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Gerardo Reyes Chavez in USA Today: “The thermometer doesn’t lie. It’s just common sense that we need more protections, not fewer, to keep our state’s essential outdoor workers safe from the dangers of our warming planet.”
“While the Fair Food Program is great for workers, it’s good for employers and retail brands, too. That’s because it has tackled longstanding human rights violations such as forced labor, child labor, physical violence and sexual assault.”
On this Labor Day, USA Today published an opinion piece from Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a farmworker and longtime leader with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. In his editorial, Chavez taps his personal experience harvesting watermelons — maybe the heaviest job in the fields, done during the highest heat of summer — to share a near tragedy involving a fellow crew members and to outline the transformative power of the Fair Food Program, highlighting the urgent need for farmworkers across the country to be protected by its industry-leading standards.
We hope that while celebrating Labor Day, you take a moment to read Chavez’ timely piece. Below you can find an excerpt of it, and you can also check out this piece in full on the CIW's site, or on USA Today’s site by clicking here. [[link removed]]
Enjoy! And stay tuned for more coverage on the impact the FFP is making around the country!
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My friend nearly died of dehydration. Farmworkers like us need better protections.
As temperatures rise, so do risks for outdoor workers. Fair Food Program is trying to help both manual laborers and businesses.
Ten summers ago, just outside the small north Florida town of Marianna about an hour from Tallahassee, I watched, helpless, as a man I call my brother nearly died from the brutal, unforgiving heat of the watermelon harvest [[link removed]] .
Our crew was moving through the treeless field together, throwing melons rhythmically from the rows to the truck, joking as we often would to distract ourselves from the hot, heavy work. Suddenly, my friend lost consciousness and fell hard to the ground. We quickly carried him to the only shade we could find and wet the shirts off our backs with thermos water to keep him cool until the ambulance arrived. For what felt like an eternity, my friend’s life hung in the balance.
He eventually came to, and after a few hours at the hospital and a much-needed IV, he was back to work throwing melons with the rest of the crew the next day. But the shock and fear we all felt that day was a wake-up call, reminding us that the symptoms we often joked about – crippling cramps, dizziness, disorientation and an unquenchable thirst – were serious signs of chronic dehydration [[link removed]] and could have fatal consequences.
And the statistics bear that out: According to the National Institutes of Health, farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die [[link removed]] of heat-related issues than workers in other industries.
Today, a decade later, I work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers [[link removed]] , a human rights organization based in the farmworker community of Immokalee, Florida. We educate workers about their rights under the CIW’s groundbreaking Fair Food Program, including protections that The Washington Post recently called “ America’s strongest workplace heat rules [[link removed]] .”
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Coalition of Immokalee Workers
110 S 2nd St
Immokalee, FL 34142
United States
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