• Campaigns & Initiatives
• Climate Change
• Aid Reform
• 2007 Farm Bill Campaign
• Make Trade Fair
• Coffee
• Free Trade Agreements
• Access to Medicines
• Workers' Rights
• News & Publications
• Background
• What Oxfam is Doing
• One Campaign
• Control Arms
• Right to Know, Right to Decide
• Fast for a World Harvest

• Emergencies

• Issues We Work on

• Our Approach

• Where We Work

Advanced Search

• Contact Us

Background

The failure of the United States to protect the rights of farmworkers ensures second-class status for these hard working laborers. Historically, labor laws have completely ignored them, and as a result, they live in extreme poverty.

Farmworkers are the poorest workers in America.

• Half of all individuals earn less than $7,500 per year, and half of farmworker families earn less than $10,000 per year.
• Three out of five farmworker families reported incomes below the federal poverty threshold.

Farmworkers have one of the most insecure jobs in America.

• Farmworkers are much more likely to have temporary jobs because this allows employers to escape many provisions of US labor laws to reduce costs.
  
  Ninety-nine percent of farmworkers have no Social Security pension or disability insurance, and 95 percent of all farmworkers have no health insurance for non-work-related injuries or illnesses.
• Children are affected as well: 37 percent of adolescent farmworkers in the United States work full time.
• Women working under the piece-rate system of pay often need to work longer hours to earn the same income as men. They are also more vulnerable to the unhealthy work conditions and sexual harassment prevalent in the agricultural workplace. Women continue to have primary responsibility for childcare and most household chores.
• Buyers and retailers use their purchasing power to push the costs and risks of business down the supply chain to their producers. Prices paid to producers have dropped considerably over the past 20 years. In 1990, growers received 41 percent of the retail price of tomatoes; in 2000, they barely received 25 percent.

Laws fail to protect the rights of farmworkers.

• Farmworkers have long been among the least protected from abuses in the workplace in the United States. Over the past six years, six federal prosecutions of forced labor involving hundreds of workers—literally, slave camps—have occurred in plantation agriculture.
• The most important labor laws, at both the federal and state levels, exclude farmworkers altogether or afford lesser protection to them than to workers in other sectors of the economy.
• Farmworkers don't have federal protection for the right to organize.
• Farmworkers don't have the right to overtime pay.
• Farmworkers are denied the same protections from health and safety hazards that other workers enjoy.