Farmworker Justice

Farmworker Justice is a national advocacy organization that helps migrant farmworkers improve their wages, working conditions, health, immigration status and access to justice. We engage in litigation, advocacy, education, training and coalition-building.

Why do we exist?

Migrant and seasonal farmworkers – the people who put food on our table -- are the poorest of the working poor.  Government policies that protect working people often discriminate by denying farmworkers those protections.  Farmworker Justice was created in 1981 to help empower farmworkers to improve their wages and working conditions, immigration status, health, occupational safety, and access to justice. Using a multi-faceted approach, Farmworker Justice engages in litigation, administrative and legislative advocacy, training and technical assistance, coalition-building, public education and support for union organizing.  

What have you accomplished?

Although there is still much to do to achieve fairness for farmworkers, we have accomplished much over the last 26 years.  Our litigation and advocacy have helped farmworkers win major policy improvements, including protections against early entry into fields sprayed with toxic pesticides, higher wages for U.S. and foreign farmworkers under the agricultural guestworker program, and access to drinking water and toilets in the field.  We provide farmworker representatives with the policy analysis and advice they need to intervene effectively in Congress, federal agencies, and public debate on labor, immigration, health and justice issues.  We help individual farmworkers win appointments to the federal Migrant Health Advisory Committee. Our lawsuits have won hundreds of thousands of dollars in backpay and changes in companies’ employment practices for sugar cane cutters, apple harvesters, and strawberry pickers.  We have reduced injuries and illness by training hundreds of farmworkers, most of them women, to be effective health promoters (promotoras de salud); they, in turn, have trained tens of thousands of farmworkers and their family members about preventing HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and pesticide poisoning. 

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