As profoundly trying as this year has been, there remains the opportunity for us — as a community, from the very local level to the national — to emerge stronger from these months of immeasurable tragedy and loss. With a cruel indifference, the pandemic has exposed, for all who would see, the vast systems of racial and economic injustice built into the very structure of our world today. What we do now with that insight is up to us.
One of the unmistakable lessons of the past several months is the fact that we, all too often, treat our "essential" workers as expendable people.
Nowhere is that more true than in the food industry, where the workers at the base of the industry, from meatpackers to farmworkers, endure crowded, unsafe working and living conditions, extreme, generational poverty, and little or no access to essential health care. That is why, after nearly eight months of soaring infection rates and countless unnecessary deaths among food workers, we must demand that the multi-billion dollar corporations at the top of the food industry use their purchasing power to enforce compliance with verifiable worker health and safety standards, both during the ongoing pandemic and beyond. And the Fair Food Program offers the opportunity for companies that buy millions of pounds of produce every year, companies like Wendy’s, to do just that, with the implementation of critical new, mandatory, enforceable standards designed to prevent and mitigate COVID-19 outbreaks on participating farms.
And so, energized as never before by this unprecedented moment of opportunity and solidarity, the next generation of leaders on the student and youth front of the Campaign for Fair Food are escalating their efforts to bring Wendy’s into the Fair Food Program. If you are interested in bringing that energy and hope for real, enforceable social change for essential food workers to your campus or community, apply today for the 2020 Encuentro.
