This is the legacy of the Jim Crow era. We have FDR advancing New Deal reforms that broadened worker's rights, and in order to get the southern segregationists to agree, they excluded farmworkers, who at the time were majority African American. That demographic has shifted to being predominantly Central American workers - this is a legacy that this country has been exploiting, and following these workers since the very beginning.

Writer Olivia Heffernan reports on the work of building a farmworker labor movement - from the racialized exclusion of agricultural labor from the gains of the New Deal and organized labor at large, to the fight against the precarity and invisibility of workers central to an industry packaging itself to consumers as humane and honest.

Olivia wrote the article Are we prepared to pay the price for farmworker justice? for openDemocracy.