Labor Rights Groups Hold May Day Picket to Demand Hannaford Support Farmworkers
Members of Migrant Justice, the Southern Maine Workers Center and Maine DSA picketed Hannaford Supermarkets on May Day to ask the company to address low pay, poor working conditions and human rights violations in the dairy industry. For years, farmworkers and activists with Migrant Justice have been asking the supermarket chain to join the Milk with Dignity Campaign, which would require farms producing its supermarket brand milk to follow a set of worker-designed standards to improve wages, housing and the health and safety of farmworkers. However, so far the company has refused.
Migrant Justice member Yobani Morenotold Maine Public that after he came from Mexico to work on a Vermont dairy farm three years ago, he ended up working three shifts a day with little rest for low pay. He said when he was sick and couldn't work his pay was docked. But after the farm joined Milk with Dignity, it was monitored to ensure it complied with labor standards and conditions improved. Now he works shorter shifts, has days off, gets paid better and receives medical care when he gets sick. He said after visiting Maine dairy farms where farmworkers are mistreated, he hopes Hannaford will sign on with the campaign so they can enjoy the same benefits he has received through Milk with Dignity.
"I visited one couple who were living in housing that was provided by the farm, and they told me that they didn't have heating in the house," he said. "And then in the wintertime, they suffered a lot.”
The Milk with Dignity Campaign was founded by dairy workers after José Obeth Santiz Cruz — a young farmworker from Chiapas, Mexico — was killed in a horrifying and preventable workplace accident at a Vermont farm serving Ben & Jerry’s in 2009. The company has since signed on as a Milk with Dignity member.