Shirley Sherrod and All Workers Deserve to Have Their Voices Protected
All across the nation, people are watching the case of Shirley Sherrod, who was asked to resign as Georgia state director for rural development at the U.S. Department of Agriculture because of an edited video clip. A moment of personal honesty about a redemptive experience in her own life was snipped into an apparent example of bias, and the unforgiving 24-second news cycle was not her friend.
While it was wrong for Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to force Sherrod to resign before he had all the facts, I am sure that she will receive a fair hearing and get her due process.
What happened to Shirley Sherrod happens to so many American workers every day. They are fired or disciplined without cause or due process and have no recourse. They don’t have a voice on the job or an avenue to speak out for their rights. Most Americans work in jobs covered by the idea of “employment at will.” This doctrine, a relic of 19th century anti-labor laws, allows employers to fire workers at any time, for any reason or for no reason at all.
Union Support Helped Win ‘Open Fields’ Hunting and Fishing Access
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Union sportsmen and all hunters and fishing enthusiasts will soon find tens of thousands of new acres of land to explore, thanks to a new Open Fields program that union support on Capitol Hill helped push to the finish line.
Last week, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced the release of $50 million for the Open Fields program, which provides states with federal funding to create or enhance voluntary hunter-access programs that encourage private landowners to open their lands to the public for hunting and fishing. Says Vilsack:
This program will not only help achieve conservation goals, but also increase opportunities for hunting, fishing and other outdoor recreation by providing greater access to privately held lands for wildlife-dependent recreation.
Help Stop Child Labor in the Cocoa Fields
With the Easter holiday approaching, many U.S. children and their parents will celebrate with chocolate bunnies and other chocolate-covered treats. But for children in West Africa, Easter will simply be another desolate day of harvesting cocoa, the main ingredient in chocolate, under inexcusable conditions.
AFT has launched a campaign to stop the importation of child-harvested cocoa beans or chocolate made from them. You can take action. Click here to send a message to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack urging him to ensure chocolate products Americans eat are not spoiled by the bitterness of child labor.
More than half of the world’s supply of cocoa is harvested in the two West African nations of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). Growing and harvesting the crop depends upon the labor of 3.6 million children caught in the worst forms of child labor, according to the International Cocoa Verification Board (ICVB). Children must climb trees with machetes to cut down cocoa pods. They handle and apply dangerous pesticides, burn brush and carry back-breaking loads, ICVB says. ICVB is non-profit, multi-stakeholder organization that monitors child and forced labor in cocoa production.
Tomato Workers Score Huge Victory
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In a huge win for farm workers, one of the nation’s top food service and management companies reached an agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to improve working conditions and give a raise directly to Florida’s tomato harvesters.
The pact between Compass Group North America and the CIW calls for the company to pay an additional 1.5 cents per pound for all the tomatoes it purchases each year, with 1 cent per pound passed directly from the supplier to the workers. The agreement boosts workers’ wages from 50 cents for a 32-pound bucket to 82 cents per bucket, a 64 percent increase.
This is the first agreement where the money goes directly to the workers. Previous agreements called for the money to go into an escrow account.
