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An Extraordinary Summer of Crises for California’s Farmworkers

Alejandra Borunda National Geographic
Farm workers harvest peppers near Gilroy, California. The “essential workers” picking our food are facing fires, heat waves, and the pandemic, all at once. California’s farmworkers, many undocumented, and many without a choice, have been working through a summer of increasingly brutal conditions.

Why Does Essential Work Pay So Little... And Cost So Much?

Rebecca Gordon TomDispatch
bus driver waering mask and gloves Students tend to measure fair compensation on two scales. How many years of training and/or dollars of tuition did a worker have to invest to become “qualified” for the job? And how important is that worker’s labor to the rest of society?

COVID-Related Strikes Hit Washington’s Apple Sheds

David Bacon Capital & Main
This week the COVID-related strike in Washington state’s Yakima Valley quadrupled in size, as workers walked out at three more apple packinghouses with two main demands for safer working conditions and an extra $2 an hour in hazard pay.

NY Farm Workers Have a Right to Organize

NYCLU NYCLU
“Today, the court recognized that farmworkers are entitled to the same rights as all other workers in New York state,” said Rebecca Fuentes, lead organizer with the Workers’ Center of Central New York.

Are We Prepared to Pay the Price for Farmworker Justice?

Olivia Heffernan openDemocracy
Migrant farmworkers picking cabbages in Ohio. By romanticizing local farms and assuming that ‘local’ means ‘moral,’ many miss the fact that whether produce is sent to a giant warehouse or a ‘farm to table’ restaurant, the farmworkers are denied the protections granted all other hourly workers.

The Zombie Guest Worker Bill

David Bacon Capital and Main (co-published by Fast Company)
“Over the last year,” Goldstein charges, “Rep. Goodlatte has made it his mission to create a massive new guest worker program of millions of captive workers who have even fewer labor rights than the current workers they would replace
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