The Fair Food Program’s historic expansion — from 10 states to 23 following the USDA’s endorsement of the FFP as the highest form of worker protection in the US agricultural industry earlier this year — represents not only an achievement in safeguarding farmworkers from the worst effects of climate change, it is also a powerful reminder of the FFP’s unique power to guarantee farmworkers’ safety from an array of other abuses, including sexual harassment and assault in the fields.
The cumulative impact of the Fair Food Program’s protections enables farmworkers to return home safe every day after working in the fields. To support and expand that vital work, we ask that you consider becoming a Sustainer if you are not one already. With you recurring donation of as little as $10 a month, you can help ensure all farmworkers, men and women alike, are protected by the mandatory and enforceable protections of the Fair Food Program.
To illustrate the dangers many face in the fields, and how the Fair Food Program’s protections against harassment make a difference to thousands of workers every single day, we would like to share the firsthand reflections of Silvia Perez, a farmworker and staff member of the CIW.
My name is Silvia Pérez and I work with the Coalition. My job is to organize in the community and also outside the community; as well as to organize in the Campaign for Fair Food that we have had for years.
As women, we have faced abuse and harassment in the fields for years. It happened to me. When I was working in 2008, I was working in a company and someone from the group liked to be behind the women and one day the man did that to me. I felt very bad but there was no Fair Food Program at the time. There are cases where women face very severe harassment by the supervisor or by the employer. If a woman doesn’t want her husband or colleagues to know the problem that is happening to them, they stay silent, like I did. I was embarrassed and ashamed to explain to them what that man did to me. This was part of the problem women faced before the Program.
Later, when the Fair Food Program began in 2011, women won the voice and the power to report the problem, which was not possible before. Once the FFP began, they could speak out and report because a hotline number was created where workers can call and report violations of the FFP’s Code of Conduct, without fear that they might lose their job for making the call. And then we at the CIW go to the farms to speak with the workers so that each worker, man or woman, has a voice and is encouraged to report the abuse; that for years they may have faced because there was no one to complain to, there was no one to tell, not to the company, we did not know.
There was no hotline number, but after the FFP started, everything changed. Now there are thousands of workers who are protected by the Fair Food Program, and the fear of standing up for your rights is gone.
The expansion of the Fair Food Program to all farmworkers is important because today there are still many workers who are sill subject to modern-day slavery. There are farms that are still outside the FFP whose workers continue to suffer these abuses: they are robbed, they are forced to work, they are surveilled, and they are also threatened–them and their families–why? Because they are outside the Fair Food Program. In the Program, these problems would be resolved immediately, because the participating buyers, the growers, and the CIW are working together to eliminate those abuses.