June-July 97

A HUMAN RIGHTS STRUGGLE

In Watsonville, the heart of California straw-berry country, thousands of workers are struggling for basic rights. Clean drinking water. Bathrooms in the fields. A living wage. Job security. Health benefits. An end to sexual harassment. While a handful of strawberry barons take in $650 million a year, workers earn only $8,500 a season for sunrise-to-sunset workdays. For just 5 cents more per pint of strawberries, worker pay rates could increase by at least 50 percent!

The UFW supports banning methyl bromide. In addition, UFW experience shows that only job stewards trained in pesticide safety and backed up by unions can stop pesticide abuses on the job and prevent spillover effects on local communities. Without unions, workers don't have the job security to blow the whistle on lawbreakers-and to enforce public rights to a safe environment.

The UFW's pesticide-safety goals include: (1) enforcement of California's Prop. 65 to ensure workers are informed about and trained to use pesticides known to cause cancer and reproductive damage; (2) resisting agro-industry pressure on EPA to reduce the time period when workers can reenter fields after pesticide application, and (3) adopting farmworker and rural children as sentinel populations

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