Farmworkers Are Organizing to Resist Trump’s Attacks on Immigrant Workers

The new Trump regime threatens millions of immigrant workers in the U.S., including farmworkers, many of whom are undocumented. Beyond mass deportations and workplace raids, there’s the prospect of regulatory rollbacks around heat and pesticide protections and the ramping up of hyper-exploitative guestworker programs like the H2A program.

At the same time, farmworkers in the U.S. have a proud and defiant organizing tradition, and the entire U.S. food system rests on their labor. Truthout spoke to representatives from three farmworker organizations across the country to get their initial thoughts on the election, the challenges ahead, how they plan to defend their members and communities, and how they are staying hopeful and determined going forward.

Rossy Alfaro is a former dairy worker in Vermont and organizer with Migrant Justice, which organizes dairy farmworkers in Vermont and oversees the worker-driven Milk with Dignity campaign. Jeannie Economos is the longtime pesticide safety and environmental health project coordinator for the Farmworker Association of Florida, which has organized farmworkers for over four decades. Edgar Franks is the political director of Familias Unidas por la Justicia in Washington State, an independent union of primarily Indigenous Mexican farmworkers that formed a decade ago. All three organizations are members of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, a coalition of worker-based organizations in the U.S. and Canada organizing to improve wages and working conditions for workers along the food chain.

Transcript of Interview with Alvaro can be found within the article