Monday, April 25, 2016

Berry Farmworkers Toil 12 Hours A Day For $6. Now They’re Demanding A Raise.

By Esther Yu-Hsi Lee, ThinkProgress
April 1, 2016

Some of the farmworkers who make it possible for U.S. consumers to have berries for breakfast are paid about $6 a day. Those farmworkers include children toiling for 12 hours a day at 85 percent the amount of money that adults get paid. Many farmworkers do not get lunch and rest breaks and are subjected to terrible housing conditions.

Hoping to rectify these issues, farmworkers in the United States and in Mexico have been on a three-year-long fight to get Driscolls — the world’s largest berry distributor — to recognize their unions so that they could have better working and living conditions. And now they’ve taken their complaints on the road in a month-long protest tour along the west coast.

Ramon Torres, a 31-year-old Mexican immigrant, is one of the people leading the fight to unionize. As the president of the independent farmworker union Families United for Justice (FUJ), he has been picking berries since he was 18 years old. His most recent employer was the Washington state-based Sakuma Bros.[...]

Read the full article:
http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2016/04/01/3764433/driscolls-boycott/

No comments: