Farmworker Awareness Week Day Seven, Support UFW’s’ Push for Overtime Pay
"Life here is very hard when we harvest fruits and vegetables. The sun burns so much and we get weak, and you get irritated from so much heat. And despite that we have to work all day putting up with the fatigue, dehydration and hunger. I’ll also tell you that it’s very sad to be far from our land which is Mexico… and our loved ones like my parents, my wife and my son. But we’re here working hard so that we can support our family… and well, it’s very hard to be a farmworker, and sad because you work from sun up to sundown in the fields."
Inspirational and Influential Women of the World: Angela Davis
Part III of the Inspirational and Influential Women of the World Blog Series
“Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root.'” – Angela Davis
As a professor, author, and revolutionary, Angela Davis’s life has been about teaching. With her academic prowess, organizing ability, and bravery she has been a teacher to many. She has spread her intersectional feminism and anti-prison messages, against powerful opposition, to generations of activists. No matter the obstacle, she has refused to be silenced.
Farmworker Awareness Week, Day Five: Support Community, Student Action with Farmworkers
"I’m away from my family for eight months to come work in this country. Work here is very hard because we have to work ten to twelve hours a day. The work helps me support my family, but I am happy because I’m reaching my goal of having a house of my own."
Farmworker Awareness Week, Day Four: Pledge to Boycott Wendy’s
Bioparques workers who spoke to Times reporter Richard Marosi for an investigation published December 10, 2014, described subhuman conditions, with workers forced to work without pay, trapped for months at a time in scorpion-infested camps, often without beds, fed on scraps, and beaten when they tried to quit. (Harper's Magazine, 2016)
We are quite happy with the quality and taste of the tomatoes we are sourcing from Mexico. (Wendy's spokesperson, 2016)
Farmworker Awareness Week Day Three: Take Action to Ban Chlorpyrifos
“We started around four [4:00] to four thirty [4:30] in the morning,” one worker reported. “I heard someone say ‘it’s raining,’ I didn’t feel anything but I could smell it. I could smell a chemical smell like a garden product. I heard a plane or helicopter I never saw it but I heard it. I did have symptoms, my head was hurting, and my eyes were itchy and really watery.”
United Nations Commission on the Status of Women: The Need for Gender Parity within Human Rights Bodies
For an introduction to the Commission on the Status of Women read here
Forced Labor, Big Profits: One Dollar a Day in Detention Facilities
Last year people held at at a private immigration detention facility in Aurora, Colorado filed suit against the owner, The GEO Group, claiming that the company required them to work in the facility “Volunteer Work Program” and threatened solitary confinement to those who refused.
The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women: the Unequal Effects of Climate Change on Rural Women
This year, the United Nations held the 62nd annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in order to gather the international community to discuss the importance and necessity for inclusion and empowerment of women on a global level and to propose strategies to enact positive change.
Fear as Strategy: Trump Administration Using Cruelty as Deterrence
Several articles in the past week have focused on the ways the Trump administration is employing fear tactics as means to punish migrants. To some degree deterrence has always been a part of U.S. policies aimed at limiting migration. Yet, the current administration seems intent on reaching a new level of cruelty that is both immoral—and illegal. By targeting asylum seekers, separating children and families, and using enforcement in a campaign to silence dissent among immigration activists, Trump’s team is reaching new lows.
The Cycle of Criminalization in U.S. Immigration Policy
Last week, visitors from the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) joined us at the Quixote Center for a conversation on migrant detention and the prison-industrial complex. We discussed the brutality of ICE, the injustice of Operation Streamline, and the expansion of private prisons. But there was one topic we kept coming back to: the cycle of criminalization.
Torture by Another Name: Immigrant Detention in the United States
U.S. immigration enforcement practices violate internationally recognized human rights. They have for years. However, under the Trump administration the scale of violations has grown, with increases in mass arrests that ignore asylum claims, expansion of detention under conditions that are inhumane, and a recent spike in the use of family separation as a tactic to further punish migrants. These practices dehumanize migrants. And in combination, might well constitute torture.