Exploited Labor: News & Updates

IRTF is grateful to the 200 supporters who gathered on October 27 at Pilgrim Church in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood for IRTF’s annual Commemoration of the Martyrs. In addition to marking the 44th anniversary of the martyrdom of Cleveland’s missioners in El Salvador (Jean Donovan and Sister Dorothy Kazel, alongside Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke), we commemorated 36 human rights defenders killed in Central America and Colombia this past year because they dared to speak truth to power.

Our keynote speaker, Lorena Araujo of the largest campesino organization in El Salvador (CRIPDES), held the crowd’s attention with horrific stories of mass arrests, detentions and deaths currently happening under their government’s State of Exception, now in its third year. With more 88,000 imprisoned (and more than 300 deaths in prison), El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world—surpassing the astronomical rate of incarceration in the United States. 

As the people of El Salvador face the greatest challenge to their democracy since the end of the civil war in 1992, they invite us to renew and deepen our solidarity.

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A stunning report in Axios paints a damning picture of widespread farm labor abuse in the US agricultural industry outside the protections of the Fair Food Program (FFP). 

Yet while federal prosecutions of forced labor operations grow more common in agriculture, many massive food corporations like the grocery giant Kroger continue to turn a blind eye to the extreme abuses of some of the most vulnerable workers at the bottom of their opaque supply chains, according to a shocking report, months in the making, by Richard Collings of Axios.  Meanwhile, according to the report, the lack of adequate resources for state and federal authorities to protect farmworkers is only making matters worse, and is likely allowing even more widespread exploitation of the agricultural workers who put food on our tables to go undetected. 

Against this backdrop of pervasive abuse, Worker-driven Social Responsibility programs like the Fair Food Program and Milk with Dignity are singled out by Axios as “key to ending widespread forced labor.”

The bullet-pointed report is a must-read.   We have included it here below in full to best share its urgent message: Forced labor is an appalling reality in US agriculture today, but there is a proven solution — the unique monitoring and enforcement mechanisms of the Fair Food Program, driven by workers as the frontline monitor of their own rights and backed by the purchasing power of the program’s participating buyers.

My name is Cruz Salucio and I am part of the staff of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

For many years I worked in the fields, especially in tomato, blueberry, and also watermelon harvesting for nine years. So when we talk about heat, it’s a real worry that one has as a worker because every year it gets hotter.

There were moments where  if I ran out of water, well, I had to endure it. Before the Fair Food Program, growers, most of the time, didn’t give water to those who worked, and if you wanted to rest in the field, normally there was no shade so a lot of times you had to go under the bus or go far away to get below a tree if there was one. Or simply stay under the sun. So, those were the situations I saw for a long time.

After a long day of work you would get so thirsty, you would wake up with your mouth so dry in the morning, but we had to keep working and a lot of coworkers we worked with sadly would lose consciousness in the fields. That’s what comes to mind when you talk about the heat. Nowadays it’s getting hotter and that’s very worrying for one’s health as a farmworker.

That’s why I got involved here with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to fight; to better those situations in the workplace.  – Cruz Saluci, CIW

The UN Human Rights Committee reiterated its concern about the large scale of intimidation and violence and the high rates of killings of human rights defenders committed by both State agents and private individuals or groups. The Committee was also disturbed by the difficulties faced by victims in accessing justice, the lack of effective investigations, and the delays in judicial proceedings. It called on Honduras to adopt effective measures to protect human rights defenders, particularly environmental and land rights defenders, journalists, trade unionists, agrarian and peasant activists, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and LGBTI people. The State party should also promptly and thoroughly investigate these human rights violations, bring those responsible to justice, and provide full reparations to victims.