Dear Colleagues:
Remember back to 1968. 12:15 AM, PDT on June 5, 1968…to be exact. To paraphrase Sister Dolores Huerta; June 5, 1968 was the night the future died. Robert Kennedy, our beloved Senator, would then take his last breath 26 hours later, after having been mortally wounded at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. He had declared victory in that state’s Presidential Primary just minutes prior and the world changed forever when those three bullets splintered through his head, neck and chest.
A young labor organizer who had attended 38 different grammar schools, most of them segregated, before dropping out all together in the seventh grade, propelled Kennedy to victory. Like most farmworkers, he too was a Latino, and like Kennedy, he too changed our nation in his time. His name was Cesar Chavez and he waged a lifelong campaign to provide justice for American Farmworkers that had been accelerated through his partnership with our young Senator just a few years prior.
Some of you are too young to remember the Summer of ’68 but we were forever changed in our understanding of injustice, the world around us and, as the case would be, the Democratic Party. Since then, we have dedicated our lives to advancing civil rights for all Americans, furthering the rights of workers and helping the voiceless gain a voice. This is why we are Democrats, and this is why we remain shocked by your recent decision to oppose the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act. With the stroke of one reckless pen, you hobbled off to war with the Labor Movement, Academics, Civil Libertarians, the Food Justice Movement, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and all our statewide elected leaders.
Did you not understand the historical racial complexities of the bill? Did you not conduct research on the history of labor injustice in agriculture? Are you naïve enough to believe that locking arms with corporate farmers will somehow woo the praise of the Farm Bureau?
The historians among you should have understood these issues. Maybe they did, and they simply didn’t care. Maybe they were so focused on making the DRC and themselves appear relevant at any cost that they ignored history and abandoned the basic decency that somehow holds our dysfunctional Democratic family together. Why none of you spoke up in defense of New York’s most disadvantaged workers, especially the union leaders among you, is also beyond our comprehension. You are either on the side of corporate farms or you are on the side of impoverished workers; there is no in between.
If you still don’t understand why so many people are pissed off at you, please allow us to explain. First, you took an alarmingly uneducated position in the name of all rural Democrats without solicitation or even recording a formal vote. Once word of this befuddlement began to leak, you sent an email to the county committee chairs and excluded everyone else. Second, you either didn’t understand history or you simply ignored it as you abandoned the most basic and core principles of the Democratic Party. This is the part that is so thoroughly maddening, and frankly, you should have known better.
As a refresher, in the early 1930’s, when President Franklin Roosevelt advanced New Deal reforms that expanded workers’ rights, Southern segregationists conditioned their support on the exclusion of farm workers and domestic workers, who at that time, were primarily black. To gain the Southern vote, Roosevelt agreed to exempt these workers from federal labor protections and the effect largely remains intact today at both the Federal and most state levels.
As explained by Historian Ira Katznelson, southern legislators were intensely concerned with preserving a status for black agricultural labor that often came close to resembling nineteenth-century conditions under slavery. The National labor Relations Act of 1935, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and the New York State Labor Relations Act of 1937, were all borne from the same centuries-old air of white supremacy. New York remedied this sorry legacy for domestic workers in 2010 with the enactment of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. As the NYCLU has written, New York farmworkers continued to labor in the long shadow of Jim Crow until now.
The denial of labor rights for farmworkers cannot be justified as a matter of farm industry economics. Farming in New York is a multi-billion-dollar industry, making the state a national leader in production and profit. New York is the second largest producer of apples, cabbage, snap beans and maple syrup and is now the third largest dairy and grape producer in the nation. New York agribusiness remains in a very aggressive growth phase, with state exports having tripled from $500 million to $1.5 Billion between 2000 and 2016. Increases in farmworker wages during the same period were minimal at best.
According to the latest Census of Agriculture, two-thirds of New York farms don’t even employ outside labor and would not be affected by the bill. Nearly 78 percent of farmworkers labor on farms with five or more workers, with 60 percent on farms listing 10 or more workers. Among dairy farmworkers, approximately 80 percent of them work on multi-million-dollar farms with more than 500 cows.
Despite corporate welfare and record-breaking profits, the New York Farm Bureau and other conservative lobbyists continue to promote the fallacy that agriculture in New York is only a short wagon ride away from financial chaos. That wheel has been greased every time legislation has been introduced that would regulate corporate farms and recognize the rights of farmworkers. According to leading experts in New York farm economics, this happened in the late 1980’s when new pesticide notification laws were proposed, in the late 1990’s when sanitation legislation was introduced, in the 2000’s during the fight to raise the minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage and again recently during the debate over raising the state’s minimum wage.
Nearly one-third of farm workers in the Hudson Valley have reported working at least 60 hours per week without any overtime pay. Ninety percent of them had total incomes that were lower than the US Federal Poverty Guidelines for a family of three. This is happening in New York State. RIGHT NOW.
In addition to poor wages, long hours and no overtime pay, farm work in New York is exceedingly dangerous. As of 2011, the rate of injuries related to agricultural work was at least forty percent higher than the average rate for all workers and farmworkers are seven times more likely than other workers to die from work-related injuries. Sixty-nine farm fatalities were reported between 2006-2015.
And that brings us back to Brother Chavez and Sister Huerta. Most exploited farmworkers in New York State and nationwide are Latinos. Many are undocumented or falsely documented immigrants. They often take the work because no one else will and the H2-A system encourages it. Immigration status aside, these are people. They need to be treated like people. If $11.10 an hour and overtime pay is not a living wage for a single white father slinging hamburgers in the Town of Bethel, then it’s not a living wage for a single Latina mother picking grapes in Geneva.
In 1965, Filipino and Mexican farmworkers walked out of their vineyards in California to protest these conditions. They gained national notoriety through grape boycotts aimed at educating suburbanites about the injustice of farmworker wages and they organized prospective voters in their communities to make Bobby Kennedy their President because he listened when no one else would.
While they made strides in advancing state legislation that better protected their Brothers and Sisters, they had limited longstanding national success because the Democratic Party abandoned them after bullets rung out in in that Los Angeles hotel. Ironically, fifty-five years later, in 2019, a small group of rogue rural Democrats primarily from Western New York, an area well known for its vineyards, attempted to kill their future once again.
To deny fundamental worker’s rights to farm laborers is inconsistent with the values of the Democratic Party and with the values of New York. The Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act will become law despite your misguided efforts. You sent an implicit message that exploiting farmworkers is permissible. You didn’t even attempt to partner with your Brothers and Sisters of Labor and we won’t soon forget it.
Sincerely,
Mark Bellardini
Chair
St. Lawrence County Democratic Committee
Ron McDougall
President
Jefferson, Lewis and St. Lawrence Counties
Central Trades and Labor Council
Remember back to 1968. 12:15 AM, PDT on June 5, 1968…to be exact. To paraphrase Sister Dolores Huerta; June 5, 1968 was the night the future died. Robert Kennedy, our beloved Senator, would then take his last breath 26 hours later, after having been mortally wounded at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. He had declared victory in that state’s Presidential Primary just minutes prior and the world changed forever when those three bullets splintered through his head, neck and chest.
A young labor organizer who had attended 38 different grammar schools, most of them segregated, before dropping out all together in the seventh grade, propelled Kennedy to victory. Like most farmworkers, he too was a Latino, and like Kennedy, he too changed our nation in his time. His name was Cesar Chavez and he waged a lifelong campaign to provide justice for American Farmworkers that had been accelerated through his partnership with our young Senator just a few years prior.
Some of you are too young to remember the Summer of ’68 but we were forever changed in our understanding of injustice, the world around us and, as the case would be, the Democratic Party. Since then, we have dedicated our lives to advancing civil rights for all Americans, furthering the rights of workers and helping the voiceless gain a voice. This is why we are Democrats, and this is why we remain shocked by your recent decision to oppose the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act. With the stroke of one reckless pen, you hobbled off to war with the Labor Movement, Academics, Civil Libertarians, the Food Justice Movement, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and all our statewide elected leaders.
Did you not understand the historical racial complexities of the bill? Did you not conduct research on the history of labor injustice in agriculture? Are you naïve enough to believe that locking arms with corporate farmers will somehow woo the praise of the Farm Bureau?
The historians among you should have understood these issues. Maybe they did, and they simply didn’t care. Maybe they were so focused on making the DRC and themselves appear relevant at any cost that they ignored history and abandoned the basic decency that somehow holds our dysfunctional Democratic family together. Why none of you spoke up in defense of New York’s most disadvantaged workers, especially the union leaders among you, is also beyond our comprehension. You are either on the side of corporate farms or you are on the side of impoverished workers; there is no in between.
If you still don’t understand why so many people are pissed off at you, please allow us to explain. First, you took an alarmingly uneducated position in the name of all rural Democrats without solicitation or even recording a formal vote. Once word of this befuddlement began to leak, you sent an email to the county committee chairs and excluded everyone else. Second, you either didn’t understand history or you simply ignored it as you abandoned the most basic and core principles of the Democratic Party. This is the part that is so thoroughly maddening, and frankly, you should have known better.
As a refresher, in the early 1930’s, when President Franklin Roosevelt advanced New Deal reforms that expanded workers’ rights, Southern segregationists conditioned their support on the exclusion of farm workers and domestic workers, who at that time, were primarily black. To gain the Southern vote, Roosevelt agreed to exempt these workers from federal labor protections and the effect largely remains intact today at both the Federal and most state levels.
As explained by Historian Ira Katznelson, southern legislators were intensely concerned with preserving a status for black agricultural labor that often came close to resembling nineteenth-century conditions under slavery. The National labor Relations Act of 1935, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and the New York State Labor Relations Act of 1937, were all borne from the same centuries-old air of white supremacy. New York remedied this sorry legacy for domestic workers in 2010 with the enactment of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. As the NYCLU has written, New York farmworkers continued to labor in the long shadow of Jim Crow until now.
The denial of labor rights for farmworkers cannot be justified as a matter of farm industry economics. Farming in New York is a multi-billion-dollar industry, making the state a national leader in production and profit. New York is the second largest producer of apples, cabbage, snap beans and maple syrup and is now the third largest dairy and grape producer in the nation. New York agribusiness remains in a very aggressive growth phase, with state exports having tripled from $500 million to $1.5 Billion between 2000 and 2016. Increases in farmworker wages during the same period were minimal at best.
According to the latest Census of Agriculture, two-thirds of New York farms don’t even employ outside labor and would not be affected by the bill. Nearly 78 percent of farmworkers labor on farms with five or more workers, with 60 percent on farms listing 10 or more workers. Among dairy farmworkers, approximately 80 percent of them work on multi-million-dollar farms with more than 500 cows.
Despite corporate welfare and record-breaking profits, the New York Farm Bureau and other conservative lobbyists continue to promote the fallacy that agriculture in New York is only a short wagon ride away from financial chaos. That wheel has been greased every time legislation has been introduced that would regulate corporate farms and recognize the rights of farmworkers. According to leading experts in New York farm economics, this happened in the late 1980’s when new pesticide notification laws were proposed, in the late 1990’s when sanitation legislation was introduced, in the 2000’s during the fight to raise the minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage and again recently during the debate over raising the state’s minimum wage.
Nearly one-third of farm workers in the Hudson Valley have reported working at least 60 hours per week without any overtime pay. Ninety percent of them had total incomes that were lower than the US Federal Poverty Guidelines for a family of three. This is happening in New York State. RIGHT NOW.
In addition to poor wages, long hours and no overtime pay, farm work in New York is exceedingly dangerous. As of 2011, the rate of injuries related to agricultural work was at least forty percent higher than the average rate for all workers and farmworkers are seven times more likely than other workers to die from work-related injuries. Sixty-nine farm fatalities were reported between 2006-2015.
And that brings us back to Brother Chavez and Sister Huerta. Most exploited farmworkers in New York State and nationwide are Latinos. Many are undocumented or falsely documented immigrants. They often take the work because no one else will and the H2-A system encourages it. Immigration status aside, these are people. They need to be treated like people. If $11.10 an hour and overtime pay is not a living wage for a single white father slinging hamburgers in the Town of Bethel, then it’s not a living wage for a single Latina mother picking grapes in Geneva.
In 1965, Filipino and Mexican farmworkers walked out of their vineyards in California to protest these conditions. They gained national notoriety through grape boycotts aimed at educating suburbanites about the injustice of farmworker wages and they organized prospective voters in their communities to make Bobby Kennedy their President because he listened when no one else would.
While they made strides in advancing state legislation that better protected their Brothers and Sisters, they had limited longstanding national success because the Democratic Party abandoned them after bullets rung out in in that Los Angeles hotel. Ironically, fifty-five years later, in 2019, a small group of rogue rural Democrats primarily from Western New York, an area well known for its vineyards, attempted to kill their future once again.
To deny fundamental worker’s rights to farm laborers is inconsistent with the values of the Democratic Party and with the values of New York. The Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act will become law despite your misguided efforts. You sent an implicit message that exploiting farmworkers is permissible. You didn’t even attempt to partner with your Brothers and Sisters of Labor and we won’t soon forget it.
Sincerely,
Mark Bellardini
Chair
St. Lawrence County Democratic Committee
Ron McDougall
President
Jefferson, Lewis and St. Lawrence Counties
Central Trades and Labor Council
STATEMENT OF AFL-CIO PRESIDENT MARIO CILENTO ON VICTORY FOR FARMWORKERS
6/19/2019
Today is the culmination of a decades-long fight centered upon one simple premise: that farmworkers deserve fairness, equality and justice.
Today, justice was finally served.
We will never forget all of the farmworkers who have come forward through the years, many times at great risk to their livelihoods. They had the courage of their convictions to speak up for themselves and for others, to fight for what they believe in.
They have been a true inspiration for all New Yorkers throughout this fight. And it is their bravery and perseverance that we celebrate today and that has led us to this historic moment.
Twenty years ago, the New York State AFL-CIO joined elected officials and advocates in visiting New York farms. We witnessed the deplorable working and living conditions endured by one class of working people, farmworkers. The Labor Movement has been fighting for them ever since.
Farmworkers are finally getting basic labor rights including the right to organize a union, a mandatory day of rest, and the right to overtime pay. Organizing rights include absolute employer neutrality and binding interest arbitration.
Tens of thousands of lives will improve immediately and future generations of farmworkers will also benefit for years to come.
We thank the sponsors Assemblywoman Nolan and Senator Ramos, Speaker Heastie and Leader Stewart-Cousins for finally making farmworker justice a reality.
Today, justice was finally served.
We will never forget all of the farmworkers who have come forward through the years, many times at great risk to their livelihoods. They had the courage of their convictions to speak up for themselves and for others, to fight for what they believe in.
They have been a true inspiration for all New Yorkers throughout this fight. And it is their bravery and perseverance that we celebrate today and that has led us to this historic moment.
Twenty years ago, the New York State AFL-CIO joined elected officials and advocates in visiting New York farms. We witnessed the deplorable working and living conditions endured by one class of working people, farmworkers. The Labor Movement has been fighting for them ever since.
Farmworkers are finally getting basic labor rights including the right to organize a union, a mandatory day of rest, and the right to overtime pay. Organizing rights include absolute employer neutrality and binding interest arbitration.
Tens of thousands of lives will improve immediately and future generations of farmworkers will also benefit for years to come.
We thank the sponsors Assemblywoman Nolan and Senator Ramos, Speaker Heastie and Leader Stewart-Cousins for finally making farmworker justice a reality.
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NEW LEGISLATORS SWORN IN
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