Sitting in their air-conditioned offices with stewards who serve coffee and tea on request, a majority of our Supreme Court justices have come to an awful decision. They ordered an essential class of workers into slave-like isolation—unseen, unheard and unprotected—as they toil in scorching heat harvesting crops.
The justices, exploiting a single incident, turned back the clock on farmworker rights nearly a half-century.
In an under-reported 6-3 decision, the justices drop-kicked the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975 into the trash bin. That California law gave farmworkers access to labor organizers. The court decision assures farm owners that they once again reign over their employees like plantation owners in the antebellum South, just without bullwhips.
“It seems like a return to indentured servitude,” Rev. Richard Witt, executive director of the Rural and Migrant Ministry in NewYorkState, said after the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 23 decision inCedar Point Nursery v. Hassid.
In practical terms, the ruling means that farmworkers cannot access union organizers unless they leave the farm, creating a legal barrier that segregates the […]
There continues to be a big disconnect between Americans and their food. When it appears at the supermarket shiny and clean, priced just right wonderful, who cares or thinks about how it got there. This story conveys a little of the suffering and theft of other’s lives required for that abundant foody experience. With drought, heat and abuse of farm laborers the unconscious, uncaring eaters will awaken to higher prices and shortages of food be they vegan or carnivore.