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Show Sat/Sun/Mon/Tues, November 20-23, 2010 The Park Record !A-10 Activists focus on farming PARKRECORD Every day, in print, online and by mobile, the Park Record delivers a highly loyal and engaged audience. ^11 [ H i 1 " , n i ' T a t ^ t ; > : i o . . ; j i J v . . j ' i i • : < " • / < : . M . •:• • n i :>A / o u r Park Record. 435.649.9014 Please Help Us This Thanksgiving! You can give a delicious Thanksgiving dinner to a Hungry and Needy Soul for $1.83! Salt Lake City Mission will serve delicious turkey and dressing, mashed potatoes with gravy, vegetables, a roll, a big piece of pumpkin pie and a drink. Your gift will also provide clean clothes, hygiene kits, life skills, education, employment opportunities, counseling and so much more to the needy. We expect to serve over 28,000 meals this 17th Annual Holiday Season. Q S18.30 provides for 10 hungry souls CD S25.62 provides for 14 lonely individuals O $51.24 provides for 28 people in need \Z\ 5100.65 provides for 55 hungry people A good meal is often the first step to a new life! You will receive a tax-deductible receipt. Please mail your gift today! I •I 0 j $183.00 provides for 100 destitute folks S501.42 provides for 274 needy people 51,001.01 provides for 547 of Utah s neediest 55,000 or my best gift of Other $ Name Salt Lake City Mission Address P. O Box 142 Sail Lake Cil>. UT 84110-0142 Apt. Ci ly/S tate/Zip "Providing real change not just spare cliange since 1993" I • [U • D If Credit Card, # Cost* JSC cpproxinuic include n\w.mm expend .ind ruv S: usal (or programs lo help the IKHTKJCV, ihroughfiui llic year We ne-icr wll your name. Exp. Dale: Not oitiimteq affiliated with with The Rescue Mission Mission ol of Sail Sail Lafcc Lake Hot ] he Kcscuc For more more inlo info or or to to mane make aa giU gift online online visit visit wwvv.salllaKccitymission.org www.sallliikecitymission.org | j t-or / Signed: a little too dangerous. But 30 minutes of bending, stooping and twisting berries off the By Stephanie Paige Ogburn stem got the point across. High Country News Next, the group squeezed At a Watsonville, Calif., into Roberto's one-bedroom strawberry field, a gaggle of house, four at a time, through a the agriculturally curious - a vestibule serving as a kitchenstate representative's aide, an cum-laundry room. Stepping anthropologist, a food service past a tiny living room, they company employee - gath- peered into a bedroom stuffed ered around Ann Lopez, with three beds and a handful whose voice gained intensity as of skinny children. Rent runs she careened through a farm $850 a month, Roberto says. worker's tale of woe: pesticide Though their hardships are exposure, low wages, back- well chronicled, farmworkers breaking labor. are still excluded from labor Lopez, a Santa Cruz-based laws guaranteeing rights most activist and academic, was workers take for granted. The leading one of the two major federal laws passed "Farmworker Reality Tours" in the 1930s governing overthat her nonprofit, the Center time and collective bargaining for Farmworker Families, left out agricultural workers to hosts about five times a year. gain Southern votes. (Southern Lopez is on an evangelist's mis- congressmen didn't want black sion: to show and tell everyone farmworkers given the same she meets about the plight of rights as whites.) But in the Mexican migrants who toil in '60s, farmworkers were guarCalifornia fields. anteed minimum wage, and in "I think the only way it's 1975, California passed the going to change," Lopez said, most progressive agricultural "is if the public says, 'No labor law in the country, giving workers collective bargaining more.'" Even in California, a pro- rights. Over time, many legal labor state brimming with prin- migrants found better jobs, cipled foodies, farmers are and farmworker unions shrank mostly adored and farmwork- in size and power. Now, undocers ignored. Just 13 states - umented immigrants - about including six in the West - 50 to 75 percent of the agriculrequire employers to offer tural workforce nationwide - worker's compensation, and take the seasonal, low-wage less than half protect farm- work. They are hesitant to workers' right to form unions, assert the rights they do have, guaranteed to most other and often answer to middlelaborers. Lopez hopes men who can avoid many labor increased awareness will make laws. a difference, but as recent Though California is one of attempts to reform labor laws just four states to offer agriculshow,fixinga system that relies tural laborers any overtime, on cheap labor to turn a profit they can only receive it after a is not easy. six-day, 60-hour week. Gov. On a typical day, California Schwarzenegger recently strawberry pickers, paid in part vetoed a bill requiring extra by the size of their harvest, per- compensation after a 40-hour form a stoop-shouldered race week, claiming it would overly down plastic-covered rows, burden farms. The work's seapicking and packing fruit. sonal nature justifies the weak"Roberto," one of the workers er law, he said. on the tour, left his farm in With few exceptions, large Jalisco 12 years ago to work in and small, organic and convenWatsonville because he could- tional farms all say paying the n't find a steady job in Mexico. state's 650,000 agricultural He now earns about $16,000 a laborers a truly just wage is year. more than they can afford. Phil Tour-goers began by pick- Martin, an agricultural econoing strawberries. The fruit was mist at the University of organic, to prevent chemical California-Davis, attributes exposure; true reality could be this, in part, to market forces and the high labor costs associated with specialty crops like grapes and berries that require hand weeding, picking or pruning. "Farmers usually can't determine what the price of the crop is - the markets determine that," Martin says. "Farmers will usually say (labor is) their only controllable expense." Even Northern California's famed Full Belly Farm, often held up as a model of sustainability, and one of few farms that strives to pay workers a living wage, opposed the overtime bill, saying it would force many farms to pay less hourly to compensate for overtime wages. "In effect, the new law would turn the job into a minimum-wage job," Judith Redmond, a manager at the farm, wrote in a newsletter to customers, As the reality tour progressed, attendees alternately hissed at Driscoll's Berries, labor contractors and NAFTA, which allowed subsidized U.S. corn to flood the Mexican mar-, ketplace, undercutting many family farms. The exhortations - by Lopez and members of Human Agenda, a human rights group - were familiar Despise NAFTA. Support immigration reform. Write your senator. Some in Congress have already responded. In 2009, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, DCalif., reintroduced the Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits and Security Act, which would provide a path to legal status for workers who have lived in the U.S. for at least two years, and allow farmers to bring guest workers in on temporary visas. Though workers, employers and politicians on both sides of the aisle support the bill, it's languished in Congress for nearly as long as Roberto has been picking strawberries. Immigration reform - and agricultural labor rights - are still a long time coming. 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