Farmworkers

Fred Ross Changed Community Organizing

September 1, 2025 Peter Dreier, Portside. Organize! Community organizing, Farmworkers, Fred Ross, History

"A good organizer is a social arsonist,” Fred Ross Sr once said. “One who goes around setting people on fire.” Ross may be the most influential political activist you’ve never heard of. This anonymity was intentional. Carey McWilliams of the Nation called Ross “a man of exasperating modesty, the kind that never steps forward to claim his fair share of credit for any enterprise in which he is involved.” He believed organizers should be behind the scenes, getting others to take leadership in their unions, community organizations, and civil rights groups. Ross was a California community organizer for the better part of the twentieth century. He started in the 1930s farmworker camps that inspired John Steinbeck’s novels and went on to pioneer methodical tactics that transformed American organizing.

Farmworkers Continue To Organize In Face Of Chilling ICE Raids

August 25, 2025 Joe Maniscalco, Work-Bites. Resist! Farmworkers, Global heating, ICE, Worker Rights, Workplace Safety

Imagine you’re a farmworker in 2025. You make the food on tables across the United States possible. Five years ago because of the pandemic, people even began acknowledging the essential work you do. It felt good for a second, even hopeful, after decades of being left out of the conversation around worker rights. Soaring summer temperatures threaten more than 69 million workers across the United States with heat-related illnesses each year, according to the National Committee on Occupational Safety and Health [COSH]. In 2023, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 14 heat-injury deaths in Texas alone. But farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die of heat-related stress than workers in other dangerous industries.

What It Will Take To Get US Citizens To Work The Farm?

August 4, 2025 Samuel Benson, Portside. Strategize! California, Farmworkers, ICE, Immigrant Rights, Wages, Worker Rights

The agriculture sector is on edge like never before. With ICE officers chasing undocumented immigrants through fields and barging into meatpacking plants, workers are spooked. Even before the farm raids, workforce shortages and economic uncertainty rankled the industry. Now, as harvest season arrives for many crops, concerns are growing that there may not be enough workers out there to feed the country. To Dolores Huerta, it’s an unprecedented problem caused squarely by the Trump administration. “It’s an atrocity, what they’ve been doing to the immigrant community,” Huerta said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine.

Farmworkers Organize Three-Day Strike In California

July 23, 2025 Lyn Neeley, Workers World. Resist! California, Farmworkers, ICE, Immigrant Rights, Strike

At 10:20 a.m. on July 10, some 500 community supporters responded to a Rapid Response Hotline alert by UndocuFund announcing that armored vehicles were heading toward migrant farmworkers at two southern California Glass House farms in Camarillo and Carpinteria, California. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and members of the National Guard descended on the farms. They used weapons and threats of deportation to terrorize the farmworkers — who work seven days a week raising tomatoes, cucumbers and legal cannabis — and their families. Supporters were met with tear gas as they threw rocks and faced off against the troops.

Farmworker Fear Of A General Strike Exposes Stranglehold On Migrants

July 21, 2025 Joe Maniscalco, Work-Bites. Strategize! California, Farmworkers, ICE, Protests, Worker Rights and Jobs

This week, California farmworkers protesting the recent death of 57-year-old Jaime Alanís García after he broke his neck fleeing militarized ICE agents in Ventura County on July 10, chose to observe the “Huelga para la dignidad,” or “Strike for Dignity.” Most, however, did not. And the reason they did not has everything to do with Trump administration policies designed to perpetuate an unrepresented class of workers in this country consigned to a state of virtual slavery. The Trump-directed raids on poor California farmworkers makes zero economic sense when you consider the current president’s supporters in agribusiness simply cannot do without the cheap, exploitable labor that makes their profits possible.

The Battle For The Future Of Farmwork

July 16, 2025 Joseph Bullington, In These Times. Educate! Detention, Farmworkers, Food and Agriciulture, ICE, Immigrant Rights, New York (NY)

The jail where they have taken his wife is very cold and very far away. In the weeks since immigration agents pulled her off the work bus, she has been in jail and he has kept working at the vegetable farm where they worked together. She calls him from a detention center in another state and tells him about the cold, how the prisoners complain about the cold but the guards do nothing. She has fallen into un hueco now, he says — a hollow, a hole, a gray area. His name is not Carlos, but he doesn’t want his real name published because he doesn’t want to be taken. We sit in his friend’s one-room apartment in an old two-story house in the upstate New York town of Albion, population 7,400.

Three Ways To Support Detained Farmworker Organizer ‘Lelo’ Juarez

March 28, 2025 Natascha Elena Uhlmann, Labor Notes. Resist! Farmworkers, ICE, Immigrant Rights, Lelo Juarez

Longtime farmworker organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents this week in what many believe to be retaliation for his organizing. Juarez was pulled over while driving his wife to work. ICE agents shattered Juarez’s window and dragged him out of the vehicle for exercising his right to remain silent, his brother said. Juarez helped form Familias Unidas por la Justicia, an independent farmworker union that emerged out of a 2013 work stoppage by berry workers in Washington state. He himself began working as a berry picker at 14, and has fought for the rights of farmworkers since, advocates say.

UFW Announces Boycott Of Windmill Farms Mushrooms From Sunnyside

December 22, 2024 Jasper Kenzer Sundden, Seattle Times. Resist! boycott, Farmworkers, Mushrooms, Worker Rights

The United Farm Workers union is calling for a boycott of mushrooms from the Windmill Farms plant in Sunnyside, Yakima County, its first boycott in nearly 20 years. Workers are seeking the community’s support in their efforts to form a union, said Gabriela López, a member of the workers’ committee, during a gathering Wednesday night. Officials with Windmill Farms did not comment on the boycott. The union’s last boycott was E. & J. Gallo Winery in California in 2005, UFW organizer Roman Pinal said. The union called on consumers to look out for mushrooms produced in Sunnyside and sold in Washington, Oregon and Alaska.

Farmworkers Are Organizing To Resist Trump’s Attacks On Immigrants

November 18, 2024 Derek Seidman, Truthout. Organize! Donald Trump, Farmworkers, Immigrant Rights, Immigration, Worker Rights and Jobs

Donald Trump rode to reelection on a campaign packed with racist rhetoric that promised mass deportations of immigrants. So far, Trump has appointed anti-immigrant extremists like Stephen Miller, Thomas Homan and Kristi Noem to top positions in his administration. The new Trump regime threatens millions of immigrant workers in the U.S., including farmworkers, many of whom are undocumented. Beyond mass deportations and workplace raids, there’s the prospect of regulatory rollbacks around heat and pesticide protections and the ramping up of hyper-exploitative guestworker programs like the H2A program.

Why Fair Trade Produce Labels Are Bogus

January 16, 2024 Anna Canning and James Daria, Labor Notes. Educate! Fair Trade, Farmworkers, Food and Agriculture, Worker Rights and Jobs

Any U.S. consumer walking down the supermarket aisle will find berries, tomatoes, and other vegetables that are labeled “responsibly grown,” “farmworker-assured,” and “fair-trade certified.” But behind the labels, the Mexican workers who harvest these fruits and vegetables live and labor in conditions they call “twenty-first century slavery.” We interviewed 200 workers for our new report “Certified Exploitation: How Equitable Food Initiative and Fair Trade USA Fail to Protect Farmworkers in the Mexican Produce Industry.” They detailed widespread wage theft, sexual harassment, rampant retaliation, and, in the most extreme cases, forced labor.

Organizers Speak Out As Employers Investigations Hit Record Lows

January 12, 2024 James Anderson, Barn Raiser. Strategize! Farmworkers, Labor Movement, Migrant Labor, Worker Rights and Jobs

Sixty years after Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association, agricultural workers—especially migrants—continue to be subjected to widespread abuses, including wage theft and dangerous working conditions, due to lax enforcement of labor regulations, concerted efforts by employers to skirt the rules that are in place and a political-economic system that favors employers. Despite these challenges, labor organizations have helped farmworkers stand up for themselves and together with other workers, with some success. Although migrants working temporary and seasonal jobs on farms are legally protected by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) under the H-2A visa program, legal protection does not necessarily translate into workplace protections, especially absent a union presence.

Farmworkers In Florida Are Marching Against Slave Conditions

March 15, 2023 Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network. Resist! Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Fair Food Campaign, Farmworkers, Florida

In December of 2016, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), based out of Immokalee, Florida, received a phone call from two men who had just escaped captivity near the town of Pahokee by hiding in the trunk of a car. The two men were migrant farmworkers, working on H-2A visas, who had been harvesting watermelons for Bladimir Moreno, owner of the farm labor contracting business Los Villatoros Harvesting LLC—a business that, in reality, was little more than a modern-day slave camp. “They told of being held against their will on a labor camp surrounded by barbed wire,” the CIW notes, “working and living under constant surveillance, and earning extremely low pay.”

Citizenship, Not Surveillance, For Farmworkers

December 23, 2022 Servando Jimenez, Labor Notes. Educate! Farmworkers, Food and Agriculture, Immigration, Worker Rights and Jobs

This week, I joined farmworkers across the country in sounding the alarm on legislation that would make us even more vulnerable. We have defeated it for now. However, the agricultural lobby has been pushing for this legislation since 2019, and we know they will continue to propose legislation that ties immigration reform to labor exploitation. I know just how grueling year-round agricultural work is and how difficult it can be to make ends meet as an undocumented farmworker. After coming to the United States from Oaxaca, Mexico, I spent years picking grapes and after that, working on dairy farms. Farm work wasn’t my first choice, but as an undocumented person, there weren’t any other options for me. In just 10 years of farm work, my body was broken, leaving me unable to support myself.

Organized Farmworkers Win Basic Demands In A Quick Strike

April 2, 2022 David Bacon, Labor Notes. Resist! Farmworkers, Strike, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Mt. Vernon, Washington - Tulips and daffodils symbolize the arrival of spring, but the fields are bitterly cold when workers’ labors begin. Snow still covers the ground when workers go into the tulip rows to plant bulbs in northwest Washington state, near the Canadian border. Once harvesting starts, so do other problems. When a worker cuts a daffodil, for instance, she or he has to avoid the liquid that oozes from the stem—a source of painful skin rashes. Yes, the fields of flowers are so beautiful they can take your breath away, but the conditions under which they’re cultivated and harvested can be just as bad as they are for any other crop. “Tulips have always been a hard job, but it’s a job during a time of the year when work is hard to find,” says farmworker Tomas Ramon.

Indigenous Farmworkers Hold The Key To Healing Our Burning Planet

January 27, 2022 Brooke Anderson, In These Times. Organize! climate crisis, Environment, Farmworkers, Worker Rights and Jobs

Anayeli Guzman was born into a Mixtec-speaking Indigenous community in San Miguel Chicahua in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her family raised chickens on their land, and as a child she would help plant corn, squash and radishes. They ate handmade tortillas with beans, eggs and salsa. Her grandparents taught her to care for the land and to revere the rain. Few people worked for wages. Rather, families owned small plots and grew seasonal, drought-resistant crops, exchanged produce with nearby communities and helped each other with big projects. After migrating to the United States to be with her husband, Anayeli (along with 11,000 other, mostly Indigenous, immigrant farmworkers) toils for meager wages in the $1.9 billion wine industry of Sonoma County, Calif. In the past several years, record-breaking wildfires have ravaged the area, often during harvest season.

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