First, a bit of context…
The CIW’s Silvia Perez (pictured on the right during last week’s Freedom Fast), has spent the past six years waking up as early as 4 am to drive through the dawn to tomato, strawberry, and pepper fields across the state of Florida and up the East Coast as far as New Jersey. Over those six years, she and her fellow education team members have taught tens of thousands of her fellow farmworkers about their rights — including the right to work free from sexual violence, an abuse so common that fully 80% of farmworker women report being subjected to sexual harassment or assault at work — under the Fair Food Program.
Indeed, along with several other longtime CIW leaders, women and men, Silvia has spent the past seventeen years, since the launch of the Campaign for Fair Food in 2001, organizing day in and day out to win the power to enforce farmworkers’ human rights in the fields — including the right to work free from sexual violence. In the process, Silvia and her colleagues have helped countless farmworker women successfully defend their rights and have transformed an entire industry.
And today, the Fair Food Program (FFP) that Silvia and her colleagues built is widely recognized as the only program that has successfully put a stop to sexual assault at work for low wage workers in this country. The FFP is being studied by experts from the halls of academia, to European capitals, to the inner circles of the Time’s Up movement as a model for protecting the rights of tens of millions of women around the globe. Their efforts over the past two decades have attracted the attention of human rights observers from the White House to the United Nations. They have received a Presidential Medal, the Anti-Slavery Hero Award from the State Department, and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant for their groundbreaking achievements.
Yet this week, Wendy’s spokesperson Heidi Schauer accused Silvia and her colleagues at the CIW of “trying to exploit the positive momentum that has been generated by and for women in the #MeToo and Time’s Up movement to advance their interests,” in an article published Wednesday in the Huffington Post.
Wendy’s accused farmworker women of exploiting the Time’s Up movement.
Wendy’s should never be allowed to speak about the Time’s Up movement again.
No comments:
Post a Comment