Rat-infested camps. Unreliable clean water supply. Lack of sanitation. Little to no bedding. Withholding of already inadequate wages. Restricting workers’ ability to escape.
Those are the conditions endured by the people who work on the farms that supply food to many of American’s most popular brand-name companies, as revealed by the Los Angeles Times in its 2014 investigative report.
The report triggered consumer outrage. And promises by some of those companies that source produce from the farms, notably the retailer giant Walmart, to do more. But nothing improved. So in March of this year, farmworkers in the Baja area of Mexico became so desperate, they went on strike.
We have NAFTA to thank for the fact that a third of our fruit, and two-thirds of our vegetables, come from large produce farms in Mexico. U.S. corporations are more than happy to pay low wages to farmworkers in order to increase their own profits.
Can we, as consumers, force U.S. corporations to treat Mexican farmworkers with decency and fair wages? Can we afford not to?