Word: grapes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Since 1962, the United Farm Workers (UFW) of America and Cesar Chavez, its founders and president, have relied on the support and compassion of the American people. In the first grape boycott, from 1965 to 1970, farm workers and UFW volunteers, including many students, successfully convinced millions of Americans to stop buying California table grapes...
...Farm Workers won the boycott in 1970, and for the first time in this country's history, grape growers in California (over 95 percent of them) signed contracts with their workers. These first contracts guaranteed safe and decent working conditions for farm workers, secured jobs, ended child labor and banned the use of toxic pesticides like DDT, Dieldren and Aldrin, which threatened the lives of farm workers and consumers...
Unfortunately, since 1980 Republican administrations in California, who get a large portion of their financial backing from agribusiness, have shamefully denied farm workers their legal rights. As a result, the working conditions of farm workers rapidly declined in the 1980s. The state of grape workers and their children today, in 1991, is worse than it was 30 years ago, when Chavez first set out to eliminate the injustices of agricultural work...
...uncontrolled and reckless use of toxic pesticides by grape growers demonstrates how helpless farm workers and their children are without protection. In 1988, 12 million pounds of pesticides were used on grapes alone in California; one-third of these pesticides are known to cause cancer. This inordinate use of toxic pesticides poisons and kills farm workers and their children. In McFarland, the rate of cancer diagnosed among children is 800 percent the normal rate. Fourteen children in this grape-growing community of 6000 have been stricken with cancer since 1985; six have already died...
...Earlimart, 15 miles from McFarland, six children have been diagnosed with cancer since 1988; the rate in Earlimart is 1200 percent the expected rate. One of these children, Monica Tovar, died earlier this year. Seven children in Fowler, another grape-growing community, have been diagnosed with cancer since 1984. The World Institute estimates that toxic pesticides poison over 300,000 farm workers in the United States every year...