers in Immokalee, Florida. ...widely accepted by everyone but Wendy's. For more information about the CIW, visit https://ciw-online.org. And be sure to follow the CIW on Instagram @immokalee.workers. *** As always, thank you for listening! Find us on Instagram @her.blog.life: https://www.instagram.com/her.blog.life/ Subscribe to Rachel's YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes videos of recordings: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpvDljLIDd8mRegPxrGYqpA?view_as=subscriber Check out all our blog posts at https://herbloglife.online/
Who Is Growing And Picking The Food You Eat And How Are They Being Treated? | This episode is brought to you by BelcampoMost of us don’t think about food and farmworkers when we are eating or shopping for groceries, but this is actually the largest sector of workers in the United States. Unfortunately, these workers have historically been marginalized and are often unprotected and underpaid. In this minisode, Dr. Hyman offers a brief overview of why food and farmworkers were not included in the United States Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. He also talks to Kerry Kennedy about a group of farmworkers who banded together to create the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to fight for better wages and working conditions. This coalition of farmworkers found a creative solution to injustice by creating the Fair Food Program, which mandates that growers provide basic protections for their workers.Kerry Kennedy is the president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. Since 1981, she has worked on diverse human rights issues including child labor, disappearances, indigenous land rights, judicial independence, freedom of expression, ethnic violence, impunity, women's rights, and the environment. Kerry is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Being Catholic Now, Robert F. Kennedy: Ripples of Hope, and Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World. Kerry founded RFK Compass, which convenes biannual meetings of institutional investors who collectively control $5 to $7 trillion in assets to address the impact of human rights violations on investment outcomes. She serves on the boards of the U.S. Institute of Peace, Human Rights First, Ethics in Action, SDG USA, Sustainable Development Goals Center for Africa, Health eVillages, Kailash Satyarthi Children's Foundation, Nizami Ganjavi International Center as well as several public companies. This episode is brought to you by Belcampo. Right now, you can order Belcampo’s sustainably-raised meats to be delivered to your door using my code HYMAN at Belcampo.com/Hyman for 20% off for first-time customers. Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Kerry Kennedy, “Is Your Food Grown by Oppressed Farmworkers?” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/KerryKennedyFind Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. Charles Modlin, Dr. Leonor Osorio, and Tawny Jones from Cleveland Clinic, “Why We Have The Worst Health Outcomes Of All Industrialized Nations” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/ModlinOsorioJones See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster is the original #tomatorabbi creating partnerships between the Jewish community and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Now the Executive Vice President at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, she works with faith and values-based investors to catalyze their assets for social change. Previously Rachel worked at T'ruah where she was the lead strategist on human rights campaigns and organized more than 2,000 rabbis and cantors.
Dr. Laura Emiko Soltis serves as the Executive Director at Freedom University, an underground school for undocumented students in Atlanta. Born in rural Minnesota, Emiko was raised in a biracial Japanese/Slovak household and developed passions for working-class politics and music performance in equal measure. Emiko's early work experiences in low-wage industries alongside diverse immigrants in restaurant work, janitorial services, and farm labor inspired her to study interracial labor movements and human rights. Emiko graduated from the University of Georgia in 2006 and received her Ph.D. in 2012 from Emory University, where she wrote her dissertation on an interracial migrant farmworker movement led by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in South Florida. After the closing of Freedom University in Athens by its founding faculty, Emiko re-opened Freedom University in Atlanta in September 2014. As the organization's first Executive Director, Emiko introduced the human rights framework to the center of its mission, expanded the curriculum to include the arts and social justice leadership training, and began connecting undocumented youth to veterans of the Black Freedom Movement. Emiko works to advance the undocumented student movement by educating and mentoring a new generation of undocumented freedom fighters and advocating for fair admissions policies in higher education across the United States. At Freedom University, Emiko continues to serve as the Professor of Human Rights, teaching classes in international human rights, social movement theory, and immigration history. As an organizer, Emiko has engaged in numerous direct actions for workers’ rights and immigrant justice, and has been arrested four times in the Kingian tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience. Emiko is also an accomplished violinist, photographer, and sings with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chamber Chorus. Follow Emiko on Twitter. Follow the work of Freedom University. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– To support this podcast, please visit www.kindful.activistheology.com. To follow Activist Theology on Twitter: @activistheology To follow Activist Theology on Instagram: @activistheology To follow Activist Theology on Facebook: @activistheology To be in touch with Dr. Robyn: robyn@activistheology.com or @irobyn To be in touch with Rev. Anna: anna@activistheology.com or @unholyhairetic
Dr. Laura Emiko Soltis serves as the Executive Director at Freedom University, an underground school for undocumented students in Atlanta. Born in rural Minnesota, Emiko was raised in a biracial Japanese/Slovak household and developed passions for working-class politics and music performance in equal measure. Emiko's early work experiences in low-wage industries alongside diverse immigrants in restaurant work, janitorial services, and farm labor inspired her to study interracial labor movements and human rights. Emiko graduated from the University of Georgia in 2006 and received her Ph.D. in 2012 from Emory University, where she wrote her dissertation on an interracial migrant farmworker movement led by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in South Florida. After the closing of Freedom University in Athens by its founding faculty, Emiko re-opened Freedom University in Atlanta in September 2014. As the organization's first Executive Director, Emiko introduced the human rights framework to the center of its mission, expanded the curriculum to include the arts and social justice leadership training, and began connecting undocumented youth to veterans of the Black Freedom Movement. Emiko works to advance the undocumented student movement by educating and mentoring a new generation of undocumented freedom fighters and advocating for fair admissions policies in higher education across the United States. At Freedom University, Emiko continues to serve as the Professor of Human Rights, teaching classes in international human rights, social movement theory, and immigration history. As an organizer, Emiko has engaged in numerous direct actions for workers’ rights and immigrant justice, and has been arrested four times in the Kingian tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience. Emiko is also an accomplished violinist, photographer, and sings with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chamber Chorus. Follow Emiko on Twitter. Follow the work of Freedom University. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– To support this podcast, please visit www.kindful.activistheology.com. To follow Activist Theology on Twitter: @activistheology To follow Activist Theology on Instagram: @activistheology To follow Activist Theology on Facebook: @activistheology To be in touch with Dr. Robyn: robyn@activistheology.com or @irobyn To be in touch with Rev. Anna: anna@activistheology.com or @unholyhairetic
In this season, we are sharing the recordings of a six part speaker series called Acting for Change, Creating Justice produced by Ekar Farms, an earth-based Jewish urban farm in Denver, CO. We will look at how to use ancient Jewish traditions, like Shmita, to catalyze conversations that inspire individual and collective actions to work towards justice. Each episode will have a new speaker to explore the interwoven themes of Judaism, connection to land, and modern social justice movements. We hope this series will inspire you to take action on some of these issues during the upcoming Shmita Year. You can learn more about this series and other programs at www.ekarfarm.org/shmita. This series is produced in partnership with the Shmita Project. The Shmita Project is working to expand awareness about the biblical Sabbatical tradition, and to bring the values of this practice to life today to support healthier, more sustainable Jewish communities. Learn more at www.shmitaproject.org. Please enjoy this second episode, featuring co-hosts Hannah Perez-Postman and Adam Brock and their guest speakers, Greg Watson of the Schumacher Institute for a New Economics and Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster of T'ruah: the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights. This hour long conversation will be a discussion of economic justice through the lens of Shmita, during which our guests will speak about what brought them to their work as activists and what we all can do to contribute and organize for a more economically just, and equitable society. Featured Guests: Greg Watson, Director of Policy and Systems Design at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. His work currently focuses on community food systems and the dynamics between local and geo-economic systems. Watson has spent nearly 40 years learning to understand systems thinking as inspired by Buckminster Fuller and to apply that understanding to achieve a just and sustainable world. Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, Deputy Director, T’ruah. Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster has spent nearly fourteen years at T'ruah: The Rabbinical Call for Human Rights, most recently as Deputy Director. At T'ruah, she has been the lead strategist on T’ruah’s human rights campaigns and heads the organizing and training of more than 2,000 rabbis and cantors. Rachel is the original #tomatorabbi, spearheading T’ruah’s critical partnership with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, and leads Jewish community in worker-led campaigns for corporate accountability.
Sanjay Rawal is my guest on Episode 85 of Inside Ideas. Sanjay is a James Beard Award winning filmmaker, Sanjay made FOOD CHAINS (EP Eva Longoria, Eric Schlosser) which chronicled the battle of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a small group of Oaxacan and Chiapan indigenous farmworkers in Florida, against the largest agribusiness conglomerates in the world. The film was released theatrically in a number of countries (Screen Media in the US) and won numerous awards - including citations from the US Conference of Mayors, the Clinton Global Initiative and the White House. The film was also a Winner (shared) of the 2016 BritDoc Impact award and several festival prizes. Sanjay's last film 3100: RUN AND BECOME won several festival prizes, had a robust theatrical release in the US in 2018 and is opening in traditional theatrical engagements across Europe and Australia in 2020 and 2021. https://gather.film/
Dr. Klein from Kent University inaugurates our women of art history series by speaking about her incredible book The Fruits of Empire. Babelito and Shana discuss their grad school years at New Mexico, and the importance of food art in the articulation of race, gender, and class in the U.S. Stay tuned till the end to hear recommendations from Favy and Babelito and as always send your questions to AskLWLpod@gmail.com and we may read them on a future episode. #podsincolor #supportbrownpodcasts #supportlatinxpodcasts #lwlpod #latinx Show Notes: Shana Klein (https://www.kent.edu/art/shana-klein) Fruits of Empire Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/thefruitsofempire/) Moises Barrios (http://www.artnet.com/artists/moises-barrios/) CIW Coalition of Immokalee Workers (https://ciw-online.org/) Discount Code 17M662 (https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520296398/the-fruits-of-empire) Estamos Bien Museo del Barrio (https://www.elmuseo.org/la-trienal/) Balún (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlwxzC9l8YI&t=13s) Thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/latinoswholunch) and Paypal (http://www.latinoswholunch.com/donate) Buy the ABCs of Latinidad Coloring book (https://thewritersblock.org/?q=h.tviewer&qsb=keyword&qse=ZzjQjUtIw2ckZaqLBU_Zqg&using_sb=status)
Genetic Engineering and Society Center GES Colloquium - Tuesdays 12-1PM (via Zoom) NC State University | http://go.ncsu.edu/ges-colloquium GES Mediasite - See videos, full abstracts, speaker bios, and slides https://go.ncsu.edu/ges-mediasite Twitter - https://twitter.com/GESCenterNCSU Agriculture from its inception has been the exploitation of people and nature. “Modernity” has exacerbated that mode of operation. In the 21st century, will we be able to do better? Links & Resources: Adam Frank, Woodruff Sullivan (2014) Sustainability and the astrobiological perspective: Framing human futures in a planetary context Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2014.08.002 Goodbye, U.S.D.A., Hello, Department of Food and Well-Being, Ricardo Salvador, New York Times, Dec. 3, 2020 Guest Speaker Dr. Ricardo J. Salvador (@cadwego) is Director and Senior Scientist of the Food & Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in Washington DC. He leads a team of scientists, economists, policy analysts and organizers to make the case that modern, sustainable practices can be highly productive while also protecting the environment, producing healthy food, and creating economic opportunity for all. He is a member of the Board of Agriculture and National Resources of the National Academy of Sciences, and of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food. He has advised a range of leading organizations in sustainable and equitable agriculture, including the Food Chain Workers Alliance, the Fair Food Program of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, The Land Institute, FoodCorps, National Farm to School Network, Center for Good Food Purchasing, Food System 6, and the HEAL Food Alliance. He is an agronomist with a focus on sustainability and systems analysis. His undergraduate degree in agriculture is from New Mexico State University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in crop production and physiology are from Iowa State University. GES Center - Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology. Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co
Today, we're celebrating the power of stories in creating shared understanding. We're talking with James Beard award-winning filmmaker Sanjay Rawal. The creative force behind a new movie about Native American food ways called "Gather." Gather is an intimate portrait of the growing movement amongst Native Americans to reclaim their spiritual, political and cultural identities through food sovereignty, while battling the trauma of centuries of genocide. Interview Summary So let's begin, would you please describe the Gather film for our listeners and talk about why you took on this very ambitious project. Gather is a new film released a few months back in September, and it's on the kind of esoteric subject of food sovereignty. What does that even mean? Well, we follow three sets of characters who are all citizens of different tribal nations on turtle Island, what's now the United States. We follow a chef Neefa Craig, who is a French trained Culinary professional who has returned to his home land, his reservation the White Mountain Apache tribal land in Eastern Arizona, to set up a high-end affordable restaurant that will deepen people's understanding of Apache food traditions. We also follow a young Lakota woman who grew up on a Buffalo ranch in South Dakota on the Cheyenne River Sioux nation, Elsie DuBray, and she's a scientist. She's studying the benefits of their traditional food - bison. And we follow a group of young gentlemen on the Klamath river in Northern California as they contend with the presence of a gigantic dam that's decimated the river health and salmon populations that have sustained their people for millennia. So through these interwoven stories I believe we present a very compelling narrative of a movement happening in tribal nations right now to reassert their sovereignty by reestablishing food ways that were taken away from them by the colonial extractive government of the United States. The early Anglo European economy was based on mono crop agriculture. How did that change what were once profoundly bio-diverse lands? What are they like now? That's a great set of issues to discuss. We live in an era right now where we are so separated from the food and the land that it's hard to imagine that less than 150 years ago almost the entirety of the American economy was land-based. And when you look at the groups in Europe that were beginning this kind of new wave of colonization and the 1400 and 1500s, you basically had two sets of goals. You had nation States that were hiring call them entrepreneurs, call them state-sanctioned pirates. They were hiring people to go and be the number one find mountains of gold. And there was an another set of nation States that realized that the wealth that they could extract was from the top soil itself. And those were the Anglo European nation States who in the beginning funded Italian explorers to come and make an assessment of the Eastern seaboard of what's now the United States. Those explorers saw that far from being wild terrain, they encountered highly advanced agricultural populations that had a deep understanding of farming animal, stewardship, foraging, waterways, fishing, et cetera. And they began to realize they could use the fertility that natives had built into their farming practices, use the fertility and that land and create economies of scale. They could force natives off their land, essentially keep that land with zero operating costs forever. And eventually they went to West Africa to find bodies, to find agrarian experts as it were, and enslaved those people and brought them to turtle Island. And so in a matter of a hundred years there was a massive farm economy primarily set up to send goods back to Europe. Cash crops like cotton, like tobacco. And the early American economy prized its relationship with continental Europe to a great degree because it relied on the purchase of these export cash crops to generate and maintain wealth in the new economy. The American story is really one of land theft and one of practicing very destructive monocropping practices that would generate as much wealth as quickly as possible for the investors. So it's tragic what's happened to the native American food ways. And of course, to the people themselves. Based on your learning and creating this film, what observations can you make about how the US supply chain serves people today in Indian country particularly since the COVID pandemic occurred? I'll go back to colonial history for a second. By the 1760s, the American farming economy had nearly exhausted the health of top soil on the Eastern seaboard. And American farmers wanted to push West of the Appalachian mountain range, and the British forbade that. Now, why would the British even care? Well, to support that sort of - we call that euphemistically exploration - a number of native people would need to be forcibly displaced again from their land. And that would require military support and the British were unwilling to provide that military support. But one of the first things the Continental Congress did was establish the Northwest ordinance which opened up Indiana, Ohio, and those States East of the Mississippi to farmers. Not in the sense of the family farmers that we referred to now, but as folks that were in a sense land pirates. They were going and stealing land with force and then creating economies of scale to sell those goods back to the Eastern seaboard and eventually export that. So on the Eastern seaboard, with the exception of Florida, there was all an almost immediate displacement of native populations. And with the Louisiana Purchase there was this intention of establishing lands West of the Mississippi for native populations forever. Keeping in mind that there's no such thing as Native American - there's hundreds of federally recognized tribes, and hundreds more people that don't have that kind of political distinction. A number of populations like the Cherokee, And the Seminole, and the Creek were forced marched from the Southeast and placed in Oklahoma in lands that were completely foreign to their practices their science, their way of life, and their creation stories. But as more immigrants began entering the US and wanting to stake out their own economic claim and not work for other people in cities, the only way to do so was to have a piece of land. A big piece of land to grow enough corn or wheat and to be able to sell it for a profit. That was the push West of the Mississippi. All along this way, native populations were forced into smaller and smaller and smaller parcels of land. And they were being forced to assimilate into the US and to become farmers themselves. Even if they were nomadic. Even if they followed herds of Buffalo throughout the year. Even if they foraged or even if they fished. At the same time, because the US economy relied so much on the best quality land, Natives were effectively pushed to the worst quality farmable land. And as supply chain systems began being developed and refined in the United States railroads were built from the West back to the East. And the highway system was built on top of those at the same time. Keeping in mind that natives are pushed away from urban centers as much as possible, They remained completely untouched or unserved by the supply chain. So right now in Indian country they are at the end or the terminus of supply chains. Which is why you don't find a lot of grocery stores there. Because grocery stores are expensive to run and they require a lot of people shopping and spending a lot of money. For the most part, people in indigenous communities have to drive 50, 60, to 100 miles to get access to the same sorts of foods that midsize or small sized American cities have access to. Now, if you wouldn't mind returning to the issue of how people perceive the land. What you brought up earlier was very interesting. You're painting a picture of one group of people who have descended from Anglo Europeans who see the land as something that can be owned and something that is there to be exploited where the Native Americans have a different approach to it. It's sort of a spiritual harmony that they have with the land, and the ownership is perceived much differently. Would you mind expanding on that a bit? Keeping in mind that the early American economy was based on land and enslaved people, we can see the institutional ramifications of slavery in the way that, for example, law enforcement generally tends to treat African-Americans right now. When it comes to native issues it's important to note that land in North America, on turtle Island, always had a direct value for the economy. And you see the ramifications now in institutions like the USDA, where one of its many functions is measuring the economic output of land, and giving loans and guarantees so that people farming land can hit certain benchmarks. But the system isn't set up to have farmable land fallow it's not set up to allow the land to regenerate. The native view of land was multi-century long. It was restorative, it was regenerative. It was the opposite, we should say of extractive. It was understanding that the land can only give human beings so much and that humans need to understand the balance. So that generations seven, eight, nine, 10 in the future can have the same unspoiled relationship with the land that generations now have. Now, when it comes to American policy either things are extracted or things aren't extracted, as in farming land versus national forest. There's no sense of the fact that we do need to take, we can take, but everything needs to be in balance. And that's what is missing from an equation, and I don't mean this in a bad way, but in an economic sense there's always a factor of greed. Whether it's unadulterated greed or just wanting a little bit more. And that very ethos has never really been symbiotic with the Native American environmental ethos. So one part of the gather project focused on journalism and I know that your team hired a number of Native American journalists and photographers to report on some of these issues you're talking about regarding food sovereignty. Can you talk about why collecting those stories was so important and what you did with them? The practice of documentary filmmaking is inherently - you know, this is a heavy word - it's inherently exploitative where you're going into a community and you're taking stories. And there's a whole series of expectations that people have that might not ever meet together in the middle. When someone comes to you and they share their story it's with the expectation that they could be in your film. But anybody who knows a little bit about filmmaking knows that you have to talk to a lot of people to be able to find the stories that are going to be best suited to the visual medium that film is. You'll come across so many stories that might be better told by photographs, they might be better told in words. And that's what happened to us. In our development of this project we visited a number of tribal communities, came across dozens of stories that had such deep importance and people were offering with their heart and soul. So as we began to see which stories wouldn't be suitable for the restrictive format of documentary filmmaking, we began look for grants to hire Native American journalists and photographers to write up and tell those stories. And we hired Kim Baca, who used to be the Executive Director of the Native American Journalist Association. And she worked with me on placing those stories in tribal media and in non-tribal media. Hopefully we were able to do the people that we met a service and allow the inspiration that wanted to share with us as filmmakers, be shared in some other format. So much came of this effort not just the film, which is amazing itself, thanks for sharing that. So when you interacted with so many people in the making of this filming, what are your impressions? I have made several films that had native characters. My first film was called "Food Chains" and there was about a group of tomato pickers in Florida called the coalition of Immokalee workers. And they're primarily seen as Latino but there are in fact displaced indigenous Oaxaca and Chiapas and Guatemalan migrants. For whom Spanish might be a second or third language. My second film "3,100 Run and Become" was about ultra distance running but we had a sun bushmen Hunter character from the Kalahari and we had a Navajo ultra marathoner from the Navajo reservation. I had already developed, you know, a pretty deep affinity for native American and indigenous culture because it reminded me so much of what I knew to be the village life that my father and my mother grew up in an India. And so going into Indian country, I believe I could relate to people simply because I was a good listener. And I knew I was in a world that would gradually unfold itself to me if I was just quiet, if I just built the trust wasn't loud and gave respect to the fact that the folks I was meeting with had histories on their land of one, two, five, 10, 20,000 plus years. And it's always such an amazing experience to be with people that understand where they are and where they've come from in ways that the rest of us on turtle Island in the United States can't do as immigrants. Whether we're first-generation or 20th generation we don't have the same sort of perspective that the folks in gather do. While some of the characters were younger than me, some of them were older than me. I kind of felt the deep wisdom that they had and really enjoyed learning about their stories by just listening for hours on end. So what do you hope will come out of people watching your film? In Indian country, there's been a whole series of reactions and those are the ones that we made the film for, people taking pride in reestablishing the food systems that were in effect destroyed by colonization. And when I say destroyed, I mean directly by the mid-1800s, it became really clear to the US government that the expenditure of military force on native people was too perilous. And it was euphemistically much more efficient to subjugate native people by destroying their food systems. Whether it meant creating policies and procedures to take the massive Buffalo herds from the Midwest from 63 million down to just a handful of individuals, whether it meant burning fields, damming rivers polluting rivers, et cetera. Native Americans are one of the only populations in the modern world to have had their entire food system destroyed as a tactic of war. Secondly, there was a program for more than a hundred years to forcibly remove native kids from their homes. And in the effort of assimilating them, put them into boarding schools where speaking their language, practicing their culture was forbidden. And so we've come to a stage in Indian country where people are trying to preserve the bits of wisdom, connection, and science that still remains. That wasn't completely destroyed by these two programs. So when they see characters like Twila Cassadore in our film, who is a master forger, one of the most in-tune people with Mother Earth that I've ever met - they're inspired because they realize that their ancestors were exactly like Twila. Outside Indian country, however, there've been a number of really interesting conversations, both on the foundation level because less than 1% of American philanthropy goes to native led organizations working in Indian country. Even though one might argue that all of philanthropy has come from land-based wealth even tech fortunes came from venture capitalists who come from that sort of old pre-industrial revolution or industrial revolution land-based economy. But in the farming community, there been really, really deep conversations. Because at some point in the history of the land that we're on whether your family was directly involved or whether we just purchase it from somebody who purchased it from somebody else, the land that we're on was once somebody's home. And chances are the histories of those homes still exist within Native American families and groups that have been displaced. And it's kind of horrific when you think that. If you try to imagine somewhere in your ancestry your grandparents lost their homes, your great grandparents were forcibly removed and maybe passed away. The only modern corollary is the Holocaust. And I don't say that lightly because in the Meinkaupf Hitler does allude to Native American reservations as precursor ideas for his ideas of concentration camps. And so the fact that our history, even though the ideals of America are so lofty, was based on a set of deeply horrific practices: the enslavement of Africans, and the theft of Native American land - has caused people to really contemplate what sort of future they want to live in. And the idea of equity and redistribution of wealth and resources that were taken in a very inequitable fashion. If you're interested in learning more about Gather, you can find information online at gather.film and you can watch it on iTunes, Amazon, and Vimeo on demand. Bio: Sanjay Rawal is a James Beard Award winning filmmaker and the creator of Gather (http://gather.film). He previously made FOOD CHAINS (EP Eva Longoria, Eric Schlosser) which chronicled the battle of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a small group of Oaxacan and Chiapan indigenous farmworkers in Florida, against the largest agribusiness conglomerates in the world. The film was released theatrically in a number of countries (Screen Media in the US) and won numerous awards - including citations from the US Conference of Mayors, the Clinton Global Initiative and the White House. The film was also a Winner (shared) of the 2016 BritDoc Impact award and several festival prizes. Sanjay's last film 3100: RUN AND BECOME won several festival prizes, had a robust theatrical release in the US in 2018 and is opening in traditional theatrical engagements across Europe and Australia in 2020 and 2021.
“We believe that radical, democratic change in education occurs through grassroots mobilization of teachers and students and the empowerment of those most directly impacted by injustice. … [C]onsciousness development is key to our liberatory education model.” – Freedom University Theory of Change Dr. Laura Emiko Soltis is Executive Director of Freedom University, an award-winning, modern-day freedom school for undocumented students who are banned from equal access to public higher education in Georgia. With the aim of “ending modern segregation in higher education” – and of a future where undocumented and documented students can learn in the same classrooms – Freedom University provides tuition-free college preparation classes, college and scholarship application assistance for students seeking higher education opportunities in private universities or outside Georgia, and social movement leadership development for undocumented students. A human rights educator originally from a rural Minnesota town of 1100 people, Emiko was raised in a blue-collar, biracial household as the child of a Japanese immigrant mother and a Vietnam war-vet father who was a second-generation Czech immigrant. She developed passions for working-class politics, immigrant rights, and classical music in equal measure. Emiko's work experience in low-wage industries alongside diverse immigrants in restaurant work, janitorial services, and farm labor inspired her to study interracial labor movements and international human rights. A proud public school kid, Emiko was honored to receive the Foundation Fellowship scholarship at the University of Georgia, where she graduated summa cum laude in 2006. She went on to receive her Ph.D. from Emory University in 2012, where she wrote her dissertation on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ movement for farmworker justice in South Florida. She joined Freedom University as a volunteer faculty member in 2013. Following the departure of the founding faculty and the closure of Freedom University in June 2014, Emiko re-established Freedom University in Atlanta in September 2014, introducing a human rights framework to its mission and pedagogy, and connecting undocumented youth to Black student movement veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Atlanta Student Movement. She also founded Freedom University’s social movement leadership training program and expanded the curriculum to include a creative arts program, STEM classes, and mental health workshops in a year-long academic program. As an experienced social movement strategist, Emiko works to advance the undocumented student movement by building bridges between undocumented and documented student groups, and advocating for fair admissions policies in higher education across the U.S. Emiko co-founded the Freedom at Emory Initiative, which led to Emory’s decision in 2015 to admit and offer and offer financial support to undocumented students. Through strategic direct actions of nonviolent civil disobedience, policy and legal campaigns, and local, national, and international partnerships, she and Freedom University seek to change college admissions policies and transform the public debate on immigrant justice and undocumented student access to higher education. As an active Professor of Human Rights and public scholar, she writes and lectures frequently on topics like human rights advocacy, immigration and higher education, and workers’ rights and economic justice. She’s the recipient of numerous accolades, including the Telemundo Heroe Luchadora Award, an Ashoka Fellowship, and the Ford Foundation’s Public Voices Fellowship. Her artistic side finds expression as an accomplished photographer, violinist, and vocalist who has performed in Carnegie Hall with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus. She's a polyglot who speaks a "messy combination" of English, Spanish, Japanese, and French, and enjoys dancing bachata, practicing kung fu, and "loving on her three rescue dogs." Join David Bonbright and Rahul Brown in conversation with this impassioned educator, artist, and champion of human rights.
Julia Perkins describes the work of CIW, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, among migrant farm workers in and beyond Immokalee, FL. Their work intersects with nearly every aspect of the systemic forces that contribute to hunger in the communities they serve. Listen for more wisdom about what we can all do more of, more often, to help end hunger.Check here to learn more about CIW's Fair Food Program and see if your favorite supermarket or restaurant chain is participating.BlogFacebookTwittermusic by: Tom Kemnerartwork by: Wesley Nifongproduced by: Don DurhamSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/HealingSpringsAcres)
On this special bonus episode of The Next World, we feature highlights from a recent conversation with organizations of essential workers and impacted communities. Cathy Albisa of Partners for Dignity & Rights facilitated a conversation on how we can not just save lives, but also expand human rights and make us all safer in the future. Speakers on this episode include:Poet and organizer Cynthia Dewi Oka.Tim Bell, Executive Director, Chicago Workers' Collaborative.Magaly Licolli, Cofounder of Venceremos.Merle Payne, Co-Director of Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha (CTUL).Scott Nova, Executive Director, Worker Rights Consortium.Marita Canedo, Program Coordinator, Migrant Justice - Justicia MigranteTodd Cherkis, Co-Founder, United WorkersNijmie Zakkiyyah Dzurinko, co-founder and co-coordinator Put People First! PA, co-chair PA Poor People's Campaign and national steering committee member.Letha Muhammad, Director, Education Justice Alliance and Coordinating Committee Member, Dignity In Schools Campaign.Regan Pritzker, Board President, The Libra Foundation.And (in the Q&A) Marley Monacello, Staff, Coalition of Immokalee Workers.See more of the work of host Max Rameau at pacapower.org. Thank you to Jesse Strauss for Audio Mixing and Editing. Stay subscribed to The Next World for more news from the frontlines of movements for justice and liberation. You can read more about the issues we explore on our podcast and much more at dignityandrights.org, the website of Partners for Dignity & Rights.Please subscribe, spread the word, and support the show.Support the show (https://dignityandrights.org/donate/)
In this stripped-down episode, Tom Colicchio talks to Gerardo Reyes Chavez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers about the work leading towards systemic solutions to end modern-day slavery and put a stop to crimes against growers across the food system. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers
The state of Florida is seeing record highs of coronavirus cases as the pandemic stretches into its fifth month. More than 140,000 residents have tested positive for the virus and the state is reversing some of its efforts to reopen the economy. For weeks, Governor Ron DeSantis resisted statewide closures and social distancing while the rural community of Immokalee raised concerns about the virus and requested more testing and PPE. Immokalee is home to thousands of migrant farmworkers, some whom are undocumented or on temporary guest worker visas. During the pandemic they’ve been deemed “essential” by the federal government. Now, Immokalee has the highest number of cases of any zip code in the state of Florida. Host Trymaine Lee talks to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers about their efforts to protect farmworkers in Florida and beyond, as the agricultural season shifts and the nation’s food supply is threatened. Gerardo Reyes Chávez is a leader of CIW who spent many years as a farmworker in Mexico and Florida, starting when he was 11. Greg Asbed co-founded the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in 1993. For a transcript, please visit https://www.msnbc.com/intoamerica.Further reading:Latino leaders demand Florida governor apologize for linking 'Hispanic farmworkers' to COVID-19 rise Farmworkers sue Washington state seeking coronavirus protections Farmworkers 'harvesting America's food supply' amid coronavirus pandemic fight for safety
Kerry Kennedy - Is Your Food Grown by Oppressed Farmworkers? | Brought to you by Thrive Market, Athletic Greens, and TheragunSocial injustice is all around us. With the age of COVID-19, we see it in the higher rates of illness in our most underserved communities. On a larger, everyday scale we see it in the exploitation of farmworkers we all rely on to produce our food. Of course, these are only two examples of many human rights issues that we all should be thinking about. We often make a mistake in thinking we’re too insignificant to help. We’re not politicians, lobbyists, philanthropists, so what could we possibly do? The answer is a lot—with each small step of activism we take, we send positive ripples out into our communities and the rest of the world. I was so excited to sit down with my good friend Kerry Kennedy to talk about human rights activism and how her family has historically been a part of producing positive social change. Kerry is the president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. Since 1981, she has worked on diverse human rights issues including child labor, disappearances, indigenous land rights, judicial independence, freedom of expression, ethnic violence, impunity, women's rights, and the environment. Kerry is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Being Catholic Now, Robert F. Kennedy: Ripples of Hope, and Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World. Kerry founded RFK Compass, which convenes biannual meetings of institutional investors who collectively control $5 to $7 trillion in assets to address the impact of human rights violations on investment outcomes. She serves on the boards of the U.S. Institute of Peace, Human Rights First, Ethics in Action, SDG USA, Sustainable Development Goals Center for Africa, Health eVillages, Kailash Satyarthi Children's Foundation, Nizami Ganjavi International Center as well as several public companies. This episode was sponsored by Thrive Market, Athletic Greens, and Theragun.Thrive Market has made it so easy for me to stay healthy, even with my intense travel schedule. Not only does Thrive offer 25 to 50% off all of my favorite brands, but they also give back. For every membership purchased, they give a membership to a family in need. Get up to $20 in shopping credit when you sign up and any time you spend more than $49 you’ll get free carbon-neutral shipping. All you have to do is head over to thrivemarket.com/Hyman.I use Athletic Greens in the morning as part of my daily routine. It’s really one supplement that covers so many bases and you’d be hard-pressed to find something else this comprehensive in one place. Right now Athletic Greens is offering my audience their Vitamin D3/K2 Liquid Formula free with your first purchase. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hyman to get your free bottle of Vitamin D3 and K2 with your first purchase. The Theragun is a percussive handheld therapy tool that I can use at home on myself or you can use it on a partner. There are a variety of devices to choose from and multiple head attachments to get different kinds of targeted muscle treatments. The Gen Four series, with an OLED screen, personalized Theragun app, and plenty of power for deep relaxation start at just $199. Just go to theragun.com/Hyman to get your Theragun today.Here are more of the details from our interview: Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s social justice work and how it influenced Kerry’s human rights work (7:06)Exploitation of food and farm workers in the U.S. and New York state (17:51)How Black people were intentionally excluded from the Fair Labor legislation passed by President Roosevelt (23:34)The importance of allowing collective bargaining among farm workers (26:10)The Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ work preventing exploitation of farm workers and how their model is being replicated around the world (30:15)The Fair Food Program and how it’s different from most social responsibility compacts (36:59)Health, economic, and human rights inequities in the United States (40:24)The silver linings of the coronavirus pandemic (43:27)RFK’s moral imagination, his role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the speech he gave on the night of MLK Jr.’s assassination (48:56)Social emotional learning (57:58)Learn more about Kerry’s work at RFK Human Rights at https://rfkhumanrights.org/ and follow her on Facebook @KerryKennedyRFK and on Twitter @KerryKennedyRFK See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
A conversation with Lori Flores.Stony Brook University associate professor history Lori Flores's research and writing focuses on Latino life, labor, and politics in the United States from the post-WWII era to the present day. We discuss farmworkers' rights amid (and beyond) the pandemic.Link to the Food52 story we discuss here.United Farm Workers https://ufw.org/Coalition of Immokalee Workers https://ciw-online.org/National Center for Farmworker Health http://www.ncfh.org/Food Chain Workers Alliance http://foodchainworkers.org/United Food and Commercial Workers Union http://www.ufcw.org/An example of a food security initiative: No Us Without You (effort to feed undocumented restaurant workers in Los Angeles): https://www.nouswithoutyou.la/An example of a community market: People's Market in Bloomington, Indiana: https://www.limestonepostmagazine.com/peoples-market-ethos-focuses-on-food-justice-mutual-aid/ Photo Courtesy of Lori Flores.Meant To Be Eaten is powered by Simplecast.
Immokalee Workers Win Expanded Covid-19 Testing https://popularresistance.org/immokalee-workers-win-major-covid-19-victories-in-florida/ #peoplearerevolting twitter.com/peoplerevolting Peoplearerevolting.com https://flipboard.com/@unrelatedthings/people-are-revolting-9mp6ipe2y
Years ago, I attended an event called Encuentro in solidarity with farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida organized by the Student Farm worker Alliance and Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). At this event I was introduced to a whole range of specific issues surrounding the growth of tomatoes in Florida and the cultural and political landscapes of power that surround the city of Immoklaee.So, for this episode of Picture Theory I contacted Natali Rodriguez and Silvia Perez to see if they could share their perspectives and insights as women, organizers, and farmworkers, demanding justice in a time of crisis and political polarization.Silvia is a farmworker staff member of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and one the coordinators of the Women's Group, she’s also a DJ on the Coalition’s radio station, and organizes for the national Wendy's Boycott.Natali is a staff member of the CIW and in addition to community support, she helps coordinate the logistics for the worker-to-worker education sessions that the CIW facilitates throughout the season. Natali will also be translating today’s conversation.So, you might be wondering what is the CIW and what kind of work do they do? First here’s a little context: the average wage for a farmworker in Immokalee is roughly 17k a year. The work is extremely, physically labor-intensive and very difficult to maintain a family on. Immokalee is a multiracial working class immigrant community surrounded by wealthy communities that often ignore the human rights and needs of those in Immokalee.The CIW is a leader in the growing movement to end human trafficking due to its groundbreaking work to combat modern-day slavery and other labor abuses common in agriculture. In order to take action and demand justice the CIW has three broad campaigns or strategies you should know about:The Campaign for Fair FoodThe CIW’s national Campaign for Fair Food educates consumers on the issue of farm labor exploitation – its causes and solutions – and forges alliances between farmworkers and consumers in an effort to enlist the market power of major corporate buyers to help end that exploitation. Since 2001, the campaign has combined creative, on-the-ground actions with online organizing to win Fair Food Agreements with eleven multi-billion dollar food retailers, including McDonald’s, Subway, Sodexo and Whole Foods, establishing more humane farm labor standards and fairer wages for farmworkers in their tomato suppliers’ operations.The Fair Food ProgramUnder the FFP, the CIW conducts worker education sessions, held on-the-farm and on-the-clock, on the new labor rights set forth in the Fair Food Code of Conduct; the Fair Food Standards Council, a third-party monitor created to ensure compliance with the FFP, conducts regular audits and carries out ongoing complaint investigation and resolution.Anti-Slavery CampaignThe CIW’s Anti-Slavery Campaign has uncovered, investigated, and assisted in the prosecution of numerous multi-state, multi-worker farm slavery operations across the Southeastern U.S., helping liberate over 1,200 workers held against their will; pioneered the worker-centered approach to slavery prosecution; played a key role in the passage of the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act; and co-founded the national Freedom Network USA and the Freedom Network Training Institute, which is regularly attended by local, state and federal law enforcement officialsIn our conversation Silvia and Natali talk about what the CIW’s focus has been on before the COVID pandemic and how the workers are cooping with the health crisis as farmworkers, asking supporters to sign this petition and demanding justice from the governor:Set up a field hospital, or alternative care facility, in Immokalee to provide both treatment for COVID-19 patients with severe symptoms, and a separate quarantine space to allow workers with milder symptoms to self-isolate, to stop the spread of the virus in the community and relieve stress on the local health system.Require agricultural employers to provide personal protective gear, particularly masks, to farmworkers for use while they are traveling to and from the fieldsEnsure comprehensive, free, accessible COVID-19 testing in Immokalee, when widespread testing becomes availableAllocate public funds for economic relief for Florida farmworkersHere’s our conversation with Silvia and Natali of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers:You can also listen to Picture Theory on Spotify and in the Apple podcasts app.Episode notes:History of the CIW; started in 1993Immigrant farm workers coming from Mexico, Guatemala, HaitiWage theft, difficult working conditions, extreme cases, sexual assault25,000 people working in agricultureMigrant community dependent on growing seasonsHousing conditions of workersHow COVID pandemic aggravates the conditionsThe history behind the CIWSiliva’s backstory with CIW women’s group and becoming a staff memberA typical day in the life of a farmworker in ImmokaleeWhat campaign work looked like before the COVID pandemicWhat does a victory look like for a farmworker action and campaignDemands 1 extra penny per tomatoEliminating wage theftZero tolerance policy for sexual assault in the workplaceThe key players in the fight for food justice from Wendy’s, to Walmart, to hospitalsWhat the supply chain looks like on a macroscale and how anyone who eats tomatoes is involvedThe after-effects of slavery and the history behind why tomatoes are grown in Immokalee, FloridaWhat it’s like to raise a family as latinx communities living in a politically conservative state ImmokaleeWhy Immokalee is a forgotten working class immigrant community surrounded by wealthy land ownersThe joys of doing work as a coalitionFarm work is not easy and the wages on average are around 17000 per year and the seasons are unpredictableSelf isolation for workers who can’t go back to their homes without spreading the virus furtherNatali describes the nation network of food justice organizations
May Day Amid A Plague with Sarah Jaffe Full Audio & Transcript at laborwaveradio.com/sarahjaffe [edited for clarity, May 1, 2020] Laborwave Radio in conversation with Sarah Jaffe, author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, which Robin D.G. Kelley called “The most compelling social and political portrait of our age.” She is a Type Media Center reporting fellow and an independent journalist covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Atlantic, and many other publications. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum. She discusses labor organizing and worker militancy amid a plague on this troubled day of celebration, May Day. Preface “We already know, because of the climate catastrophe that is breathing down on us, that we need to radically reshape the economy and do it quickly. Well now we've seen that we can. It turns out that we can survive on the work of so-called essential workers. I think what we’re seeing is the things that are staying open right now, the things that we need, are jobs doing the work of social reproduction. Nurses are working, and members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are picking tomatoes in Florida working. The people who deliver things to you, the logistics chain, Amazon warehouse workers who have been showing us all how to be militant lately, are working. That is social reproduction work. So much of the rest of the economy doesn't actually need to exist.”
If the goal is a socially just food system, is it enough for consumers to vote with their forks, or for food activism to focus on urban areas and concerns? Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern says we need to shift the focus from consumer-led food initiatives to movements led by farmworkers and supported by consumers. She finds the activities of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers particularly instructive and inspiring. (Encore presentation.) Alkon and Guthman, eds., The New Food Activism: Opposition, Cooperation, and Collective Action University of California Press, 2017 The post Food Activism and Farmworkers appeared first on KPFA.
Puck Lo welcomes journalist Lewis Wallace as a co-host. They talk journalism, Palestine, healthcare, and trans rights. Then they are joined by organizer Oscar Otzoy of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, who discusses his work holding corporations accountable.Support the show (https://dignityandrights.org/donate/)
Imagine working for a company that serves more than 5 billion meals worldwide every year. Balancing what people like to eat with corporate goals of promoting health, sustainability, and fair labor practices. Such is the work of The Leading Voices in Food guest Cheryl Queen, vice president of communication and corporate affairs, of Compass Group North America. About Cheryl Queen Cheryl Queen, vice president of communication and corporate affairs, of Compass Group North America. Compass Group is the largest food and support services company in North America with 2017 annual revenue of more than $17 million and 265,000 employees. Cheryl is deeply involved in food and farming issues. She served as chairman of the Board of advisors for the Center for Environmental Farming Systems. She is a member of the Farm Foundation Roundtable; serves on the board of directors with the Global Animal Partnership; serves on the board of directors of the Fair Food Standards Council; and was recognized for her work in helping craft a code of conduct for suppliers and an agreement to pay farm workers a premium with the Cesar Estrada Chavez award. Cheryl, thank you so much for joining us. Interview Summary Let's begin with putting the work of the Compass Group in some kind of a context. So the Compass Group is an enormous global enterprise. Can you explain a bit more about what this work is? Sure. So when people ask me what Compass Group does, I often try to make it very personal by saying anytime that you are not eating in your own kitchen or dining room, you might be dining with us, and you wouldn't even have any reason to realize that. Compass Group North America has 28 different companies under that big Compass Group umbrella. And we feed people in every sort of setting you can imagine from schools, colleges, and universities to corporate dining to wonderful like sports and entertainment venues, cultural museums and performing arts centers, hospitals, senior dining, any place you can imagine having a meal outside your home. That's what we do. How can a company of this size with this buying power, for example, affect food systems and food policies? Well, you know, we realized that we actually have enormous power because of the volume that we purchase, and because of the number of guests we serve every day. In North America alone we serve more than I think nine point 8 million meals a day. So what an enormous opportunity to impact the choices that people have and that all begins as a supply chain, you know, of what you purchased and how you purchase that drives them to that end goal of offering our guests healthy, nutritious, better for you, choices every day. To give us some concrete examples of that, could it affect the welfare of the animals that are being raised or the nutrition of the foods or how to? How do you specifically think about that supply chain being affected by the buying power? Well, it absolutely affects each one of those that you named and I'll start with farm animal welfare, because we've had the opportunity to lead in some change in that space, and try to move to a system that allows farm animals to experience better health and a healthier life and we believe that translates to our guest. And there's that sort of bigger piece that's important to some people about the life that the animal has while they're here on this earth. It's that sentient being. So we started with cage-free eggs and making our purchase of cage-free shell eggs important throughout our whole supply chain. The power of Compass Group is that our purchases are so large, Kelly, that when we go all in, and we say we're going to make this purchase impact all of all these 28 companies it's pretty significant. We moved all of our shell egg purchases to cage-free. We're now in the process of making what's truthfully a much larger change. And that's to making our liquid eggs cage free for instance. It is challenging work all across the way, but we think it's important, you know, our guests have become informed and engaged consumers who want to know where their food comes from and that starts at that, you know, local farm level and that whole movement that we've seen in the last 10, 15 years. For a lot of our guests that piece around farm animal welfare is very important. That's what drives a lot of that change. You were mentioning that your guests have an interest in knowing more about really the story of their food, if you will. Where it comes from, how the animals might be treated, the vitality of the farmers, who are growing the food and things like that. How do you communicate that to your guests when you have such an enormous scope of operations? Yeah. It's interesting. We're working very hard right now on a particularly telling that story of farm workers with the Coalition of Immokalee workers, and it's finding, you know, all those points along the way. Starting with our own employees, we employ 265,000 people. That's a really big group of people who have an engagement with this and helping them understand that story both for their own personal use and in communicating with our guests, sharing that information and then talking to our guests about it. And it's, you know, all those ways you can communicate it, with signage and a cafe. It's through videos, through websites. It's through use of technology of saying this is what we're doing, we think it's important to you, and we want to share that message with you of why we're doing it. Maybe you never thought about who harvests those winter tomatoes in Florida that you're eating, the conditions under which that happens and these enormous changes that have been made in the field through our work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. But we think once you know that it will drive further appreciation of your food, how that whole system work. We find that, but a lot of guests really do, and they feel good about their engagement with us. So, it's an important story to tell, and we're always trying to find that unique creative way that engages our guests. Could you talk a little bit more detail about the farmworker issues and how you were engaged with that? I would love to because this has been for me personally the most fulfilling work I think I've done in my career. Ten, 12 years ago when we started thinking of like sustainable agriculture, I think like most organizations and most consumers we thought about the farmer and local farms and, but for some reason, we never thought beyond the farmer into the actual farm worker. And when we, when the Coalition of Immokalee workers reached out to us and engaged us in a conversation, it was very, and I think it would be eye-opening to most people today to understand some of the issues in agriculture that farm workers and harvesters faces. Most of them are migrant workers. They traveled from farm to farm. Are the growing seasons change? They are very vulnerable for the most part, in that space, they often most often are not from the US. English is not their first language, so they're vulnerable to be taken advantage of. For women, in particular, there is oftentimes sexual harassment and sexual assault. And it's, I think it would be surprising. In Immokalee, which is where the winter tomatoes are grown, the Department of Justice called it Ground Zero for modern day slavery. And the first time I heard modern-day slavery, I thought, well, you know, that's, that's quite an accusation, and I'm sure conditions are hard, but that's, that's unbelievable. But actually, some people were, being by any definition in slaved and there have been, I think eight or nine successfully prosecuted federal cases of modern-day slavery where people who are serving time in federal prison. So what this whole piece of the Coalition of Immokalee farmworkers did was say, let's change that system. It doesn't have to be this way. And they used the power of consumers to help drive that change so that a number of fast food companies, grocery stores that, that we'd be all be familiar with, and companies such as ours signed a code of conduct that said to growers: if you grow tomatoes for us, we expect them to be done under these conditions where it involves safety and training and education. And made it a healthier and smarter work environment for the workers. And also to pay them a penny a pound for tomatoes grown for us, which may sound so small to us, but for farm workers could be a 63 percent pay increase. The success of that model has been extraordinary. It's been recognized by the United Nations, by the White House, by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights by the James Beard Foundation because it has changed that whole model for worker engagement and work in the agricultural fields. And, it's now moving beyond tomatoes and Florida to other crops in other locations across the US and expanding. And we're incredibly proud of the work that we've done with the Coalition. And it is a story that is very moving and engages across our organization particularly for our chefs who now visit Immokalee, who've come to know the worker and understand the issue and create recipes that give them an opportunity to tell the story. You've been involved on the cutting edge of a number some very important issues. So let's see if you could provide us your crystal ball for the last question. I'd like to ask, what do you see as some of the key issues going forward with, with farming, with food systems and with a company like Compass Group? What do you think the future will bring? Well, I think there's so much more work to be done. When we talk about a food system that is essentially broken in lots of different ways, and I think there are organizations and people who are making differences in this space. You know, I think that we have to move from more intensive farming, both for the environment and for our own health and for the health of land and farmers and farming communities. And so there's a fellow in Georgia--Bluffton, Georgia named will Harris, who is the owner of White Oak Pastures and he does the most amazing work in this space. And I think it's someone like that who can be a role model to other farmers who want to work in more sustainable practices. One of the things that I often hear when we talk about the food system is that we have a whole generation who didn't learn to cook at home. And I look at people like Matthew Wadiac of Blue Apron and other subscription type services who are, who have created a fun and engaging way to let people learn how to cook and have the confidence of producing a great meal at home. That's delicious. That takes about 30 minutes. It doesn't require every gadget. It doesn't require a chef-approved kitchen. But they have confidence and appreciation now in being able to cook for themselves. And that's important. I look at people like Josh Tetrick of JustFoods who's now, who had this idea to apply the innovation and the technology of Silicon Valley to provide healthy and accessible and affordable food for everyone. So he started improbably with a mayonnaise product, just Mayo that eliminated eggs, the basis of mayonnaise but he's used pea protein in its place, and he's now growing his line of products, including one just egg. It makes absolutely delicious scrambled eggs, French toast, anywhere you'd use the liquid egg, but it's all made from plants. No animals. Allowing us to put more focus in that plant-based diet, which I think we all recognize this healthier. There's Dr. Uma Valeti who is a Mayo Clinic-trained cardiologist who saw firsthand the impact that that typical American diet is having on his patients. So a true entrepreneur at heart, I think as well as a physician, he founded this company called Memphis Meat in 2015, and it's about making be more sustainable in delicious, but eliminating the impact of meat production on the environment and providing a healthier choice. All of these points of light along the way are going to be at the forefront of making a change in the food system and making it easier for companies like Compass Group to continue to be at the forefront in bringing these opportunities to our guests. Produced by Deborah Hill, Duke World Food Policy Center
Who are the people growing our food, and what are their experiences? How, as informed eaters, can we make food choices that lead to fair wages and safe, humane working conditions? In conversations about building a sustainable food system, these questions are often ignored or overshadowed by other issues; in this episode of The Farm Report, they are front and center. Join host Lisa Held as she leads a panel discussion on agricultural labor in front of a live audience at Brooklyn’s Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD), featuring Coalition of Immokalee Workers senior staff member Gerardo Reyes Chavez, Rev. Noelle Damico of the Alliance for Fair Food, "Labor and the Locavore" author Margaret Gray, and Jody Bolluyt, a farmer at Roxbury Farm. The Farm Report is powered by Simplecast.
If the goal is a socially just food system, is it enough for consumers to vote with their forks, or for food activism to focus on urban areas and concerns? Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern says we need to shift the focus from consumer-led food initiatives to movements led by farmworkers and supported by consumers. She finds the activities of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers particularly instructive and inspiring. Alkon and Guthman, eds., The New Food Activism: Opposition, Cooperation, and Collective Action University of California Press, 2017 The post Food Activism and Farmworkers appeared first on KPFA.
This week on Off-Kilter, it’s midterm season — the time when members of Congress come home to their districts to tell their constituents just how hard they’ve been fighting for them, and why they should send them back to Washington. For a look ahead to the upcoming midterms — and a sneak peek at how Indivisible is working to bring change to Washington by supporting activists-turned-candidates taking on GOP incumbents through the “Indivisible 435” campaign launched earlier this week — Rebecca talks with Indivisible’s Chad Bolt. Next: One month after the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, a group of faith leaders resuscitated the civil rights icon’s final project by launching the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. You’re probably familiar with campaign co-chair Reverend William Barber II from his leadership of the Moral Mondays movement. But less well known is his co-chair, the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis, who has spent the past two decades working as an organizer with groups led by people in poverty, such as the National Welfare Rights Union and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Rebecca speaks with Rev. Dr. Theoharis about what’s behind the campaign — and how it’s trying to change the narrative on poverty in the U.S. Later in the show: TalkPoverty.org broke the story last week that Ohio is hoarding over half a billion dollars in unspent funds for poor families — and how when a bipartisan group of 70 rural mayors asked to use just a small portion of it to help struggling Ohioans afford their water bills… the state said no. Rebecca talks with Jack Frech, who spent nearly four decades working in an Ohio welfare office, as a caseworker and ultimately as itsdirector, to get the skinny on what’s going on in Ohio. But first: With horrifying immigration stories dominating the headlines, from families being separated at the border to people dying in ICE custody, Rebecca and Jeremy bring in a ringer — Claudia Flores, immigration campaign manager at the Center for American Progress Action Fund — for a special all-immigration edition of In Case You Missed It.
Amirah and Will discuss their participation in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers' Freedom Fast in New York City that took place March 11-15, 2018. Then they play "one-one-one" where they each ask each other 3 questions on a particular theme. This episode's them is the word "fast" in honor of the Freedom Fast. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is a farmworker-led human rights organization that is changing the lives of people who work in agriculture across the United States. Their Fair Food Program raises wages, eliminates forced labor (slavery) in the fields, stops sexual and physical violence, and ensures that people have the right to access to water and bathroom breaks while they work. The CIW's current campaign is calling on Wendy's fast food restaurants to join the Fair Food Program like other fast food outlets such as Taco Bell, McDonald's, Burger King, Subway, and Chipotle. In this episode, Amirah and Will describe their experience participating in the CIW's annual spring action, which took place in front of the office of Nelson Peltz, Wendy's board chair and largest shareholder. Farmworkers and allies fasted for 5 days in front of Peltz's office in midtown Manhattan. The week culminated with a march where thousands of people joined farmworkers in their call for justice. In the second half of the podcast, Amirah and Will play "one-on-one," which is a way they have a structured conversation by asking each other 3 questions on a particular topic. In this episode, the theme for the conversation is the word "fast" in honor of the CIW's Freedom Fast.
On this episode of LaborPress' Blue Collar Buzz Uriel Zelaya-Perez from the Alliance for Fair Food and Oscar Otzoy from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers talk about the upcoming Wendy's fast; Striking Spectrum workers Ian Aiken and David Lopez reflect on the nearly year-long strike against Charter Communications; and IBEW Local 3 Business Manager Derek Jordan gives his take on events and what might happen next.
On this episode of LaborPress' Blue Collar Buzz Uriel Zelaya-Perez from the Alliance for Fair Food and Oscar Otzoy from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers talk about the upcoming Wendy's fast; Striking Spectrum workers Ian Aiken and David Lopez reflect on the nearly year-long strike against Charter Communications; and IBEW Local 3 Business Manager Derek Jordan gives his take on events and what might happen next.
On this episode of LaborPress' Blue Collar Buzz Uriel Zelaya-Perez from the Alliance for Fair Food and Oscar Otzoy from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers talk about the upcoming Wendy's fast; Striking Spectrum workers Ian Aiken and David Lopez reflect on the nearly year-long strike against Charter Communications; and IBEW Local 3 Business Manager Derek Jordan gives his take on events and what might happen next.
On this episode of LaborPress' Blue Collar Buzz Uriel Zelaya-Perez from the Alliance for Fair Food and Oscar Otzoy from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers talk about the upcoming Wendy's fast; Striking Spectrum workers Ian Aiken and David Lopez reflect on the nearly year-long strike against Charter Communications; and IBEW Local 3 Business Manager Derek Jordan gives his take on events and what might happen next.
Opportunity in America - Events by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program
Rarely do we pause to consider the origins of the produce that occupies our refrigerators, pantries, and plates. Out of sight and out of mind for most of us, at least 1 million farmworkers (estimates vary) in the US harvest tomatoes, strawberries, melons, oranges, and more. These workers endure strenuous working conditions, low pay, long hours, and all-too-frequent abuse, mistreatment, and exposure to chemical and other hazards. In Florida's tomato fields, a group of farmworkers came together to improve their working conditions. They formed the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and won industry agreements to the Fair Food Program, a partnership of farmers, farmworkers, and retail food companies that ensure humane wages and working conditions at participating farms. In her new book, I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took on the Fast Food Giants and Won, Susan Marquis tells the story of the Coalition and draws implications for other industries. This event featured a discussion of the book, the Fair Food Program, and the potential for worker-driven social responsibility strategies to improve job quality throughout the nation and world. This event features Susan L. Marquis (Dean, Pardee RAND Graduate School, and Vice President, Innovation, RAND Corporation), Greg Asbed (Coalition of Immokalee Workers), Jon Esformes (CEO, Sunripe Certified Brands), Gerardo Reyes Chavez (Coalition of Immokalee Workers), and moderator Steven Greenhouse (Former reporter, The New York Times) This event is part of the Working in America series, an ongoing discussion series hosted by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program that highlights an array of critical issues affecting low- and moderate-income workers in the United States and ideas for improving and expanding economic opportunities for working people. For more information, visit as.pn/workinginamerica. The Economic Opportunities Program advances strategies, policies, and ideas to help low- and moderate-income people thrive in a changing economy. We recognize that race, gender, and place intersect with and intensify the challenge of economic inequality and we address these dynamics by advancing an inclusive vision of economic justice. For over 25 years, EOP has focused on expanding individuals' opportunities to connect to quality work, start businesses, and build economic stability that provides the freedom to pursue opportunity. Learn more at as.pn/eop.
Workers in low-wage jobs are fighting back against sexual harassment. The Fair Food program of The Coalition of Immokalee Workers brought in measures that increased the safety of women farm workers. And in New York, Seattle and Hawaii, unionized workers in the hotel housekeeping industry gained a number of important changes that protect them from harassment by hotel guests. Jenny Brown is former staff writer and editor for Labor Notes. She now works for National Women’s Liberation.
We talk with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers about organizing to fight sexual harassment of farm workers. The post Belabored Podcast #139: Fighting Harassment on the Farm appeared first on Dissent Magazine.
“The work we do is too important to the nation. We are the people who make it possible for every meal to exist. We feed the nation and we ask, have always asked, for the possibility to feed our own families in a dignified way without having to be in a vulnerable position all the […]
“The work we do is too important to the nation. We are the people who make it possible for every meal to exist. We feed the nation and we ask, have always asked, for the possibility to feed our own families in a dignified way without having to be in a vulnerable position all the...
“The work we do is too important to the nation. We are the people who make it possible for every meal to exist. We feed the nation and we ask, have always asked, for the possibility to feed our own families in a dignified way without having to be in a vulnerable position all the...
Airs on WSFM-LP 103.3 in Asheville / streaming at AshevilleFM from 3am EST on September 25th through October 1st and podcasting on libsyn.com. For a 59 minute long, radio clean version for syndication purposes, please visit the archive.org collection. Coalition for Immokalee Workers Today we are airing an interview conducted with Lupe Gonzalo of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Immokalee, Florida. This is is a worker-based human rights organization which seeks to promote awareness of social responsibility, human trafficking, and gender-based violence at work and in corporations, seeking to boost the voices of some of the more marginalized workers in the US. We talk about the ciw, how it got started, and about hurricane relief after Hurricane Irma. We also touch on some political differences and points of unity with anarchism. This interview was conducted in translation from Spanish into English, with Patricia of the Alliance for Fair Food doing translation. If anyone would like the full interview just in Spanish, please write to us and we will provide that audio! If you would like to learn more about the Coalition of Imokalee Workers, and to donate to hurricane relief efforts, you can visit their online fundraising page For more on this group, including how to get onto their email list, information on their radio station Radio Conciencia or La Tuya, and their upcoming visit to UNC Chapel Hill, you can visit ciw-online.org If you would like to see just one of the many accounts of anarchist accompliship and solidarity with the CIW you can go to It's Going Down and search "Autonomy in Tampa, Solidarity in Immokalee: Love Letter to the Future" Further links for reading and solidarity: Blog Concerning Hurricane Irma relief Alliance for Fair Food's report on the state of the town of Immokalee CIW Blog post about Hurricane Irma relief in Labelle, FL CKUT's Prison Radio with Jalil Muntaquim Then comes part two of Prison Radio's interview with Jalil Muntaquim, who is former member of the Black Panther party and the Black Liberation Army and is one of the longest held political prisoners in the world. While incarcerated, Jalil has become a father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Jalil graduated with a BS in Psychology and a BA in Sociology in 1994. He has written several books, arguably most notable being We Are Our Own Liberators, his most recent being a book of poems entitled Exiting the Prism. More from CKUT out of Montreal can be found here! Announcements Duke Energy Protest & NCUC Public Comment Period In Asheville on Wednesday, there'll be a protest against Duke Energy, which proposed to the NC Utilities Commission to raise electricity rates 15%, raising $200 million a year to pay for the cleanup costs of their coal ash dumps and build new infrastructure to keep us dependent on ecocidal fossil fuels. NCUC is holding a public hearing from 7-10pm at the downtown courthouse in Asheville, with a rally starting at 5pm and marching towards the courthouse. You can find a fedbook event for a training to help you get more comfortable with presenting during public comment period. "Eyewitness to Charlottesville" at UNCA Also in Asheville this Wednesday, Sept 28th at UNCA here in Asheville, there'll be a presentation from 6-8pm. Location to be determined, but you can find more at fedbook by searching for "Eyewitness to Charlottesville." The presenters are from the (shudder) International Socialist Organization (ISO) from Raleigh, a UNCA student and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and members of the Carolina Mountain John Brown Gun Club, formerly Redneck Revolt. Trouble #6 at Firestorm BRABC will be airing Trouble #6 on Friday the 29th at 7:30pm. This episode of the short-documentary series from sub.Media is focusing on Counter-Insurgency. The showing is free and will be followed by a discussion with questions crafted by sub.Media on the topic. The flyer for the event can be found here. FBI visits more activists in WNC From BRABC: On September 8, 2017, an FBI agent attempted to visit a comrade in western North Carolina. They visited a house, and the person there stepped outside to talk to the agent, who repeatedly asked if the comrade in question lived there. The person at the house did not engage with those questions, and instead insisted on a card from the agent that a lawyer could call later. The agent said it was regarding a case being handled by another office. This comes at a time when Anarchists have been standing up to a grand jury and other FBI harassment across the state of North Carolina. The person who the FBI agent was seeking secured legal representation. On September 13, 2017, their lawyer called a number the agent wrote down, and the FBI specified that they were actually looking to speak with the person's child, a minor. The FBI said that they were seeking the original person because a legal guardian had to be present for the agent to talk to the minor. During that call the agent stated she wanted to ask about graffiti on a car related to a case being investigated by the FBI Field Office in Raleigh, NC. The minor in question has now secured legal representation. Nobody above is speaking to the FBI. We cannot just hope that harassment like this stops. Get educated on how to protect yourself if the FBI shows up. If you are approached by the FBI, refuse to answer their questions. Know your rights! Please read If An Agent Knocks for more information. We cannot let them intimidate us and raise fear and distrust. If An Agent Knocks: https://ccrjustice.org/if-agent-knocks-booklet
In Part 2 our guests from Freedom University Georgia (FUGA) talk about their definition of leadership–from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ model of “we are all leaders”–through students as “co-conspirators” in their educational experience. Their questioning of the master narrative of current U.S. immigration policy has led them to collective action, with the Georgia Board … Continue reading "The Freedom University Georgia Podcast: Part 2" The post The Freedom University Georgia Podcast: Part 2 appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.
Gerardo Reyes-Chavez and Patricia Cipollitti are from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and will speak to labor and food justice in the agriculture.
Opportunity in America - Events by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program
Labor unions traditionally have been the voice of workers seeking better pay, benefits, and jobs and have been a critical means for working people to improve their working conditions, incomes, and social standing. The right to form and join a labor union is enshrined in the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But in the United States, union membership and the commitment to unions is not as strong. Union membership has fallen from a high of 34.8 percent of wage and salary workers in 1954 to 11.1 percent in 2014. Recently, a number of states and the courts have taken actions that weaken labor unions. Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin have joined 22 other mostly southern and western states and adopted “right to work” laws that undermine labor union membership. Last year, the US Supreme Court ruled against the home care worker union in the Harris v. Quinn case. The future of workers' voice in shaping their jobs today and tomorrow is at a crossroads. Are traditional labor unions able to successfully represent workers today — especially those in fast-growing, low-wage service sector jobs — or have they been too weakened? What are the new models and organizations that have started to emerge over the last two decades? And fundamentally, how can the nation hear from workers themselves and understand their experience of work today if there is no organized voice that brings their perspective to public and private discussions about jobs and work? A number of both traditional unions and new types of organizations are taking on this challenge of finding new ways to represent the experience of working people in today's economy. This panel discussion explores issues affecting the future of worker voice and new ways of organizing workers to collectively shape and improve their jobs and careers. This event features Sarita Gupta (Executive Director, Jobs With Justice), Ruth Milkman (Professor of Sociology and Research Director, CUNY's Murphy Labor Institute), David Rolf (President, SEIU 775; Founder and Co-Chair, The Workers Lab), Judge Laura Safer Espinoza (Executive Director, Fair Food Standards Council), Cruz Salucio (Watermelon harvester and Spokesperson, Coalition of Immokalee Workers), and moderator Harold Meyerson (Editor-at-Large, The American Prospect; Columnist, The Washington Post) This event is part of the Working in America series, an ongoing discussion series hosted by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program that highlights an array of critical issues affecting low- and moderate-income workers in the United States and ideas for improving and expanding economic opportunities for working people. For more information, visit as.pn/workinginamerica. The Economic Opportunities Program advances strategies, policies, and ideas to help low- and moderate-income people thrive in a changing economy. We recognize that race, gender, and place intersect with and intensify the challenge of economic inequality and we address these dynamics by advancing an inclusive vision of economic justice. For over 25 years, EOP has focused on expanding individuals' opportunities to connect to quality work, start businesses, and build economic stability that provides the freedom to pursue opportunity. Learn more at as.pn/eop.
Greg Asbed is a Co-Founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a worker-based human rights organization. He works with farmworkers and their student, labor, and religious allies to organize the national Campaign for Fair Food, a breakthrough worker-based approach to corporate accountability in the agricultural industry known for its creativity and effectiveness. He writes and designs the CIW’s main communication tool — the website (www.ciw-online.org) and also coordinates the CIW’s negotiating team in talks with food industry leaders, negotiating “Fair Food” agreements with nine multi-billion dollar retail food corporations to date, including McDonald’s, Subway, Sodexo, and Whole Foods. He is currently leading the effort to develop and implement innovative new farm labor standards in collaboration with two of Florida’s largest tomato growers, paving the way for the implementation of the CIW’s Fair Food Code of Conduct across the entire Florida tomato industry in November, 2011. Greg is one of the authors featured in the textbook Bringing Human Rights Home: Portraits of the Movement (2008). He has an M.A. in International Economics and Social Change and Development from Johns Hopkins SAIS and is fluent in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole. He has also spent the past 15 seasons harvesting watermelons in the states of Florida, Georgia, Missouri, and Maryland. This program has been brought to you by Hearst Ranch. “Most farm workers were farmers back home, and I’m sure they’d love the opportunity to use more than just their arms and legs to work.”– Greg Asbed on Greenhorn Radio
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers organized a rally in front of a center city Trader Joes and the Philly Student Union was there to help support. Immigrant farmworkers across southwest Florida have been working under low wages and have been treated unfairly for many years. Back in 1993 they began organizing and between there hunger strike and their historic 230-mile march in 2000, their organizing ended over declining wages in the tomato industry. By 1998 they won industry-wide raises but wages still remained below poverty level. Today they are called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and they are currently fighting for big chain companies like Trader Joes, Walmart, Stop and Shop, ect to sing off on their fair food agreement. This radio piece was produced by Ericka Johnson and it includes a interview with Oscar from the CIW.
As 2008 came to a close, Media Mobilizing Project welcomed organizing groups from across Philly to the 3rd annual MMP Community Building Dinner. This dinner was a chance for Philly Student Union to share our 2008 victories and talk to allies about their struggles and successes. In this piece, Dan Jones talks to attendees (see MMP's Wall of Leaders, on right), including keynote speaker Gerardo Reyes from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
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