HBO's 'Last Week Tonight' with John Oliver spotlights farmworkers' plight
HBO television series "Last Week Tonight" and host John Oliver recently shed light on the exploitive conditions experienced by many of the more than 1.5 million hired farm laborers in the U.S. who harvest fruits and vegetables.
In the segment, Oliver underlined the uncomfortable truth that while the U.S. acknowledges that farmworkers are essential to the U.S. economy, these same workers often lack the most basic protections that other workers in the U.S. enjoy.
Throughout the piece, Oliver highlighted ways individuals and consumers can support and advocate for essential farmworker protections. One organization the TV host spotlighted as championing farmworkers was the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
The worker-led human rights organization, while recognized by many in fresh produce for its human rights work combatting modern-day slavery, also runs the Presidential Medal and MacArthur Fellowship award-winning Fair Food Program — a partnership initiative between farmworkers, farmers and retail food companies that ensures humane wages and working conditions.
“The segment was the latest in a growing wave of recognition of the Fair Food Program’s unique success and will surely add much-needed momentum to the expansion of the program as high-bar growers and buyers seek out the one, gold-standard program to ensure social responsibility and certify ethical production,” Lucas Benitez, co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, told The Packer.
This recognition by Oliver came on the heels of a CIW march on March 18, 2023, where advocates and workers walked from Pahokee, Fla., to Palm Beach, Fla., on a 50-mile, five-day trek championing the Farm Food Program and sharing the message of farmworker freedom with Florida residents.
Marching for a world free from abuse and exploitation
“We launched our recent 50-mile, five-day march outside a dilapidated labor camp in Pahokee, Fla., where workers trapped in the latest major slavery prosecution were housed. Two workers escaped from that camp by hiding in the trunk of a car to call the CIW and report the operation,” Benitez said.
During the march, workers carried a globe depicting the two worlds farmworkers face in this country today, he said.
“In one world, workers still regularly face abuse and exploitation, sometimes as extreme as the slavery case that sparked our march,” Benitez said. “While in the other world — the world of the Fair Food Program — workers have a voice on the job, work in partnership with their employers and enjoy the protected ability to ensure that their fundamental human rights are respected. The difference between those two worlds couldn’t be more stark.”
This past week, Oliver's show cast a bright light depicting these two worlds, he added.
On one hand, Oliver catalogued the many indignities visited upon workers on many farms today, and rising, with more risk of even greater abuse due to the increased use of H-2A workers, who are uniquely vulnerable due to their visa requirements, Benitez said.
"On the other hand, he also highlighted the Fair Food Program as the only social responsibility program in the industry today up to the task of protecting workers and forging a more modern, more humane working environment, one truly worthy of praise,” Benitez said.
