Farmworker Victory in North Carolina
16 September 2004
Oxfam partner Farm Labor Organizing Committee establishes new union for over 8,000 workers.
The Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), Oxfam America’s partner based in Ohio, announced that it had reached an historic agreement with the North Carolina Growers Association and the Mount Olive Pickle Company that will give over 8,000 so-called guest farmworkers from Mexico a union contract.
According to FLOC, this makes the farmworkers in North Carolina the “first such workers in the history of the United States to win union representation and a contract.” The contract will affect workers on over 1,000 North Carolina farms.
The US Department of Labor estimates that of the 340,000 farmworkers in North Carolina, 40 percent are migrant workers. Ninety percent of the total number of North Carolina farmworkers are Latino.
The agreement was signed on September 16th, 2004 at the United Church of Christ in Raleigh, N.C.
FLOC’s founder and President Baldemar Velasquez sad, “This agreement will set an important standard to the rest of the agricultural industry. Everyone else almost exclusively utilizes undocumented workers and the conditions of those workers are tragic and shameful.”
The new agreement establishes worker complaint system and a grievance commission, which will allow workers to speak out without fear of being sent back home or blacklisted. The agreement also established the right for workers to know which and when pesticides have been applied in the fields, increased wages, and a fair recruitment system based on seniority that brings workers from Mexico under the Department of Labor guest worker program. Such rights are unheard of for farmworkers, who are normally exempt from federal minimum wages and other standards.
According to Like Machines in the Fields: Workers Without Rights in American Agriculture, a report on farmworkers released by Oxfam America in 2004, nearly two million are working on US farms with no basic rights to decent wages, and live in dehumanizing conditions.
Farmworkers average about $7,500 a year in wages. When adjusted for inflation their wages are lower today than 10 years ago. Farmworkers in the United States also suffer from poor health, a much lower life expectancy, and high rates of malnutrition.
FLOC has been demanding better wages for farmworkers in North Carolina for five years, and had targeted the Mount Olive Pickle Company with a boycott, charging that Mount Olive’s demand for low cucumber prices push down wages for farmworkers. The company is the largest employer in North Carolina, and also imports cucumbers from Sri Lanka and Honduras. The new union agreement ends the boycott, and establishes FLOC as the largest union in the state.
Oxfam America has supported the organizing efforts of FLOC in North Carolina since 2001, helping the organization pursue it mission of bringing growers, workers, and corporations to the table to negotiate collective bargaining agreements and better respect for farmworker rights.
