Underground America by Peter Orner

Author:Peter Orner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781940450940
Publisher: McSweeney's
Published: 2015-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

WALKING TO THEIR DEATHS

A few weeks after I got the job at the real estate company, in September of 2004, I started an organization on campus to help local farmworkers. I glow a little when I talk about it because it’s something that I created.

I had come back from North Carolina full of fire and a revolutionary spirit. We’d had students selected for this internship every year before that, but no one had come back and done anything. I couldn’t understand, after seeing all that—what was going on in the fields—for ten weeks, that no one would want to come back and continue the fight. I said to myself, I have to do it. We have to keep educating people about the issues.

So I got some students together at school and talked to them about what I wanted to do. The Taco Bell boycott was still going on at that time, so we did a lot of demonstrations on campus. We visited classrooms and spoke at different events. And then, finally, Yum! Brands, which owns Taco Bell, agreed not to buy tomatoes from that particular grower any more.

We also helped with passing the Emergency Heat bill5 into law in California, to reduce the number of deaths from heat stress in farmworkers. So many farmworkers were dying from heat exhaustion. We helped organize a press conference with one of our state senators, and we were the only student organization there. It was in the middle of a field, at twelve o’clock noon, right when the sun is strongest. All these reporters had to walk through the dirt and sit on buckets and listen to a state senator talk about why it was so important to get this law passed.

The Heat Illness Prevention section of the General Industry Safety Orders adopted in California on June 15, 2006.

Another student and I dressed up in all black. We were supposed to be grim reapers. We had crosses and flowers and candles for three men who had just passed away of heat exhaustion, one right after the other. We were basically representing that if the law didn’t pass, then when the workers walked toward the field, they were walking to their deaths. We almost passed out from heat exhaustion ourselves, but it all went great.

As a result of the law, farmers had to provide a shaded area. And a shaded area is not a tree. They had to provide a canopy or something like that. And they had to provide drinking water for farmworkers. The law also said that farmworkers could not be penalized for taking breaks if they felt sick. Before that, farmworkers wouldn’t take breaks for water or to rest for fear of being sent home or not being called to work the next day.

After that, we started getting up to thirty people or more at our meetings. But now the membership has dwindled. I was president for two years, but this past year somebody else has been president. I guess nobody runs something as well as the person who created it.

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