Dolores Huerta and Librada Paz (right) in 2004. Courtesy of Librada Paz.

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 15 2012 (IPS)

A widely respected advocate for U.S. farmworker rights received a prestigious award on Capitol Hill here Wednesday, using the occasion to highlight pending state legislation that could significantly improve lives and working conditions that some have likened to modern-day slavery.

Librada Paz originally came to the United States from Oaxaca, Mexico, when she was 15 years old, planning on studying for an engineering degree. Instead, for the next decade she ended up working on fruit and vegetable farms in New York State, where she learned of the “enormous discrimination” and “inhuman conditions” that continue to mark the lives of the state’s farmworkers.

“In the fields, you do not matter – neither your security, nor your thoughts, nor your dignity,” she told those gathered at a U.S. Senate office building, where she received this year’s Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.

“While all workers suffer enormous discrimination, this is multiplied particularly for women. This is what it means when the legal system allows abuse – when justice has no meaning.”

In the United States, nearly 75 percent of farm labourers are Hispanic, more than half of whom are thought to be undocumented. While working conditions for farmworkers throughout the country remain difficult, those in New York State have long been particularly, and often cruelly, marginalised.

That’s because of state legislation, passed in 1932, that codified into law systematic discrimination against farmworkers in New York, even as other states eventually moved to extend protections to farm labour.

Now a leader with the Rural Migrant Ministry, a three-decade-old NGO focusing on farmworker rights in New York, Paz and others are currently ramping up agitation in support of state legislation that would do much to bring New York’s regulations on the issue in line with national and international standards. The bill, the Farmworker Fair Labor Practices Act (FFLPA), is scheduled to be debated early next year.

Unfinished rights battle

Currently, New York farmworkers are unable to engage in collective bargaining, while also lacking many of the labour protections that have become nearly universal in other sectors and states. Farm labourers do not receive overtime pay and often work for little over three dollars an hour, with child labour reportedly rampant.

According to Kerry Kennedy, Robert Kennedy’s daughter, many farmworkers in the state are forced to work 95-hour workweeks, often around the clock; live in miniscule, overcrowded group housing; and go years without receiving time off. On Wednesday, she reported that of two dozen women farmworkers with whom she spoke recently, each reported having suffered sexual assaults from employers.

If passed, the FFLPA would make it easier for women to pursue such charges against their employers. In addition, the bill would ensure that New York farmworkers receive the same minimum labour guarantees enjoyed by other workers in the state, enforcing a minimum wage, worktime caps and overtime assurances, and worker compensation and disability insurance.

“Farmworkers never received the rights most others received, and to this day they continue to be perceived as little more than chattel, thought of as ‘barely human’,” Kerry Kennedy said. “Drudgery, subjugation and humiliation are, today, what characterises the conditions for those who grow food for the people of this country.”

Kennedy says that the legal peculiarities that perpetuate the marginalisation of New York’s 60,000-odd farmworkers contravene international rights standards. She also notes that even as unemployment figures have skyrocketed in recent years in the United States, few within the mainstream have chosen to engage in readily available farmwork – because they realise that it’s next to impossible to make a living.

“Jim Crow conditions continue to live on in New York farms,” Kennedy said, referring to the systemic segregation that openly and legally marginalised African Americans for decades in large parts of the country. “This situation constitutes an unfinished battle for civil rights in this country.”

50-year anniversary

Now in its 29th year, the Robert F. Kennedy award is named after the assassinated former U.S. attorney general and brother of President John F. Kennedy, and over the decades it has recognised human rights defenders from 26 countries. In addition to his daughter, Robert Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, was in Washington on Wednesday to confer the award on Paz, the third laureate from the United States.

Farmworker rights was a central focus of Robert Kennedy’s advocacy work. The week before his 1968 assassination, Kennedy met with a hunger-striking Cesar Chavez, the California labour leader who has had the single most significant impact on Hispanic and farmworker rights in the United States.

Chavez funnelled much of his organising work through an organisation called the United Farm Workers, which he co-founded 50 years ago, in 1962, along with social activist Dolores Huerta. Librada Paz is often compared with both Chavez and Huerta, and the latter’s time is currently focused on raising support for the FFLPA, the New York legislation.

“Many people think of New York City as the intellectual soul of the United States, but the fact that farmworkers in that state still have no human rights – that’s a disgrace,” Huerta said here on Wednesday.

“This legislation is not asking for a lot, just for respect and dignity, but it is long overdue – those who feed us shouldn’t be treated like slaves. Workers in New York need to have this legislation passed to give them some level of protection, which would be a big first step.”

Huerta added that the FFLPA bill is “very close to passing, and if we all work together we can make it happen.”

New York State legislators up in Albany are likely to be seeing a lot of Librada Paz in the near future.

Librada Paz in the winter of 1990, when she worked trimming apple trees about two years after arriving in the United States. Credit: Courtesy of Librada Paz

The farmworkers’ rights activist was recently chosen as the 29th recipient of the annual RFK Human Rights Award, marking the beginning of a six-year partnership between Paz and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights to further her advocacy for just working conditions for farmworkers and the recognition of additional exploitation women face in the fields daily.

“The judges were extremely impressed with her, and excited about the possibility of making a difference with our support,” Santiago Canton, director for the Human Rights Program of the Washington D.C.-based RFK Center, told IPS.

The future partnership with Paz and her organisation, Rural Migrant Ministry (RMM), will include financial support and human resources for advocacy campaigns to get farm workers equal protection under New York State’s Labor Relations Act.

Currently, farm labour is excluded from this law – which grants other New York State workers such rights as a day of rest, sick leave, paid overtime and collective bargaining – leaving it up to farmers to decide whether or not to extend such rights.

“I’m very excited about this partnership,” Librada Paz told IPS. “RMM needs a strong partnership like this in order for us to really help out. I think it’s going to be really powerful.”

Paz migrated from Mexico to the U.S. at age 15, along with her sister, where she joined her two brothers working 14-hour days on farms in Florida, California and New York. For the next 15 years, she experienced first hand many of the conditions she today addresses in her work for RMM, a non-secterian organisation educating and advocating for farmworkers across New York state.

Having obtained a college degree and her citizenship, Paz quit the fields in 1998 and has since poured her energy into lobbying for such initiatives as the Farm Workers Fair Labor Practices Act – a bill that has won the backing of other civil society organisations, like the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU).

She’s eager to stress that “not all farmers are bad”, but that protections ought to be in place for those workers who are currently being exploited by the rotten apples in the industry.

“People are being fired because they get sick. And people get sick because they don’t get a day of rest,” she said.

Her organisation further seeks overtime pay for work “above 50 or 60 hours a week”, which is a standard workweek for farmworkers, according to Paz.

One of the biggest obstacles her organisation faces in its lobbying efforts at the state level, she said, is politicians’ disbelief that workers’ rights are violated to the extent they are. When it comes down to it, “It’s always their word against the farmers’.”

In addition to across-the-board farm labour conditions, which Canton calls “horrendous” and “anachronistic” in most of the U.S., women face additional discrimination, ranging from difficulties securing farm work to endemic sexual abuse.

“When I first came here, we would go to farmers and they would say ‘we’re not hiring women, we’d never ever hire women’,” the now 39-year old remembers of her early experiences finding work. “Now it’s more open, but it’s still not as easy as for men.”

Once she did find employment, the living conditions were tough for women. “People want to take advantage of you. We sleep with men and women in one room. And you know what men do when there aren’t many women around.”

Paz, who has been active in the farmworkers movement since high school but who didn’t become politicised as a woman activist farmworker until about 10 years ago, sees a similar trajectory reflected in other women. “Maybe it’s me paying more attention now, but even just 10 years ago, women were much less visible in the movement that they are now.”

She remembers attending a conference on sexual violence against women farmworkers around that time as one of the first instances that women around her banded together for their rights. “Women have become more active and are participating in events, and working to empower other women.”

Paz’s award closely follows the recognition of another farmworker rights activist, Dolores Huerta – cofounder of the United Farmworkers with Cezar Chavez – who received the Medal of Honor from U.S. President Barack Obama in May.

Both choices mark a strong recognition of women’s involvement in the fight for equal labour rights of farmworkers and the additional discrimination they encounter.

The RFK Center, which announced the decision last week, chose Paz out of 34 nominees to enter into a partnership. The centre will provide up to 30,000 dollars in financial assistance and one staff person at the centre who will fully dedicate their time to working with the award winner on a strategy they design and execute over the next six years, according to Canton.

“This doesn’t mean after six years we’re gone,” he stressed. “The idea of the award is to help those individuals and those organisations that are working towards social justice to make a difference in the world of millions of people. If after six years we still consider this work relevant enough to continue, we will continue to support her.”

In recent years, the Robert F. Kennedy Center has recognised and supported the work of Ugandan LGBTQI-activist Frank Mugisha and Mexican advocate for indigenous rights Abel Barrera Hernández, among others.

Paz admits she wasn’t aware quite how big of a deal the award was until she won it and did some research.

“I did not know how powerful they (the RFK Center) are. When I realised it, I thought, ‘Wow, this is really incredible.’”

With the help of the RFK Center, she’ll be knocking on some more doors in the state capitol, Albany, soon, she assured IPS. After all, she knows her way well there. “I’ve been around and around to Albany,” she says, laughing, “And I never give up.”

The award will officially be handed to Librada Paz during a ceremony in Washington D.C. in November.