From the Coalition of Immokalee Workers blog:
“The Fair Food Program is a transformative, model program”
A study conducted in 2010 found that 80% of farmworker women report that they have experienced sexual harassment on the job. That number is incomprehensible, until you stop to think of the immense imbalance of power between workers and their employers that defines most farm labor jobs. The near total dependence of many farmworkers on their bosses — for everything from employment to, in many cases, housing, transportation, and, in the case of guest workers, even their right to live and work in the country — is the kind of relationship that lends itself to abuse. As a result, sexual harassment in the fields is effectively endemic, and has been for decades.
In one sector of the agricultural industry, though, that devastating story is starting to change, and two recent articles highlight the gains women farmworkers are seeing in the Florida tomato industry today thanks to the Fair Food Program (FFP). In the words of the CIW’s Lupe Gonzalo, who worked for years in the tomato harvest before joining the CIW staff two years ago to help educate her fellow workers on their rights under the FFP, “When we arrive home at the end of the day, we can hug our children happily, knowing that we didn’t have to sell our dignity in the fields. We brought it home with us.”
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