- Editor's Note: What follows is user-generated news. If you would like to post your news to Patch, for detailed instructions. The following was posted by Rev. Noelle Damico, an Associate for Fair Food Presbyterian Hunger Program.
What: Rally for Farmworker Justice
Where: , 154 Westchester Ave., White Plains
When: Sunday, April 15 from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.
For decades, Florida's farmworkers faced poverty wages and daily violations of their basic rights —including physical abuse, sexual harassment, and in the most extreme cases, modern-day slavery —in order to harvest the food on our plates.
Today, however, a new day is dawning in the fields. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) —human rights award-winning farmworker organization—has reached groundbreaking agreements with ten of the world's leading food retailers, including McDonald's, Subway, Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe's.
Royal Dutch Ahold USA (parent company of Stop & Shop) has refused to join this partnership, instead continuing to leverage their high-volume purchasing power to demand the ever-lower prices that result in farmworker exploitation.
Hailed by the New York Times as "possibly the most successful labor action in the US in twenty years," the Fair Food Program establish a stringent, worker-designed code of conduct in the fields and requires retailers to pay one more penny per pound for the tomatoes they buy to go directly to the workers who picked them.
Rather than use this market power to support farmworkers and their families, Ahold's recalcitrance provides a market for continued abuse.
Join farmworkers, clergy, students and Westchester families on April 15 in White Plains to insist that Stop & Shop/Ahold uphold human rights and join the Fair Food Program!
Read about the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ responses to what Ahold has been saying.
Local Contact Will Summers, w.v.summers@gmail.com or 915-820-9917
Learn more at www.ciw-online.org
