Still Sun-Mad
Lesson Plan on Farmworker and Climate Justice
Essential Questions
Background for Teachers:
In the summer of 2023, the global community experienced unprecedented high temperatures due to climate change that pose serious health risks for vulnerable populations. In July 2023 alone, two farm workers, 29-year-old Efrain Lopez Garcia in Florida and 25-year-old Dario Mendoza in Arizona, died from heat stress. The latest death of farm workers urges scholars and teachers to extract patterns amid the more recent past - the deaths of 53-year-old Asución Valdivia in 2004, 19-year-old Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez in 2008, and 69-year-old Florencia Gueta Vargas in 2021 - and a longer history of labor abuses and inhumane working conditions for agricultural laborers in the United States.
There are no federal policies in place in 2023 that ensure health and safety of workers exposed to extreme heat in the workplace, although states such as California, Oregon, Minnesota and Washington have passed their own standards to guarantee protections from excessive heat exposure. As one of the sources shows, rising heat temperatures also create a “synergistic effect,” or a more significant impact of pesticide exposure, which longitudinal studies of women and children in farm worker communities have already linked to cancer, infertility, developmental defects, and neurological damage.
Because of the ways that climate change creates more dangerous working conditions, current-day advocates of farm worker justice frame agricultural laborers as “fighting on the front lines of the climate crisis.” As a result, rather than teach the history of migrant Mexican and Filipino labor struggles as definitively and successfully ending after the plight of the United Farm Worker movement of the 1970s, this lesson suggests that there are still unresolved struggles, exacerbated by the climate crisis, for farm workers who nourish, grow, pick, pack, and can the food that the United States depends upon everyday, even during the global pandemic.
This lesson attempts to bridge two increasingly urgent discourses: Ethnic Studies and climate justice. It works best in a classroom that has already reviewed the intentions and consequences of the Bracero Program, Repatriation Act, and Operation Wetback. Students will be guided through an investigation of the connections between poor working conditions, the climate crisis, indigenous/ancestral knowledge, and collective resistance across time. It is important to emphasize to students the use of collective organizing as a means for disrupting and challenging oppressive conditions. Using visual references from the Library of Congress and other sources, students will study images, photographs, prints, and other posters that represent the long journey towards racial, labor, and climate justice. Students will also read secondary sources from scholars and online news sites that affirm the experiences of farm workers and the need to re-evaluate the current system of food production. After completing the final reading, students will create a call-to-action poster that embodies the themes studied in the lesson.
Key Vocabulary
Social movements
Climate change
Indigenous
Heat exposure/stress
Pesticides
Collectively organize
Union/unionize
Ancestral Knowledge
Immigrants
Climate justice
Synergistic Effect
Monoculture
Instructions
7. Use the local history reading to contextualize health impacts of poor working conditions in Sacramento.
8. The interdisciplinary readings provide important literature on how climate change impacts the health of farm workers. These can be read individually or as a class, while students annotate closely and answer reflection questions. Note: these readings contain more scientific vocabulary, and will require more time to discuss connections to farm workers.
9. To make a connection to a current social movement, show students the campaign video for the effort Que Calor led by the organization “We-Count” in South Florida. https://vimeo.com/645033482
Discuss what workers are being highlighted in the video, why it is important that these workers’ experiences are being heard, and what they are demanding. Consider discussing the implications of rising temperatures in the coming decades.
9. The “Ethnic Studies Perspectives” gives students a critical shift in the narrative by framing farm workers as land healers and key players in the fight against the climate crisis. Discuss and emphasize the importance of including indigenous narratives and knowledge in the study of farm workers, immigrants, and climate change.
10. The final page provides directions for the culminating assignment and a review of the vocabulary and essential questions. Consider showing examples of “call-to-action” posters. Provide the students with sufficient time to collect artefacts from the lesson as inspiration, sketch their ideas, and color them. An artist caption helps students connect what they learned in this lesson, their developing sense of self, and what they hope to express to the viewer.
Warm - up
EQ: What are the connections between historical and contemporary struggles?
Directions Observe the two photos below carefully. Respond to the reflection questions in short answer responses.
1. When and where do you think these photos were taken?
2. What communities do you think are involved?
3. What are some differences between these two pictures?
4. What are some similarities between these two pictures?
5. What might be happening?
6. Who is shown to have power in these pictures?
Photo by Harvey Richards. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved from National Park Service website nps. gov.
Image courtesy of Mario Moreno and family.
Background
Is the current food system just and safe for the people who grow our food? How does climate change increasingly impact both farm workers and agriculture?
Directions Read through the following historical and contemporary context for agricultural laborers, highlighting the main idea or stand-out sentence for each paragraph.
"¡Que vivan los campesinos!”
In the summer of 2022, the United Farm Workers, a union, or organization that represents farm workers, led a 335-mile march from Delano, California to Sacramento, the capitol. With hundreds of supporters joining along the way, farmworkers demanded the right to vote by mail to unionize, or create representative organizations that advocate for workers rights. For decades, undocumented immigrants from Latin America and Asia have made up the workforce in agriculture, including women and children.
Unionization of farm workers threatens the power of large land owners, growers, and mayordomos (bosses). Oftentimes, undocumented immigrants are threatened with deportation, or verbally and physically harassed to prevent workers from collectively organizing. Collective organizing is a tool to build relationships and community around shared experiences in order to address oppressive conditions together. The California bill 2183 proposed that farm workers could vote to unionize from the safety of their own home. After marching miles in the heat of August, and continuing a vigil outside of the capitol in Sacramento for over a month, farmworkers pressured California Governor Gavin Newsom to sign the bill -- it was a huge victory.
But this wasn't the first time farm workers had made the long trek across California. In 1966, Filipino and Mexican farmworkers organized a strike against grape companies and did the same peregrinación, or pilgrimage, from Delano to Sacramento to protest years of poor wages and working conditions. While this movement was a historic success - farm workers won a new contract that guaranteed higher wages and safe working conditions - farmworkers today are still paid significantly low wages and endure harsh working conditions.
A Changing World
Climate change is a term to refer to the significant changes in the weather caused by burning of fossil fuels for energy. It has been underway since the industrial revolution, and as the consequences of climate change begin to be more severe - think rising sea levels, heat waves, flooding, droughts and wildfires - the global
community has grown more serious about fighting the causes. In 1965, scientists in Boulder, Colorado were just beginning to note the "chaotic" nature of the shifts in weather. Now, in 2023 climate scientists, as noted by the United Nations, have recorded that the last decade was the warmest on record, and that these changes may have other impacts such as water scarcity, melting polar ice, and declining biodiversity.
Many have argued that the current system of growing food, in the United States and globally, is not sustainable. At low wages, rural farm workers grow one crop on land that is owned by large corporations. Monoculture, or farming a single crop in a field, contributes to soil depletion (loss of nutrients in soil), reduced biodiversity (different types of living things) and the overuse of pesticides (chemicals that prevent pests) which are linked to cancer, developmental defects, and neurological damage in children. Now, the extremes of climate change are only making worse the hazards that agriculture poses to worker health and to the environment.
What will the climate crisis mean for farm workers in the United States who are already exposed to severe weather conditions and environmental hazards for long hours at a time? How do we strategically and collectively work towards creating a humane, just, and sustainable food system during the climate crisis?
Mexican cantaloupe workers. Imperial Valley. Photographer: Dorothea Lange (1938). Library of Congress.
Image #, Date, and Author | What do I see in this photo? Take note of colors, people and words in the background and foreground (what is farthest from the viewer and what is closest to the viewer in an image). | How does this image make me feel? What emotions come up for me? What parts of this image remind me of other people, places, or things I have seen or experienced? | Why do you think this image was created? What is this image trying to say to its audience? |
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Image Analysis
EQ: How do images, pictures, and posters capture and tell powerful stories about farm workers’ experiences and struggles across decades?
Directions As you take a look at each image carefully, complete the following graphic organizer with short notes.
Image #1
Source: Library of Congress
Title: Group of children posing under sign that read “U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Security Administration Farm Workers Community:
Date: 1941
Type: Photograph
Notes: El Rio, California, Camp for Mexican Migrant Workers
FSA Camp for Mexican fruit pickers. Front gate - 1941
EQ: How do images, pictures, and posters capture and tell powerful stories about farm workers’ experiences and struggles across decades?
Image #2
Source: Library of Congress
Title: Filipinos cutting lettuce. Salinas, California
Photographer: Dorothea Lange
Date: 1935 June
EQ: How do images, pictures, and posters capture and tell powerful stories about farm workers’ experiences and struggles across decades?
Image #3
Source: Library of Congress
Title: “Sun mad” Sun mad raisins, unnaturally grown with insecticides - miticides - herbicides - fungicides
Creator: Ester Hernandez, 1944
Medium: Screen print, color.
EQ: How do images, pictures, and posters capture and tell powerful stories about farm workers’ experiences and struggles across decades?
Image #4
Source: Library of Congress
Title: Boycott grapes. Support the United Farmworkers Union (1973)
Creator: Xavier Viramontes, artist
Notes: Poster supporting the grape boycott in California shows a man with an Aztec god-like headdress squeezing blood from grapes.
EQ: How do images, pictures, and posters capture and tell powerful stories about farm workers’ experiences and struggles across decades?
Image #5
Source: National Museum of Mexican Art, with permission of the artist
Title: “Sun mad” (ofrenda dedicated to the artist’s father, a farm worker from the San Joaquin Valley, CA)
Creator: Ester Hernández, 1989
Medium: Multicomponent installation
EQ: How do images, pictures, and posters capture and tell powerful stories about farm workers’ experiences and struggles across decades?
Image #6
Source: Library of Congress
Title: Grape strike and boycott.
Date: March 18, 1970.
Photographer: Marion S. Trikosko
Medium: 1 photograph : negative; film width 35mm (roll format)
EQ: How do images, pictures, and posters capture and tell powerful stories about farm workers’ experiences and struggles across decades?
Image #7
Source: Library of Congress
Title and Date: Cesar y Olin / Juan R. Fuentes (2003)
Summary: Print shows portrait of Cesar Chavez with grapes on vines and inset images of men working in the field and a woman washing a floor.
EQ: How do images, pictures, and posters capture and tell powerful stories about farm workers’ experiences and struggles across decades?
Image #8
Source: Library of Congress
Title: Protect Essential Workers (2020)
Notes: Poster shows a female farmworker, wearing a face mask labeled “Hero”, holding a bucket filled with tomatoes.
EQ: How do images, pictures, and posters capture and tell powerful stories about farm workers’ experiences and struggles across decades?
Close Reading
A group of California farmworkers who walked 50 miles carrying two wooden coffins arrive in Sacramento this week.
Their journey began near the vineyards where a 17-year-old undocumented farmworker died of heat exhaustion last month. Her death raises questions about how effectively California’s heat regulations work in the fields.
Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez was tying grape vines at a farm east of Stockton on May 14, when the temperature soared well above 95 degrees. The nearest water cooler was a 10-minute walk away, and workers say the strict foreman didn’t allow them a long enough break to stop and get a drink. Vasquez collapsed from heat exhaustion.
Her fiance, Florentino Bautista, cradled her in his arms. "When she fell, she looked bad," Bautista says. "She didn't regain consciousness. She just fell down and didn't react. I told her to be strong so we could see each other again."
Bautista, 19, had saved up money to buy a gold ring for Maria Isabel, his childhood sweetheart from their indigenous village in Oaxaca, Mexico. Bautista says that after Jimenez collapsed, the farm labor contractor delayed bringing Jimenez to a hospital. Another employee took her to a drugstore to try and revive her with rubbing alcohol, Bautista says.
In a written statement to NPR, Merced Farm Labor says Bautista was the one who decided to stop at the drugstore, and that he had refused the company's offer to call a doctor. Furthermore, the company says Jimenez wasn't engaged in strenuous work that day and had been working without apparent distress up to the time she collapsed.
What is clear is that by the time she arrived at a hospital, Jimenez was in a coma, and her body temperature topped 108 degrees. She died two days later. It was only at the hospital Bautista found out she was two months pregnant.
That's why he and about 500 other farm workers carried two empty coffins on their march from the fields to Sacramento this week. Jimenez's actual coffin has been shipped back to her mother in Mexico, her body dressed in a white gown and veil.
"The life of a farmworker isn't important to people," says Arturo Rodriguez, the president of the United Farm Workers union, which organized the march…
"Teen Farmworker's Heat Death Sparks Outcry" National Public Radio | Sasha Khokha | June 6, 2008
EQ: Are working conditions safe for farmworkers? What environmental hazards do farmworkers face?
Directions Read the following source carefully while annotating. Circle words you don't know and define them, underline sentences that stand out to you, and complete the stop and reflection questions.
"People just don't care. ... The reality is that the machinery of growers is taken better care of than the lives of farmworkers. You wouldn't take a machine out into the field without putting oil in it. How can you take the life of a person and not even give them the basics?"
California passed the most stringent heat laws in the nation three years ago after four farmworkers died in the field. The laws say growers must provide workers adequate water, shade and rest breaks. But three farmworkers still died in California the year after the law was passed. And in 2007, state labor inspectors found more than half of the employers they audited were violating the rules.
Merced Farm Labor was fined and cited for failing to train its employees on heat safety two years ago. State labor inspectors hadn't conducted a follow-up visit since then. There are only 200 inspectors to audit millions of California employers.
The California Farm Bureau says every industry has a few bad actors. But spokeswoman Danielle Rau says most growers are trying hard to follow the rules.
"The current standard, when applied correctly, is absolutely adequate," Rau says. "It provides shade and rest, water. It is certainly a standard that protects employees."
Bautista says he never imagined his fiancée's death would spark such an outcry. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger even attended her funeral.
Bautista says the governor put his hand on his shoulder and told him Jimenez's death could have been prevented — and that he would be sure justice was done.The farmworkers arrived in Sacramento on June 4.
"It's inexcusable that those people that pick the fruits and vegetables and do this kind of work, that they shouldn't get the right working conditions," Schwarzenegger said that day.
He also announced that the California labor commissioner was initiating proceedings to revoke Merced Farm Labor's license as a farmworker contractor.
"Teen Farmworker's Heat Death Sparks Outcry" National Public Radio | Sasha Khokha | June 6, 2008
1. What parts of the article about Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez's death stand out to you? Why?
2. Why do you think Arturo Rodriguez claimed that "the life of a farmworker isn't important to people?"
Stop and Reflect
Local History
Work conditions for Chicanas at Sacramento canneries were not only deplorable, but also posed health hazards. Mexicanas generally worked the belts, considered to be the harshest and most demanding position. Reyes described the intolerable working conditions women workers were exposed to:
When you work the belt, it is awfully hard work to stand in one place, the steam, the heat, or the cold, and this belt moving in front of your eyes for eight hours. Women used to faint up there. Plus the handling of the product itself was such that women [were at] the nurses office every day before each shift was full of women, they couldn’t tend to all of them because they would come in and get bandaged up. What was happening was that they were handling the product coming in off the fields full of insecticides. They developed sores, what have you. Rashes. They thought [from the] peach fuzz, or the acid from the tomatoes. This is the explanations the canners gave. It took us years to find out what was really going on.
Reyes was referring to the harmful side effects of pesticides later discovered. In the 1980s, the United Farm Workers led a taskforce to investigate the affects of pesticides on farm workers. Startling U.S. government reports found that in the 1980s farmers used approximately 2.6 million tons of chemical pesticides per year and that at least 300,000 people suffered serious illness due to its use. Not only were farm workers exposed to this poison, but so were their children who lived and played near agricultural fields. In fact, the mere act of sharing the same living headquarters exposed children to unusually high rates of pesticides. The most devastating effects were the large accounts of cancer clusters--unusually high rates of disease, especially among the young--which divided small communities in the San Joaquin Valley, just south of Sacramento..
Lorena Marquez “Sacramento en El Movimiento: Chicano Politics in the Civil Rights Era.” Dissertation. 2010.
EQ: Are working conditions safe for farmworkers? What environmental hazards do farmworkers face?
1. Based on the secondary source by Lorena Marquez, what have we learned about pesticide exposure on women and children?
2. How does this scholarly source relate to the NPR report of Maria Isabel’s death?
Stop and Reflect
Directions Read the following source carefully while annotating. Circle words you don't know and define them, underline sentences that stand out to you, and complete the stop and reflection questions.
Interdisciplinary Analysis Part 1
EQ: What impact does climate change have on the working conditions of farm workers?
"The Climate Crisis and Its Impact on Farmworkers" Prepared for Farmworker Justice's Environmental Justice Symposium; May 17-18th, 2022
The climate crisis severely impacts the health and livelihoods of the approximately 2.4 million farmworkers in the U.S. Rising temperatures increase the risk of heat-related illnesses and deaths and also allow pest populations to grow and expand their range, leading to greater use of toxic pesticides by agricultural employers. Changing weather patterns result in more frequent and longer droughts, increasingly severe storms and wildfires, and other natural disasters that threaten farmworkers’ food security and access to clean water, in addition to their physical safety.
Heat Stress
Among all weather-related workplace hazards, heat is the leading cause of worker deaths. Agricultural workers face a rate of heat-related death 35 times higher than the rate for all other industries in the U.S.5 Heat exposure may cause heat exhaustion, dizziness, nausea, acute kidney injury and, over the long term, increase the risk for chronic kidney disease.
Food security
Studies show that between 20 and 80 percent of farmworkers will experience food insecurity, without consistent access to healthy or nutritious food, at some point during the year. Droughts and other natural disasters that impact agriculture and the availability of work can have a tremendous impact on farmworkers’ food security.
Despite their low wages, many farmworkers are ineligible (not qualified) for federal assistance programs. They also often live in rural communities with limited access to stores, food banks, or food assistance programs. Community-based organizations, food banks, religious organizations, and health centers, among others, provide food assistance to farmworker communities.
Microorganisms an organism, or living thing, that can only be seen with a microscope
Substandard below standards
Inadequate not adequate
Food Security to have consistent and reliable access to affordable, healthy food
Federal Assistance Programs programs from the government that help people afford food, housing health care, and other basic costs of living
Directions Read the following source carefully while annotating. Circle words you don't know and define them, underline sentences that stand out to you, and complete the stop and reflection questions.
Stop and Reflect
1. What type of secondary source is provided? Who is the intended audience?
Pesticides
Farmworkers are often exposed to toxic pesticides in the workplace. Climate change has exacerbated the threats posed by pesticides as more pesticides are applied to combat increasing numbers of pests.
Water Access
Access to clean, safe water is not always the norm for farmworkers, many of whom live in substandard housing that in some cases is served by old or inadequate water infrastructure that compromises water quality. Others live in informal housing or labor camps that lack indoor plumbing. Some obtain their water from wells, which in agricultural areas may be contaminated with fertilizers, pesticides and microorganisms from animal waste. Droughts and storms, which are becoming more intense and frequent due to climate change, also affect the availability and quality of water sources. Lack of clean drinking water puts farmworkers’ health at risk and forces many farmworker families to spend a portion of their limited income purchasing water.
"The Climate Crisis and Its Impact on Farmworkers" Prepared for Farmworker Justice's Environmental Justice Symposium; May 17-18th, 2022
Microorganisms an organism, or living thing, that can only be seen with a microscope
Substandard below standards
Inadequate not adequate
Food Security to have consistent and reliable access to affordable, healthy food
Federal Assistance Programs programs from the government that help people afford food, housing health care, and other basic costs of living
2. Based on the summaries provided in this source, how will climate change will have an impact on pesticide usage, water access, food security, and heat stress?
Stop and Reflect
Some communities are impacted by multiple pollutants from multiple sources, which cause what scientists term cumulative impact. For example, some people live near major roadways and agriculture where pesticides are used.
Interdisciplinary Analysis Part 2
EQ: What impact does climate change have on the working conditions of farm workers?
Directions Read the following source carefully while annotating. Circle words you don't know and define them, underline sentences that stand out to you, and complete the stop and reflect questions.
"The Different Effects of Climate Extremes on Physiological Health Among Agro-ecology and Conventional Smallholder Rice Farmers" Environmental Justice | Volume 13, Number 2, 2020
As climate changes increases temperatures of extreme heat events, farm workers are among the most affected. Because of the nature of the work, farmers working at hot temperatures may experience physiological changes in their body such as increases in body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate, as well as leading to intolerance of blood glucose and blood cholesterol.
This study speculates (makes an educated guess based on evidence) that extreme heat hazards may lead to incidence of heat-related diseases among farmers in the workplace and other metabolic disorders. The purpose of this study is to determine the potential health effects of heat exposure between agroecology and conventional rice farmers.
This study recruited 33 agroecology and 25 conventional rice farmers in the northern state of peninsular Malaysia. The adapted questionnaire (survey) was used to obtain the respondent's background information.
Both groups of farmers also have a significant association between blood glucose and blood pressure. The findings of this study suggest that pesticide use can act as a synergistic effect, resulting in more significant health effects for those who were exposed to heat in their work environment. Given the impact of climate change on the agriculture sector, the disparity in the heat-related effects between pesticides used and non-pesticides used farming community may serve as a critical factor to consider while implementing the workplace heat stress program in the agricultural industry.
physiological relating to bodily part functions
intolerance of blood glucose conditions that result in higher than normal blood sugar levels which can cause serious health problems
blood cholesterol a waxy, fat-like substance found in the body
metabolic disorders when the body has difficulty with normal processes and distribution of nutrients
agroecology a way of farming that works closely with the cycles of nature
synergistic effect the effect when two or more things are combined
Stop and Reflect
EQ: How do we strategically and collectively work towards creating a humane, just, and sustainable food system during the climate crisis?
On most days, Sandra de Leon prunes grapevines in Northern California’s wealthiest vineyards. But today she is dressed head to toe in a yellow fire-resistant suit, helmet, safety goggles, and globes, carrying a machete and a drip torch. She calls out over her crackling mobile radio, “Jefe de quema: aqui Bravo, informandoles que…” (“Burn chief: Bravo unit here, informing you that…”) and then rattles off data in Spanish on the number, size, duration, and temperature of a dozen or so burn piles she is monitoring on the sun-speckled forest floor.
De Leon is one of 25 immigrant and Indigenous farmworkers gathered on a cold December morning in Sonoma County, California, for the first-in-the-country Spanish-language intentional-burn certification program. Like de Leon, each of these firefighters-(and firelighters!)-in training has been haunted by fire. During a massive inferno in 2017, de Leon was one of many “essential workers” escorted by vineyard managers through mandatory evacuation zones to harvest grapes while breathing in toxic fumes from nearby blazes.
“When we arrived at work, there were patrol cars because it was an evacuation zone, but they waved us through to harvest. The skies were red and heavy smoke was in the air. They didn’t give us any protective equipment. No masks,” de Leon says. “There was so much ash on the grapes that when you’d cut the grape, it would get on your face. Our faces were black.” While she didn’t get sick, she says her co-workers struggled with asthma. De Leon recalls harvesting like this for eight hours and getting paid just $20 per hour.
“They should have paid us more,” de Leon says. “We risked our lives for their profits.”
Today, however, de Leon and her fellow farmworkers are here to learn about “good fire” – a controlled burn land stewards use to reduce underbrush in overgrown forests to prevent the spread of more destructive wildfires.
Thanks to North Bay Jobs With Justice, de Leon and her fellow farmworkers are (re-)learning skills many of their ancestors knew well. And they are putting that know-how to work healing a fire-ravaged landscape and people.
"From Farmworkers to Land Healers" Yes! Solutions Journalism | Brook Anderson | April 25th, 2023
Ethnic Studies Perspectives
Stop and Reflect
1. In this source, why is de Leon and other farmworkers re-learning to set "good fires", and why does the author consider them to be "re-learning" this practice?
Directions Read the following source carefully while annotating. Circle words you don't know and define them, underline sentences that stand out to you, and complete the stop and reflect questions.
While wine producers often depict their agricultural operations as small, idyllic, and picturesque, the reality is that most are anything but. The wine industry erodes local ecological balance and accelerates climate destabilization through planting monoculture crops, intensive water use, soil erosion, and application of toxic pesticides and herbicides.
Calling themselves trabajadores de la tierra (land workers), farmworkers like de Leon say they’re tired of having their labor used by the vineyard bosses to deplete the land. So instead, they’re fighting for the training, resources, and job opportunities to restore ecological health and mitigate the worst impacts of climate chaos already set in motion…
…Too often, cost-cutting measures among vegetation management companies–which clear overgrown brush to minimize the risk of wildfires–result in low wages, lack of training, and excessive clear-cutting. Instead, immigrant and Indigenous farmworkers are positioning themselves as the leaders who have the ancestral knowledge, practical skills, work ethic, and heart to do this work, and assert they should be fairly compensated for it.
Their fight began two years ago, when these workers on the front lines of climate-change-fueled wildfires started organizing for safety and respect.
Through their 5 for Farmworkers campaign, North Bay Jobs with Justice farmworker leaders have won improved job safety and training in indigenous languages, and a first-of-its kind $4 million disaster-insurance fund for frontline workers who lose work during disasters. They’ve also secured unprecedented commitments from growers both large and small to provide hazard pay for workers who harvest when the outdoor air quality is unhealthy
Despite these impressive victories, farmworkers say the California wine industry remains ecologically unsustainable. The vineyards’ contribution to local ecological degradation, combined with global climate change, results in heat, droughts, wildfires, and floods that cause increasing insecurity for existing agricultural workers. In short, workers know the wine industry won’t last forever.
"From Farmworkers to Land Healers" Yes! Solutions Journalism | Brook Anderson | April 25th, 2023
2. With the help of North Bay Jobs with Justice, what did farm workers win through their campaign?
3. According to the source, how can highlighting and uplifting indigenous or ancestral knowledge be an important strategy to fighting climate change and its consequences?
Stop and Reflect
Directions for the Culminating Assignment
Culminating Assignment
Review essential questions
Review vocabulary
Social movements
Climate change
Indigenous
Heat exposure/stress
Pesticides
Collectively organize
Union/unionize
Ancestral Knowledge
Immigrants
Climate justice
Synergistic Effect
Monoculture
Student Examples