Shining the Light on Our Social & Environmental Justice Action Work at
BUF, Story of the Week
This week's story is from our partner organization, Community to
Community. The focus for the rest of this month will be on the work of
this partnership, with other social justice action teams chiming in in
future months.
Something remarkable was planned. C2C staff and the President (Ramon)
and Vice-President (Felimon) of the first independent farmworker's
union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), based in our little corner
of Washington, travelled to the border to meet their Mexico farmworker
counterparts who also grow and harvest berries for Driscoll. (As an
aside: FUJ has called for a boycott of all Driscoll Berries until Sakuma
Farms agrees to negotiate a fair labor contract with its workers). The
plan was to meet at the fence with the FUJ workers on one side, and the
farmworkers from Mexico on the other. While free trade agreements allow
capital and corporate types from the company to flow freely across the
border, the workers cannot. The C2C and FUJ folks left Bellingham by
car at noon on Friday and just got back at 4 am today, Tuesday.
The logistics of the border proved too tough for the meeting, but there
were some positive outcomes, nonetheless. Though the Mexico and US
farmworkers could not hear each other talk at the border, they did talk
by phone and solidified the cross border commitment to the Driscoll
boycott. They plan to try face-to fence-to face talks with the same
groups again in early December. An even happier outcome was that the
FUJ/C2C group ended up connecting with a group of 12 young Latino
students and children of famworkers in San Diego in a "wonderful"
meeting. This group of young leaders is enthusiastic about the new
union and is planning to take the boycott to larger groups in San Diego
and LA. See the photo of their meeting at Chicano Park in San Diego.
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