NY Times: Farm Workers' Rights

[Guest guest]

April 6, 2009

EDITORIAL

Farm Workers' Rights, 70 Years Overdue

It is more than bank failures and rising unemployment that give these troubled

times echoes of the 1930s. An unfinished labor battle from the New Deal is being

waged again.

The goal is to win basic rights that farm and domestic workers were denied more

than 70 years ago, when the Roosevelt administration won major reforms

protecting other workers in areas like overtime and disability pay, days of rest

and union organizing.

That inequality is a perverse holdover from the Jim Crow era. Segregationist

Southern Democrats in Congress could not abide giving African-Americans, who

then made up most of the farm and domestic labor force, an equal footing in the

workplace with whites. President Roosevelt's compromise simply wrote workers in

those industries out of the New Deal.

They were thus sidelined from the labor movement, with predictable results.

Though the Dixiecrats have all long since died or repented, the injustice they

spawned has never been corrected. Poverty, brutal working conditions and legally

sanctioned discrimination persist for new generations of laborers, who are now

mostly Latino immigrants.

In New York, advocates are pressing for passage of the Farmworkers Fair Labor

Practices Act, which would give these workers the rights that others have long

taken for granted, as well as seek badly needed improvements in safety and

sanitary conditions in the fields. Domestic workers, meanwhile, are seeking a

" Bill of Rights " in Albany covering things like overtime pay, cost-of-living

raises and health benefits.

A separate effort begun last week seeks to end these stubbornly lingering

injustices for workers in all states by fixing federal law. It was announced on

Cesar Chavez's birthday by old lions of his movement, including Jerry Cohen, who

as general counsel of the United Farm Workers helped win passage of a landmark

1975 California law that secured unprecedented rights for the state's farm

workers. The campaign has been joined by a growing number of labor groups and

immigrant advocates, like Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and the Farm

Labor Organizing Committee, which represents migrant workers in the Midwest and

North Carolina.

In both campaigns, advocates are counting on a changed political landscape to

help their cause. But even with Democrats controlling the New York Legislature,

the farm worker bill has languished. It faces fierce opposition from growers and

has been eclipsed by the entropy and fiscal crises of Gov. David Paterson's

Albany. In Washington, labor advocates are preoccupied by different battles,

like the fight for the pro-union Employee Free Choice Act. Other long-sought

immigration reforms have taken a back seat to the budget and health care.

But farm workers are used to long, hard slogs and pitiless heat and cold, with

justice as their distant but inevitable destination. The advocates see President

Obama and Governor Paterson as ideal candidates to take them there, and are not

about to give up. " Any just national labor law reform must include farm workers

and domestics, " Mr. Cohen wrote to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, stating an

obvious and compelling truth. " If not now, when? "

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company