women farm workers

Cotton is one of the most valuable crops grown in the U.S., with a harvest value of some US$7 billion yearly. It is cultivated across a crescent of 17 states stretching from Virginia to California and is used in virtually every type of clothing, as well as in medical supplies and home goods such as upholstery. Cotton grows inside a hard, fibrous case called a boll. About 100 days after planting, the bolls mature and split open, revealing thousands of fluffy white fibers inside. Each boll contains 20 to 40 seeds with fibers attached to them, which is why the cotton plant’s fruit is called seed cotton. Picking cotton manually, as is still done in some major producing countries, is a meticulous task. Workers have to bend to reach the bolls and can hurt their hands on hard, dry parts of the plants. To harvest the seed cotton, they have to grab and twist it to separate it from the boll without leaving fiber behind. Starting in the 1930s, cotton farmers in the U.S. shifted f...

Television crime shows often are set in cities, but in its third season, ABC’s “American Crime” took a different tack. It opened on a tomato farm in North Carolina, where it showed a young woman being brutally raped in a field by her supervisor. “People die all the time on that farm. Nobody cares. Women get raped, regular,” another character tells a police interrogator. The show’s writers did their research. Studies show that 80% of Mexican and Mexican American women farmworkers in the U.S. have experienced some form of sexual harassment at work. Rape is common enough for some to nickname their workplace the “fields of panties.” For comparison, about 38% of women in the U.S. report experiencing some kind of workplace sexual harassment. In a recent report, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization called for transformative changes to the formal and informal social systems that disempower women who work on farms and in the food s...