Background
Toiling under dangerous conditions, workers in our nation's meat-processing plants and on our farms are among the lowest paid and most vulnerable laborers in the country. An increasingly competitive global market is pushing wages lower and eroding worker rights.
Immigrants and low-wage workers in the fields or processing plants are guaranteed few to no protections on the job. In the Southeast and along the Gulf Coast, Oxfam and its local partners are seeking to reform the system so that those who produce our food can be assured of their rights to decent work and improved conditions in their communities.
On the Gulf Coast, soon after Hurricane Katrina hit, it became clear that the disaster would overwhelm local, state, and federal authorities. The post-hurricane construction boom, alongside the nonenforcement or complete waiver of federal policies to protect worker rights, enabled employers to create disposable jobs with wages too low or too precarious to protect the immigrants who were working them or to encourage local workers to return home. Oxfam's initial response in the Gulf Coast has now grown into a $12 million program focusing in part on good jobs for low-wage and immigrant workers. Despite the deterioration of worker rights in the Gulf Coast, new opportunities present themselves for both worker organizing and job creation, such as growing pro-labor policy agenda and green jobs.
