Report: Immigrant Women in the U.S. Food Industry
The Southern Poverty Law Center recently published a report called “Injustice on Our Plates: Immigrant Women in the U.S. Food Industry” that interviewed about 150 women working in the food industry in Arkansas, California, Florida, Iowa, New York or North Carolina. Download the entire report here.
What the SPLC found in the report is interesting, sad, but not really surprising, a few highlights:
- The National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) published by the Department of Labor reports that about 22% of the farmworker population is female; there are an estimated 630,000 women engaged in farm work in the United States.
- The average personal income of female crop workers is $11,250, compared to $16,250 for male crop workers.
- At least half of the 250,00014 laborers in 174 of the major U.S. chicken factories are Latino and more than half are women.
- In a recent study of 150 women of Mexican descent working in the fields in California’s Central Valley, 80% said they had experienced sexual harassment. That compares to roughly half of all women in the U.S. workforce who say they have experienced at least one incident.
- While investigating the sexual harassment of California farmworker women in the mid-1990s, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that “hundreds, if not thousands, of women had to have sex with supervisors to get or keep jobs and/or put up with a constant barrage of grabbing and touching and propositions for sex by supervisors.”
- A 1989 article in Florida indicates that sexual harassment against farmworker women was so pervasive that women referred to the fields as the “green motel.” Similarly, the EEOC reports that women in California refer to the fields as “fil de calzon,” or the fields of panties, because sexual harassment is so widespread.
