HAAGEN DAZS STRAWBERRY ICE CREAM & DRISCOLL BERRIES
CURRENTLY SUBJECT TO A CONSUMER BOYCOTT. NATIONWIDE.
If these are items you purchase or the restaurants / bars
you work for use them, please consider cancelling your orders and finding an
alternative. The workers are currently tracking down the other companies their
berries are repackaged as. Charley’s produce delivers the berries but many of
them are repackaged and labeled as “grown in the usa”
Sakuma Bros farm workers are currently trying to organize
amidst retaliatory firing and a media smear campaign bought and paid for by the
company. Most of these workers are undocumented and therefore extremely
vulnerable to abuse, threats and firings by the parent company Sakuma Bros who
operate 1500+ acres of berry fields in Skagit County near Mount Vernon and
Burlington, Washington. Today we heard workers talk about their struggle at a
panel hosted by the UW Tacoma Labor Studies Department. We heard workers talk
about the deplorable living conditions, the child labor, the wage theft, the
firings at wim, the racist caste system that benefits only those workers who
are able to communicate more effectively and defend themselves. The indigenous
workers who have traveled from rural small villages in Mexico and speak their
native dialects are given the lowest wages and most difficult tasks. Oh and
there are 12 year olds picking berries for less then the legal wage required
for child agricultural workers in this state.
They are currently trying to organize and have an
organization called Familias Unidas por la Justicia. They have struck
6 times this season and have a list of demands that the company is refusing to
agree to in writing. I will post some links below but want to paraphrase some
of the things these workers said that really moved me.
A sister named Angelica was speaking about the way indigenous
people of color are stereotyped and looked down upon in their communities as
ignorant and lazy. She said, “They say our problems are cultural, but this has
nothing to do with culture, these are social problems.” Which a brother named
Ramon echoed when he said, “How is this a cultural problem? What does a child
making $4 an hour have to do with their culture back home in Mexico?” Another
member of the panel, a man named Edgar drew connections between all social
struggles and activist communities by saying that the food system is broken,
just like the immigration system. The problems that workers face are connected
to struggles in the LGBT community and other activist communities when we live
in a world with a broken economic system of which these issues are all symptoms.
Wendell Berry famously said, “Eating food is an agricultural
act.” Michael Pollan one of his protégés took it a step further and said
“Eating food is a political act.” One of the women on the panel closed the
meeting with a plea for us to draw lines in the sand. “Do you eat? Are you
eaters,” she asked? “Then you need to support farm workers!”
Please like their page on Facebook here:
And check out these other links too!
No comments:
Post a Comment