THE HUMAN COST OF A STRAWBERRY WAGE
By David Bacon
Civil Eats, 4/24/24
https://civileats.com/2024/04/24/strawberry-farmworkers-fight-for-a-living-wage/
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-human-cost-of-strawberry-wage.html

Driving north on California’s Highway 101 through the central coast, a traveler approaches the Santa Ynez Valley through miles of grapevines climbing gently rolling hills.  Here humans have mastered nature, the landscape seems to say – a bucolic vision of agriculture with hardly a worker in sight.  Perhaps a lone irrigator adjusts drip pipes or sprinklers.  Only during a few short weeks in the fall can one see the harvest crews filling gondolas behind the tractors.  Even then, you’d have to be driving at night, when most grape picking now takes place under floodlights that illuminate the rows behind the machines.

As 101 winds out of the hills, the crop beside the highway suddenly changes.  Here endless rows of strawberries fill the valley’s flat plane. Dirt access roads bisect enormous fields, and beside them dozens of cars sit parked in the dust.  Most are older vans and sedans.  Inside this vast expanse dozens of workers move down the rows.  

From the highway, many fields are hidden by tall plastic screens.  Growers claim they keep animals out, but they are really a legacy of the farmworker strikes of the 1970s.  Then growers sought to keep workers inside, away from strikers in the roadway calling out to them, urging them to stop picking and leave.  The abusive and dangerous conditions of strawberry workers today, and the eruptions of their protests over them, make the screens more than just a symbol of past conflict.  

Picking strawberries is one of the most brutal jobs in agriculture.  A worker picking wine grapes in the hills can labor standing up.  But the men and women in the strawberry rows have to bend double to reach the berries.  As strawberries ripen, they hang over the side of raised beds about a foot high, covered in plastic.  In a ditch-like row between them, a worker pushes a wire cart on tiny wheels.  Each holds a cardboard flat with 8 plastic clamshell containers – the ones you see on supermarket shelves.

The pain of this labor is a constant.  Many workers will say you just have to work through the first week, when your back hurts so much you can’t sleep, until your body adjusts and the pain somehow gets less.  At the start of the season in March, rain fills the rows with water and the cart must be dragged through the mud.  When summer comes the field turns into an oven by midday.

Through it all, workers have to pick as fast as possible.  «At the beginning of the season there aren’t many berries yet,» Matilde told me.  She’d been picking for three weeks, her fifth year in the strawberries.  «The mud makes heavy work even heavier.  It’s hard to pick even 5 boxes an hour, but if I can’t make that, or if I pick any green berries, it gets called to my attention.  The foreman tells us we’re not trying hard enough, that they don’t have time to teach us, and if we can’t make it we won’t keep working.  Some don’t come back the next day, and some are even fired there in the field.»  

Mathilde didn’t want to use her last name because being identified might bring retaliation from her boss, a fear shared by another worker, Juana.  «Not many people can do this job,» Juana told me in an interview.  She came to Santa Maria from Santiago Tilantongo in Oaxaca and speaks Mixtec (one of the many indigenous languages in southern Mexico), in addition to Spanish, like many strawberry pickers living in the Santa Ynez Valley.  She’s been a strawberry worker for 15 years.  «I have permanent pain in my lower back,» she said, «and when it rains it gets very intense.  Still, I get up every morning at 4, make lunch for my family, and go to work.  It’s a sacrifice, but it’s the only job I can get.»

Low Wages, High Cost of Living

On April 1 the Alianza Campesina de la Costa Central (Farmworker Alliance of the Central Coast) organized an event timed to gain public notice at the beginning of the strawberry season.  The objective was to pressure growers to raise the wages.  The Alianza issued a powerful 44-page report, Harvesting Dignity, The Case for a Living Wage for Farmworkers, that documents in shocking statistics what Mathilda and Juana know from personal experience.  

Those statistics reveal that the mean hourly wage for farmworkers in Santa Barbara County was $17.42 last year, which would produce a yearly income of $36,244 for a strawberry picker working fulltime, all twelve months.  But this calculation includes the higher wages of foremen and management employees.  Juana, after 15 years, made $16, the state minimum wage, and Mathilde after five years made the same.  

In reality, their annual income was much lower because even working the entire season, they would get no more than eight months of work, and often less.  At the beginning of the season there are not enough berries for 8 hours each day, so Mathilda only got 6 hours, or 36 hours in a week working on Saturday too.  Juana’s week in late March was 15-20 hours.  

At the height of the season wages go up because growers begin to pay a piece rate, which last year was usually $2.20 for each flat of eight clamshell boxes.  To make the equivalent of the minimum wage, a worker would have to pick over 7 flats an hour, and earning more than minimum wage on the piece rate means working like a demon, ignoring the physical cost.  At the beginning of the season, «champion pickers can do 8 or 9 an hour,» Mathilde explains.  «but not everyone can.  6 or 7 is normal.»    

Fulltime work at minimum wage for eight months would produce $21,760.  Out of her strawberry wages Juana and her husband, who works in the field with her, are paying $2000 a month rent, or $24,000 a year.  Three of her children are grown, and the other three are still at home.  «We have to save to pay the rent during the winter when there’s no work.  If we don’t, we don’t have a place to live,» she explains.  «During those five months there are always bills we can’t pay, like water.  By March there’s no money at all, and we have to get loans to survive.»  The loans come from «friends» who charge 10% interest.  «Plus, I have to send money to my mama and papa in Mexico.  There are many people depending on me.»

Mathilde and her husband and their two children share a bedroom in a two-bedroom house.  Another family of three lives in the other, and together they pay $2,200 in rent.  «Fortunately, my husband works construction, and gets $20 an hour,» she says, «but the same months when there are no strawberries the rain cuts his hours too.  It would be much harder if we didn’t have his work, and we try to save and save, and look for work in the winter, but often there’s just enough money for food.  We don’t eat beef or fish, just economical foods like pasta, rice and beans.  And even with that sometimes we have to get a loan too.»

According to Harvesting Justice, the median rent in Santa Barbara County is $2,999 per month.  Using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculation formula, the report estimates the annual food cost for a family with two children at $12,880, and the total income required for all basic expenses at $99,278. As a result, a UC Merced/California Department of Public Health survey found that a quarter of all farmworkers sleep in a room with three or more people.  

This poverty affects all farmworkers in the state, in all aspects of life.  Less than a quarter of undocumented field laborers have health insurance, and the Harvesting Dignity report estimates that people without immigration documents make up 80 percent of those living in Santa Maria.  Because reporting bad conditions, and even more so protesting them, is much riskier for undocumented workers, having no papers affects survival at work as well.  «In Santa Barbara County in 2023 there were two farmworker deaths,» it noted, «both related to poor supervision and training. In one instance, farmworkers reported they were told to continue working in a Cuyama carrot field alongside the body of their fallen coworker.»

Workers Calling for Change: The Wish Farms Strike

Santa Maria strawberry workers have mounted many challenges to this low wage system.  In 1997 a Mixteco worker group organized a strike that stopped the harvest on all the valley’s ranches, which lasted three days.  More recently workers at Rancho Laguna Farms protested the owner’s failure to follow CDC guidelines during the pandemic, and won a 20¢ per box raise by stopping work.  In 2021 forty pickers at Hill Top Produce used the same tactic to raise the per-box piece rate from $1.80 to $2.10, which was followed by similar action by 150 pickers at West Coast Berry Farms.  At the beginning of the next season in 2022 work stopped at J&G Berry Farms in another wage protest.

Last year, workers carried out a dramatic and well-organized strike at Wish Farms, a large berry grower with fields in Santa Maria and Lompoc, and headquarters in Florida.  At the height of the season, to increase production the company promised a wage of $6/hour plus $2.50 per box, a rate they’d paid the previous year.  When workers saw their checks, however, the piece rate bonus was a dollar less.  They met with Fernando Martinez, an organizer with the Mixteco Indigenous Community Organizing Project (MICOP), which belongs to the Alianza Campesina.  Martinez and MICOP organizers had helped workers during the earlier work stoppages, and urged the Wish Farms strikers to go out to the fields to call other workers to join.  «We helped them form a committee,» Martinez says, «and in a meeting at the edge of the field they voted to form a permanent organization, Freseros por la Justicia [Strawberry Workers for Justice].

Workers say they discovered, however, that after they walked out the company brought a crew of workers with H-2A guestworker visas into one of the fields to replace them.  The H-2A program allows growers to recruit workers in Mexico and other countries, and bring them to work for less than a year, after which they have to return home.  Workers are almost all young men.  Those who can’t work fast enough, or who protest conditions, can be fired at any time and sent back.  Federal regulations establish a wage for them, which last year in California was $18.65 per hour.

Replacing domestic workers with H-2A workers during a labor dispute is a violation of Federal regulations.  Wish Farms did not respond to requests for comment about the strike.

Concepcion Chavez, one of the strikers, told me in an interview that «when we would work by the hour, the company was paying them [the H-2A workers] $18.65 [per hour], and us $16.25.  Many of the workers who live here felt the company really wanted us to leave.  We are always afraid they’ll replace us, because they give a preference to the contratados [H-2A workers].  That’s what the supervisors say, that they’ll replace us and send in the contratados.»

After two days strikers reached an agreement with Wish Farms and went back to work.  In September, however, as the work slowed for the winter, Chavez asked if she would be hired again the following season.  «In the office they told me they had no job because the company was already filled up,» she recalled.  «But when I went back to my foreman, he said the company had told him not to give me a job.  That happened to other workers who were in the strike too.»

Another Roadblock to Change: Union Busting

According to Martinez, «There were a lot of strikes until last year, mostly to challenge low wages.  But after the strikes, workers usually don’t want to continue organizing because the company brings in anti-union consultants.  Wish Farms brought in Raul Calvo, who has been in other farms also.  We’ve heard from workers that growers tell them not to participate in meetings with community organizations like us. They’re trying to intimidate people, because they’re afraid workers will organize.

Calvo has along history as an anti-union consultant.  At the Apio/Curation Foods processing facility in Guadalupe, a few miles from Santa Maria, Calvo was paid over $2 million over eight years to convince workers not to organize with the United Food and Commercial Workers.  After the union was defeated in 2015, Curation Foods was bought by ag giant Taylor Farms for $73 million.

Following huge wildfires in 2017, Calvo appeared in Sonoma County in 2022 to oppose proposals for worker protections.  A coalition of labor and community groups, North Bay Jobs with Justice, proposed hazard pay, disaster insurance, community monitoring and safety training in indigenous languages like Mixteco, for farmworkers laboring in smoke and other dangerous conditions.  Calvo organized a committee of pro-grower workers, who testified at hearings in opposition.  An ordinance including some of the protections was finally passed by the county Board of Supervisors later that year.  Most recently, Calvo was hired by the Wonderful Company to organize another anti-union committee to oppose nursery workers in Wasco, CA, who are trying to join the United Farm Workers.

Opposition to unions and worker organizing activity is one reason why strawberry wages remain close to the legal minimum, according to the Harvesting Justice report.  One of its authors, Erica Diaz Cervantes, feels strongly that the wage system is unjust.  «During the pandemic, these workers provided our food, even though as consumers we can be oblivious of that fact.  So when the workers have initiated these strikes, it has put more attention on their situation.»  Diaz Cervantes is the Senior Policy Advocate for the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), which formed the Alianza with MICOP.

Nevertheless, the strikes haven’t resulted in permanent worker organizations.  «There are a lot of union busters who discourage workers,» she says.  «They win small improvements and wins, but always in the piece rate, never the basic hourly wage.  And the actions don’t go on longer because workers can’t afford to.»

Jamshid Damooei, professor and director of the economics program at California Lutheran University, and executive director of the Center for Economics of Social Issues, was a principal advisor for the report.  «Profit seeking by growers is greatly responsible for the low wages,» he told me.  «If they can depress wages, the profit is greater.  Unionization can help workers because the function of a union is to give them the ability to negotiate.»

The Impact of H-2A Workers

But workers’ bargaining leverage is undermined by their immigration status, he believes.  «Eighty percent of farmworkers in Santa Maria are undocumented, and without them there is no agriculture.  Yet the median wage, which in 2019 was $26,000 a year for farmworkers born in the U.S, was only $13,000 – half that – for the undocumented.»

While undocumented labor is cheap, nevertheless strawberry growers in Santa Maria increasingly use the H-2A program to bring workers under labor contracts from Mexico and Central America.  About 2 million workers labor in U.S. fields. Last year, the Department of Labor gave growers permission to bring 371,619 H-2A workers – or about a sixth of the entire U.S. farm labor workforce – a fourfold increase from 98,813 in 2012.

Growers provide food and housing for the workers, although there is a long record of complaints over crowding, substandard conditions, and enforce isolation from the surrounding community.  Because employment is limited to less than a year, workers must apply to recruiters to return each year.   

Growers say they face a labor shortage making this necessary.  According to Western Growers President & CEO Tom Nassif, «Farmers in all sectors of U.S. agriculture, especially in the labor-intensive fruit and vegetable industries, are experiencing chronic labor shortages, which have been exacerbated by recent interior immigration enforcement and tighter border security policies.

That is not the case, at least in Santa Maria, Diaz Cervantes responds.  She says the 2022 census reported 12,000 workers in the Santa Ynez Valley.  Martinez believes the true number is double that, and that 60% are Mixtecos.  «I do not think there’s a shortage of farmworkers here,» Diaz charges. «We know it’s a lot more because many undocumented people are afraid to be counted.  There are always people ready to work and put in more hours.  It’s just a way to justify increasing the H-2A program.  Overall there are a lot of local workers in the county.»

What makes the H-2A program attractive to growers, Damooei says, is that «workers do not have much ability to negotiate their labor contracts.  Their living environment and mobility are restricted, and they face repression if they protest.  That has an impact on workers living here.»

One recent case highlights the vulnerability of H-2A workers.  Last September at Sierra del Tigre Farms in Santa Maria, more than 100 workers were terminated before their work contracts had ended and told to go back to Mexico. The company then refused to pay them the legally required wages they would have earned. The company’s alter ego, Savino Farms, had already been fined for the same violation four years earlier,.

One worker, Felipe Ramos, was owed more than $2,600. «It was very hard,» he remembers. «I have a wife and baby girl, and they survive because I send money home every week. Everyone else was like that too. The company had problems finding buyers, and too many workers.»  In March Sierra del Tigre Farms declared bankruptcy, still owing workers their wages.  Last year Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, Inc., another labor contractor, was forced by the Department of Labor to pay $1 million in penalties and back wages to H-2A workers it had cheated in a similar case

According to Rick Mines, a statistician who designed the original National Agricultural Workers Survey for the U.S. Department of Labor, «There are about 2 million farmworkers in the U.S., mostly immigrant men and women who live as families with U.S- born children.  They are being displaced by a cheaper, more docile labor force of single male H-2A workers.  The H-2A program should be phased out and replaced with a program of legal entry for immigrants who can bring their families and eventually become equal American citizens.   We should not become a democracy that is half slave and half free.»

A New Way Forward

As the strawberry season unfolds in Santa Maria, warmer weather will dry out the mud.  The berries will ripen faster and become more numerous.  It will be the time growers feel the most pressure to get them from the fields to supermarket shelves.  It will also be the time Juana and Mathilde depend on each year to pay past bills and hopefully save for future ones.  They will need the work.  How the Alianza Campesina uses this moment could have a big impact on their wages and lives.

«Perhaps there are different ways to change things,» Martinez speculates.  «We’ve thought about a local ordinance like ones we’ve seen for other kinds of workers.  A union could also raise pay and bring benefits and holidays.»

MICOP and CAUSA are holding house meetings with workers, and a general meeting every two weeks. «Right now we’re trying to popularize the idea of a sueldo digno [dignified wage] and explain the justice of this demand.  The idea is to increase workers’ knowledge.  And since so many of us are Mixtecos, we’re getting workers to reach out to their workmates from the same home communities in Oaxaca.» 

Diaz adds that workers can see the labor activity happening elsewhere in the country.  «Our report is adding to what workers are already doing.  Whatever they do we’re right behind them.»

Mathilde has already made up her mind.  «It’s necessary to pressure the ranchers so they value our work,» she says.  «Without us they have nothing.  We do all the work, so why should we get $2 or $2.20 per box when $3 or $3.50 is what’s fair.  People have to unite, and we need big demonstrations.  I am willing to help organize this, because it will make life a lot better.  I hope it will happen soon.»

BROOKE ANDERSON PODCAST #8

That’s How the Light Gets In

One of my most significant mentors and photographic collaborators, my dear friend and comrade David Bacon, joins me in conversations this week.

LISTEN: https://linktr.ee/thatshowthelightgetsinpodcast (or anywhere you get your podcasts)

David came up as a union organizer with the United Farm Workers and United Electrical Workers, then spent decades as a photographer, photojournalist, labor reporter, and radio host covering labor, migration, and global economy. In this week’s episode, we talk David’s journey from organizer to photojournalist, his early influences, the role of movement photographers, the importance of media workers taking collective action to support their labor rights, journalists speaking out to support a ceasefire in Gaza, and advice for new photographers developing their photographic practice.

MAS QUE UN MURO
Las comunidades fronterizas y sus movimientos de justica social
Fotografias de David Bacon

Fototeca de Zacatecas Pedro Valtierra
Fernando Millapando 406, Centro Historico, Zacatecas
Marzo – Mayo, 2024

Cinco Entrivistas sobre esta exposicion, en el Museo Nacional de las Culturas del Mundo, CDMX:

Part 1:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eix0HEStpc

Part 2:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO4IIBPs06U

Part 3:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHtY-fgtsjs

Part 4:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm_MNrEX2Mw

Part 5:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpwSuBbgAQs

La imagen de una cruz en el cementerio de Holtville, en California, Estados Unidos, con la leyenda “No olvidados”, con la que activistas religiosos reconocen a los migrantes muertos sin identidad, recibe al público de la exposición Más que un muro, de David Bacon.

Durante la inauguración, la directora del MNCM, Alejandra Gómez Colorado, manifestó que, desde hace años, este recinto complementa su discurso histórico y etnográfico con reflexiones que vienen desde la fotografía y el arte contemporáneo. Una línea acorde con el trabajo de Bacon, “una expresion dura y cruda de la vida que transcurre de uno y otro lado de la frontera México-Estados Unidos”.

Esta obra fotográfica dijo por su parte la jefa de la Unidad de Política Migratoria, Registro e Identidad de Personas, de la Segob, Rocío González Higuera, permiten acercarse a las historias, retos, éxitos y fracasos de cada persona que migra, desde dos puntos:

“El primero, la protección de la memoria contra el paso del tiempo, es decir, colocar la lente y los sentimiento sobre objetos y personas que nos permiten evocar que la frontera es un cúmulo de historias en desarrollo; el segundo, es la expresión de posturas frente a los procesos de movilidad, particularmente la migración irregular”.

Bacon, fotógrafo, escritor y activista social, comenzó a documentar las vidas y los movimientos sociales de migrantes, trabajadores agrícolas y comunidades afectadas por la globalización, hace casi cuatro décadas.  El fotógrafo detalló que su aproximación a estas realidades inició en 1986, siendo trabajador de una fábrica y sindicalista con United Farm Workers. A lo largo de este tiempo, indicó, ha podido registrar cómo la política migratoria implementada por su país devino en una “política de muerte”, al orillar a quienes buscan el sueño americano a transitar por sitios peligrosos como el desierto de Sonora-Arizona.

En la línea fronteriza que atraviesa el desierto cual se ubican con exactitud 4,000 etiquetas forenses de restos recuperados de personas identificadas, y casi 2,000 de personas sin identificar. El visitante debe llenar estas fichas, acto que conmemora por unos instantes esas vidas perdidas No obstante, anotó David Bacon, la frontera es también tierra de vivos: “Los otrora pequeños pueblos de Ciudad Juárez y Tijuana son ciudades de millones. La frontera es el escenario de algunas de las luchas sociales más agudas de México. Los trabajadores de las fábricas organizan sindicatos independientes, mientras que los agrícolas se declaran en huelga en los campos de Baja California”.

En ese sentido, finalizó, las cerca de 30 fotografías que integran Más que un muro, “nos permiten ver a la gente, sus luchas por los derechos y la igualdad, combatiendo la histeria antiinmigrante y antimexicana”.

WORKING COACHELLA
Photographs by David Bacon

Civil Rights Institute of Inland Southern California
3933 Mission Inn Avenue, Suite 103
Riverside, CA 92501

INTERVIEW WITH DAVID BACON AT THE WORKING COACHELLA EXHIBITION
Click here:  https://www.instagram.com/p/C2yAtHDPc5Q/

David Bacon’s Working Coachella – Labor Heritage Power Hour with Chris Garlock
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/labor-heritage/david-bacons-working-coachella-FGTeo-nqcuX/

---

Pacific Media Workers Guild, CWA Local 39521, adopted a resolution supporting the Labor Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza:https://mediaworkers.org/guild-joins-calls-for-immediate-ceasefire-in-gaza/

WHEN WE SPOKE OUT AGAINST WAR
Unearthing the history of protest against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Photographs © by David Bacon
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/52759801492/in/album-72177720306862427/

BOOKS – LIBROS

MORE THAN A WALL / MAS QUE UN MURO

More Than a Wall / Mas que Un Muro explores the many aspects of the border region through photographs taken by David Bacon over a period of 30 years. These photographs trace the changes in the border wall itself, and the social movements in border communities, factories and fields. This bilingual book provides a reality check, to allow us to see the border region as its people, with their own history of movements for rights and equality, and develop an alternative vision in which the border can be a region where people can live and work in solidarity with each other. – Gaspar Rivera-Salgado

David Bacon has given us, through his beautiful portraits, the plight of the American migrant worker, and the fierce spirit of those who provide and bring to us comfort and sustenance. — Lila Downs

Published by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte with support from the UCLA Institute for Labor Research and Education and the Center for Mexican Studies, the Werner Kohlstamm Family Fund, and the Green Library at Stanford University

Price:  $35 plus postage and handling
To order, click here:  
https://david-bacon-photography.square.site/product/more-than-a-wall-mas-que-un-muro/1?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false

«The «border» is just a line. It’s the people who matter.» – JoAnn Intili, director, The Werner-Kohnstamm Family Fund

IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH / EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE

Photographs and text by David Bacon
University of California Press / Colegio de la Frontera Norte
302 photographs, 450pp, 9”x9”
paperback, $34.95 (in the U.S.)
order the book on the UC Press website:
ucpress.edu/9780520296077
use source code  16M4197  at checkout, receive a 30% discount

En Mexico se puede pedir el libro en el sitio de COLEF:
https://www.colef.mx

Los Angeles Times reviews In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte – click here

---

WORK AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: The David Bacon Archive exhibition at Stanford Libraries https://exhibits.stanford.edu/bacon/browse Exhibited throughout the pandemic in the Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford. The online exhibition (https://exhibits.stanford.edu/bacon), which includes additional content not included in the physical show, is accessible to everyone, and is part of an accessible digital spotlight collection that includes significant images from this body of work. For a catalog: (https://web.stanford.edu/dept/spec_coll/NonVendorPubOrderform2017.pdf) Online Interviews and Presentations Red Lens Episode 6: David Bacon on US-Mexico border photography Brad Segal: On episode 6 of Red Lens, I talk with David Bacon. David Bacon is a California-based writer and documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights.  We talk about David’s new book, ‘More than a Wall / Mas que un muro’ which includes 30 years of his photography and oral histories from communities & struggles in the U.S.-Mexico border region. https://www.patreon.com/posts/71834023?fbclid=IwAR0BRhHYbrYU3BoeoAMFKU_zdHs5Xirmmt1LzQtfwf1yD8p9EYLXKhzzbDE Letters and Politics – Three Decades of Photographing The Border & Border Communities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvs6SyXsM-4 Host Mitch Jeserich interviews David Bacon, a photojournalist, author, broadcaster and former labor organizer. He has reported on immigrant and labor issues for decades. His latest book, More Than A Wall, is a collection of his photographs of the border and border communities spanning three decades. Exploitation or Dignity – What Future for Farmworkers UCLA Latin American Institute Based on a new report by the Oakland Institute, journalist and photographer David Bacon documents the systematic abuse of workers in the H-2A program and its impact on the resident farmworker communities, confronted with a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXKa2lHJXMs David Bacon on union solidarity with Iraqi oil worker unions Free City Radio – CKUT 27/10/2021 – https://soundcloud.com/freecityradio/oct-27-2021-ckut-27102021-david-bacon-on-union-solidarity-with-iraqi-oil-worker-unions   Organizing during COVID, the intrinsic value of the people who grow our food Sylvia Richardson – Latin Waves Media How community and union organizers came together to get rights for farm workers during COVID, and how surviving COVID has literally been an act of resistance. https://latinwavesmedia.com/wordpress/organizing-during-covid-the-intrinsic-value-of-the-people-who-grow-our-food/   Report Details Slavery-Like Conditions For Immigrant Guest Workers Rising Up With Sonali Kohatkar https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/report-details-slavery-conditions-immigrant-guest-workers The Right to Remain http://www.franknews.us/interviews/415/the-right-to-remain Beware of Pity http://www.franknews.us/interviews/525/beware-of-pity En Español Ruben Luengas – #EnContacto Hablamos con David Bacon de los migrantes y la situación de México frente a los Estados Unidos por ser el principal país de llegada a la frontera de ese país. https://rubenluengas.com/2021/03/video-mexico-estados-unidos-migracion-y-suenos-rotos-encontacto/ Jornaleros agrícolas en EEUU en condiciones más graves por Covid-19: David Bacon SomosMas99 con Agustin Galo Samario https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWQSvM9s1lw «Los fotógrafos tomamos partido» Entrevista por Melina Balcázar Moreno – Milenio.com Laberinto http://www.milenio.com/cultura/laberinto/david_baconm-fotografia-melina_balcazar-laberinto-milenio_0_959904035.html David Bacon comparte su mirada del trabajo agrícola de migrantes mexicanos en el Museo Archivo de la Fotografia http://www.cultura.cdmx.gob.mx/comunicacion/nota/0038-18   Online Photography Exhibitions Documentary Matters –  View from the US  Social Documentary Network Four SDN photographers explore themes of racial justice, migration, and #MeToo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWl-uENA7SQ&t=1641s   There’s More Work to be Done Housing Assistance Council and National Endowment for the Arts This exhibition documents the work and impact of the struggle for equitable and affordable housing in rural America, inspired by the work of George “Elfie” Ballis. https://www.thereismoreworktobedone.com/david-bacon   Dark Eyes A beautiful song by Lila Downs honoring essential workers, accompanied by photographs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdC2gE3SNWw A video about the Social Justice Photography of David Bacon: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14TvAj5nS08ENzWhw3Oxra4LMNKJCLF4z/view In the FIelds of the North Online Exhibit Los Altos History Museum https://www.losaltoshistory.org/exhibits/in-the-fields-of-the-north/ Virtual Tour – In the Fields of the North History Museum of Tijuana Recorrido Virtual de la Exposicion – En los campos del norte Museo de Historia de Tijuana https://www.facebook.com/542258639265202/videos/659536991515786 THE REALITY CHECK – David Bacon blog http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com Other Books by David Bacon – Otros Libros The Right to Stay Home:  How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration  (Beacon Press, 2013) http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2328 Illegal People — How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants  (Beacon Press, 2008) Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008 http://www.beacon.org/Illegal-People-P780.aspx Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801473074/communities-without-borders/#bookTabs=1 The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004) https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520244726/the-children-of-nafta En Español:   EL DERECHO A QUEDARSE EN CASA  (Critica – Planeta de Libros) http://www.planetadelibros.com.mx/el-derecho-a-quedarse-en-casa-libro-205607.html HIJOS DE LIBRE COMERCIA (El Viejo Topo) http://www.tienda.elviejotopo.com/prestashop/capitalismo/1080-hijos-del-libre-comercio-deslocalizaciones-y-precariedad-9788496356368.html For more articles and images, see  http://dbacon.igc.org and http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com and https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums

Copyright © 2024 David Bacon Photographs and Stories, All rights reserved. you’re on this list because of your interest in david bacon’s photographs and stories Our mailing address is: David Bacon Photographs and Storiesaddress on requestOakland, Ca 94601 Add us to your address book