Farmworker women often cover their faces with bandanas to protect themselves from pesticides and the weather, but also to ward off unwanted sexual advances.
Undocumented women who are feeding the country with their labor routinely endure sexual harassment, wage theft and other abuses, according to a new report released last week by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
The report — Injustice on Our Plates: Immigrant Women in the U.S. Food Industry — documents the workplace experiences of immigrant women who have come to the United States to escape crushing poverty. It describes how the laws that are in place to protect them from exploitation are grossly inadequate and how they are typically powerless to protect themselves.
The reports release coincides with the 50th anniversary of Edward R. Murrow’s documentary “Harvest of Shame,” which chronicled the plight of migrant farmworkers. CBS broadcast the documentary on Thanksgiving in 1960.
“These women are the backbone of the food industry but are exploited and abused in ways that most of us can’t imagine and that none of us should tolerate,” said SPLC Legal Director Mary Bauer, co-author of the report. “Fear keeps these women silent, so their suffering is invisible to all of us who benefit from their labor every time we sit down at the dinner table.”
The report is based on extensive interviews with 150 immigrant women from México, Guatemala, and other Latin American countries. They live and work in states across the country. All have worked in the fields or factories that produce food for América.
Many of the women interviewed for the report said the threat of deportation and the possible destruction of their families keeps them from reporting workplace abuses — even when it means enduring sexual harassment and other indignities.
“It’s because of fear [that] we have to tolerate more,” said one 26-year-old Florida farmworker interviewed for the report. “Sometimes they take advantage because we don’t have papers. They mistreat us, and
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