The Food Chain Workers Alliance is a coalition of worker-based organizations whose members plant, harvest, process, pack, transport, prepare, serve, and sell food, organizing to improve wages and working conditions for all workers along the food chain.
This summer we’ll have a permanent website up. For now, check out our temporary home!
UFCW Local 1500 Women's Network protest against Wal-Mart
Executive Summary
The Department of Justice/Department of Agriculture workshops investigating corporate consolidation in agricultural markets represent an enormous opportunity to rebuild and revitalize rural America by ensuring justice and fairness for working men and women across the food industry. Without a doubt, consolidation and concentration in the agricultural economy has caused decreasing incomes for farmers, ranchers, workers and the rural communities that depend on agriculture. Our rural communities, our food supply and the fate of a major portion of the American economy depend on us fixing this problem. However, we can’t solve this dilemma unless we are willing to look at the whole picture of the American food chain—from the farm to the grocery store shelf.
reposted from www.imagine2050.org
by Axel Fuentes, organizer with Center for New Community
Day after day, I converse with workers and hear about issues that affect their health and safety, which include injuries and accidents in the workplace. There have been several workers, especially immigrants, who have told me their personal stories. Today though, I am only going to focus on one of the issues that plague them.
The well-being of many immigrant workers is largely affected because they are expected to do the most dangerous jobs and are the most disadvantaged when claiming their rights. In most cases of course, fear is present. The fear of reprisals from employers or even fear of the government. There are several cases I have heard about in which workers are fired after a few days of being injured even though they have worked for the company for several years. Most of the accidents in the workplace are not being reported to OSHA and other government agencies. With injuries going unreported, companies proudly show zero accidents for a month in which they probably had several.
I have heard on several occasions about safety team workers or management that pressure workers not to report any information about workplace injuries.
This was the case with Ramon, who after being involved in an accident in July 2010, was told not to report the accident by his supervisor because the incident would have raised the monthly premium of the company’s insurance.
Read the rest of the article at www.imagine2050.org.
Photo by Scott Robertson
Big Three foodservice industry leaders now squarely behind growing movement for Fair Food!
This is very big news for the growing Campaign for Fair Food. The foodservice industry — the companies that, operating largely behind the scenes, manage cafeterias in the nation’s grade schools and universities, hospitals and hotels, government agencies and institutions, and more — is comprised, almost in its entirety, of its three largest members, Compass, Aramark, and Sodexo. With today’s announcement, all three of those companies have now signed Fair Food agreements and will be implementing those agreements in their supply chains this coming season. This marks the conclusion of the Student/Farmworker Alliance’s remarkably successful “Dine with Dignity” campaign, a campaign that combined energetic campus activism with smart tactics to bring all three industry leaders to the table in just over one year.
Read more about this historic agreement on CIW’s website.
Photo by Christina Schiavoni
150 Supporters of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, including the UFCW and the Farmworker Solidarity Alliance, came out to protest outside a Trader Joe’s in the Chelsea neighborhood of NYC Thursday evening to demand that Trader Joe’s sign an agreement with CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food!
Click here for photos by Christina Schiavoni, co-executive director of WHY Hunger.
Click here for an article on the action. Democracy Now! also talked about the action in its headlines this morning.
Warehouse Workers for Justice on Monday released a new report focused on warehouse workers in northern Illinois. WWJ recently helped workers file a class action lawsuit against Select Remedy, the company that staffs Wal-Mart’s warehouse in Elwood, Illinois, for allegedly not paying employees for all of the hours they worked and for overtime.
According to the survey:
• 63 percent of warehouse workers in the Will County area are working for temp agencies.
• 62 percent make poverty-level wages.
• The median hourly wage for a temp was $9 an hour, $3.48 less than direct hires.
• 37 percent of current warehouse workers had to work a second job to provide for their families.
• Only 5 percent of warehouse temp workers had sick days and 4 percent had insurance.
For more details, check out this article.
reposted from Change.org
by Lauren Kelly
A hearty hat tip to lady blog Jezebel for reminding me of this amazing blog post by Michelle, a.k.a. the Fat Nutritionist, about poor people and nutrition. It’s an oldie (in Internet time, at least), but it’s so good it deserves a second look.
The jumping-off point of Michelle’s post is the fact that low-income people tend to have poorer health than wealthier individuals — something that’s not exactly news. But Michelle (who really is a nutritionist, by the way) challenges the notion that poor people suffer from worse health simply because they don’t know any better and need to be educated about nutrition. Rather, she argues, “The reality is that people who don’t have enough money (or the utilities and storage) to buy and prepare decent food in decent quantities, cannot (and should not) be [asked] to worry about the finer nuances of nutrition.”
with same-day actions in Amsterdam and New Amsterdam (well, almost…)!
From Alliance member Coalition of Immokalee Workers:
Two exciting actions on two continents marked a notable escalation in the Ahold campaign last Friday as the Northeast Tour crew paid a visit to Ahold USA headquarters in Quincy, MA while Dutch allies protested at the company’s global headquarters in Amsterdam. Ahold owns US grocery chains Giant and Stop and Shop.
Click here to see the photo report from the actions in Quincy, MA and Amsterdam!
While the U.S. action — a delegation of five people delivering nearly 1,000 postcards collected in the course of the first half of the Slavery Museum’s Northeast Tour — was received wth extra hired security, the Netherlands action was made all the more inspiring by the presence of the one and only Rev. Billy of the Church of Life after Shopping.
Good article @ CIW’s Modern-Day Slavery Museum and the great impact that their organizing is making: “In Florida, slavery still haunts the fields” by Mischa Gaus, Labor Notes.The trailer, 24 feet deep by 8 feet wide, is muggy this early August afternoon in Manhattan. Eight of us — church ladies, iPhone-wielding denizens, curious tourists — mop our brows as we clamber inside for a look at one the most shameful secrets of the American system of food production: modern-day slavery among farmworkers.
Our guide, Romeo Ramirez, tells us straight away that the trailer, which already feels uncomfortably small, is a replica of one in southwest Florida where 12 farmworkers were forcibly kept between 2005 and 2007. Locked in at night, they had no place to relieve themselves and were forced to foul a corner of their cramped quarters. When someone fought back, he was beaten and chained to a pole. The chain and padlock, still twisted from when workers finally forced it off, rest on the trailer’s wall.
After two workers pounded a hole in the trailer’s ventilator hatch large enough to squeeze out, they found a ladder and extricated the rest. Their escape began the seventh of eight prosecutions for involuntary servitude among U.S. farmworkers since 1997. (The eighth indictments, involving dozens of Haitian nationals victimized by trafficking, were announced last month, two days after Independence Day.)
Click here to read the rest of the article.
Food Processing Workers – this Sunday Aug. 8 at 10am
Workers fired by prominent kosher food company Flaum Appetizing for organizing and claiming unpaid overtime and their supporters will protest in front of owner Moshe Grudhut’s home at Penn St. and Wythe in the South Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. The workers are supported by Alliance member Brandworkers International and the Industrial Workers of the World union. Click here to read a recently-published article about the campaign.
Farmworkers – Thursday Aug. 19 at 6:30pm
Join supporters of Alliance member Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Campaign for Fair Food outside the Chelsea Trader Joe’s store, 6th Ave. & W. 21st St., Manhattan. Trader Joe’s so far has refused to sign the code of conduct with the Campaign for Fair Food to ensure that tomato pickers receive a fair wage and safe working conditions and that slavery is eradicated from the fields. For more information on the protest, check out the FB page. For more on the campaign, go to CIW’s website.
Puente leader Salador Reza being arrested at SB1070 protest, 7/29/10Fernando Garcia from the Alliance member NW Arkansas Workers' Justice Center was in Arizona last week for the protests against SB1070! Read his account on the NWAWJC's blog!
Here’s a preview:
Day one has drawn to a close in the sweltering heat of Arizona. The day
started off with an early morning picket in front of a hotel under
construction on the outskirts of Phoenix where an employer who’s refusing
to pay around $30,000 in wages to 10 workers. Not surprising to us,
there was important conference occurring in the adjacent conference
building and the owners seemed very interested in verbally committing to
dropping the thieving contractor from the job to get us away to reduce
the embarrassment. Time will tell if the message makes it’s way to the
contractor, but judging by the reaction of the workers and supervisors on
site I suspect it will quite quickly. Around twenty people chanting and
marched around the hotel raising the issue of the workers. This was a big
step for the Arizona Worker Rights Center who are just beginning to use
direct action on wage theft issues.
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