Forty-five years ago, and just days before announcing his campaign for the presidency, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy traveled to California to join labor activist Cesar Chavez in breaking a fast on behalf of farmworker rights. It was a towering moment in American labor history and a day that is ingrained in both of our childhood memories.
This year, as presidents of the American Federation of Teachers and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, we've joined together to highlight the work of Librada Paz, a farmworkers' rights activist in New York who is carrying forward the vision of justice Robert Kennedy and Cesar Chavez fought for in 1968.
At the age of 15, Librada Paz and her sister migrated to the United States to join their brothers working in the fields. But the life they found was no simple bounty of opportunity. Chasing seasonal work around the country, they shared living quarters with 16 people in substandard housing and toiled through 16-hour days in grueling heat, surviving physical and sexual abuse by unregulated farm supervisors. After 15 years of hardship, Paz left the field behind, and earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology. But the plight of farmworkers never left her mind and she returned to the center of this struggle for labor rights — this time as an activist.
Today in New York, where Robert Kennedy was a senator, farmworkers are denied a day of rest each week, overtime pay, collective bargaining rights, statutory temporary disability insurance, and a safe and sanitary work environment.
The segregation of farmworkers in America's labor laws is no accident. It's a legacy of injustice left to us by the Dixiecrats who in 1935 threatened to block President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's National Labor Relations Act unless it excluded the two categories of workers who were then principally African-Americans: farmworkers and domestic workers.
Last year, New York enacted groundbreaking labor protections for domestic workers to right this nearly 80-year-old wrong. Now it is time do the same for those who grow and harvest our food.
Together, we are joining Librada Paz in her call for New York to pass the Farm Workers' Fair Labor Practices Act, a bill sponsored by Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan and State Sen. Adriano Espaillat currently under consideration by the state Legislature.
As part of this campaign for justice, we've partnered to disseminate a lesson on Librada Paz and other human rights defenders like her by making the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights' education initiative Speak Truth To Power available at http://www.sharemylesson.com, a digital platform for teachers that features nearly 300,000 free education resources and teaching tools. Speak Truth To Power is an educational curriculum taught in classrooms across the state and as far away as Cambodia and Romania, that introduces students to the stories of human rights defenders and empowers them to take action as defenders themselves.
The art of teaching, coupled with Share My Lesson's digital platform, brings history and current issues to life for students everywhere, whether they live in Buffalo or the Bronx.
Through these tools, New York students—and their teachers—have the power to follow in Robert Kennedy and Cesar Chavez's footsteps and become ambassadors for change themselves.
And working together, this network of activists will make sure 2013 is the year that we pass the Farm Worker Fair Labor Practices Act, to end one of the last vestiges of Jim Crow in New York and realize the dream of labor equality once and for all.
Randi Weingarten is president of the American Federation of Teachers. Kerry Kennedy is president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.