a catskill eagle

milkeemountainmama:

nom-chompsky:

super-eklectic1:

alwaysaurora:

If they explained to you it means you asked.

Also, I am assuming that if immigrants do pick the vegetables I eat they aren’t being forced to do it, tortured and killed. Are they?

“if immigrants do pick the vegetables I eat they aren’t being forced to do it, tortured and killed. Are they?”

i pray that this is a legit question and not sarcasm. I really hope so….

seriously. jfc.

from the state department’s trafficking in persons report, 2011:

The United States is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor, debt bondage, document servitude, and sex trafficking. Trafficking occurs for commercial sexual exploitation in street prostitution, massage parlors, and brothels, and for labor in domestic service, agriculture, manufacturing, janitorial services, hotel services, hospitality industries, construction, health and elder care, and strip club dancing. Vulnerabilities are increasingly found in visa programs for legally documented students and temporary workers who typically fill labor needs in the hospitality, landscaping, construction, food service, and agricultural industries. There are allegations of domestic workers, foreign nationals on A-3 and G-5 visas, subjected to forced labor by foreign diplomatic or consular personnel posted to the United States. Combined federal and state human trafficking information indicates more sex trafficking than labor trafficking investigations and prosecutions, but law enforcement identified a comparatively higher number of labor trafficking victims as such cases uncovered recently have involved more victims. U.S. citizen victims, both adults and children, are predominantly found in sex trafficking; U.S. citizen child victims are often runaways, troubled, and homeless youth. Foreign victims are more often found in labor trafficking than sex trafficking. In 2010, the number of female foreign victims of labor trafficking served through victim services programs increased compared with 2009. The top countries of origin for foreign victims in FY 2010 were Thailand, India, Mexico, Philippines, Haiti, Honduras, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic.

There’s one for every country you get your veggies from, not just the US.

The abuses of farmworkers are extensive, well documented and have long been organized around. See the united farmworkers, the coalition of immokalee workers and the southern law poverty center to name just a few of the most very well known and more recent organizers/organizations that have done work around the violence farm workers live with. See this traveling museum that the CIW’s put together to detail the history of slavery in florida and what it looks like today throughout the US industrial farms.

that there are SO many vegans who are completely unaware of even the most basic history of farm worker abuses suggests to me that vegans have a LOT of internal work to do in the community around racism, white supremacy and the history of labor in the US.

truly that was a weird question - because lots of vegans I know say they are against capitalism. So why would anyone expect, right off the bat, that workers are NOT being exploited? And who doesn’t know that vegetables are often picked by extremely vulnerable workers, immigrants with and without documents, people who don’t make a lot of money… So why wouldn’t you expect even MORE that they are being exploited?

(via marshmallowmegamama)