The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and Advocacy

I Don’t Think People Give Up, by Sheila Payne, farmworker organizer, Interview by Melinda Steele, 1998 SAF intern

I Don’t Think People Give Up Sheila Payne, farmworker organizer Interview by Melinda Steele, 1998 SAF intern To me it’s the most basic right, all the other organizing I do around peace, justice, and poverty issues, other activists I’ve worked with don’t see labor as the most basic thing to fight for, but I do. That advocacy stuff that I do always comes back mostly to what power that [people] have economically, and whether they have power, whether they have rights where they work. To me, it doesn’t make sense to not care about these issues. And farmworkers just don’t have any power, it’s really hard to organize them, and because a lot of it is transient, and people come and go. Like right now, the H-2C program, I just wrote my letters, everyone knows there’s too many workers and it’s just a way to keep people from being able to organize. I don’t see the workers being empowered anymore, every time I’m involved in a new campaign , and I actually meet the workers, I don’t get a sense of anything but starting back at the beginning. You know, you just have to start over each time. It doesn’t build on itself, like other labor campaigns. The workforce keeps changing and once they leave, nothing that’s happened to them applies anywhere else. There’s new people that come in. The farmers are going to try to get rid of any people who have any kind of union ideals, we’ll never see those workers again in that community . And, yeah I guess I’m basically recycling. I 248 The Human Cost of Food mean there’s so many tricks to it, to be able to close down farms or fields, and not even have to honor any of the negotiated contracts. I mean even if it’s without a union contract, just to have negotiated with the workers that you work with, when workers go to growers and say we want this, this, and this, I mean, even if that does work, it’s never binding, and it never lasts very long. I just think you have to fight the fight all the time, I don’t think people give up. ...