Oxfam America Blog

Many US farmworkers—like these North Carolina tobacco pickers—face low pay and hazardous working conditions, but a new bill called AgJOBS could help improve their situation. Photo: Liliana Rodriguez / Oxfam America

Sarah Zipkin is the project officer for Oxfam’s decent work program in the US. This is the second of two guest posts by Sarah about food, farms, and what it means to support workers’ rights in 2009.

Less than a week after I marched for workers in North Carolina–complete with tobacco leaf sign around my neck–I was back in Boston representing Oxfam at a pre-release screening of Food, Inc, a film opening soon that takes a disturbing look at the mechanized food industry in this country, from field to fork.

As I watched it, I was glad I’d eaten a veggie pizza beforehand, since I learned that a lot of our meat comes from mechanized slaughterhouses–often the site of inhumane conditions and questionable practices. I am already obsessed with looking over labels in the grocery store, but since seeing this film, I’m even more fixated. Now that I’ve actually started thinking about where our food comes from, I can’t help but wonder: what dark secrets hide behind those colorful packages?

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Sarah Zipkin on a visit to a farm in Mississippi.

Sarah Zipkin is the project officer for Oxfam’s decent work program in the US. This is the first of two guest posts by Sarah about food, farms, and what it means to support workers’ rights in 2009.

Last week, as I walked through the doors of the RJ Reynolds tobacco company headquarters in Winston-Salem, NC, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was having a flashback to another time. My parents told me about the grape boycott led by Cesar Chavez in the 1960s, and I read about farmworker rights in the Grapes of Wrath in high school–yet here I was in 2009, walking in a rally with a painted tobacco leaf hanging around my neck that said “Justice Now for Farmworkers!”

Today, a farmworker in this country makes around $13,000 a year and has a life expectancy of 49 years. (Yes, you read that right.) Hazardous working conditions, long hours, and a lack of health services take a toll on these workers, especially tobacco pickers–some even get physically ill. And this has been the reality for over 30 years.

That’s why 40 of us–students, people of faith, worker rights advocates, union leaders, and grandmothers–turned out on that balmy Wednesday morning in Winston-Salem. We were ready to stand up for farmworker rights at RJ Reynolds’ annual shareholders meeting, and to bring the voice of farmworkers to the company’s Board of Directors and CEO Susan Ivey.

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