Approximately three million workers work in the fields in the US producing fruit, vegetables, nuts and other products crucial to the health and lives of everyone.
The average wage of a farm worker in the US is about $10,000-$12,000 per year. The backbreaking, bent-over, sped-up work is seasonal and mostly piecework. Farmworkers have one of the most dangerous jobs in the US! On the average, one farmworker dies every day because of sweltering heat, long hours without breaks, and working with dangerous pesticides.
Capitalism organizes work and everything else for the bosses' profits—at the sacrifice of workers' lives. The food industry is a glaring, brutal example.
In communism, the working class will collectively produce healthy food under conditions designed for workers' safety without poisoning the workers who grow the food or those who eat it.
Farm work and city work won't be separated. Without profits and bosses, workers will be liberated to learn and invent new ways to safely produce healthy food and to integrate work in the fields and urban life. Machinery will be used to help us, not further enslave us.

Comprehensive Immigration Reform: Increased Exploitation of Farm Workers
The bosses' new immigration bill that passed in the Senate will increase the superexploitation in the fields while seeking to win some long-time residents to the illusion that they can have more stability.
The bill has two categories for farmworkers. One is for workers who have lived and worked in the US since 2011. Farmworkers could apply to be put in a five year program at the end of which, if they have been continually working in the fields, they can apply for a green card. However, if they stop working in the fields, and work somewhere else, they would not qualify for this program, but instead for the 13 or more year program for other immigrant workers. During their five years of continual work in the fields, they would not get any benefits, including Obamacare. The other category is a new "guest" worker (bracero) program. In this program, workers would come from Mexico or elsewhere to work temporarily and then have to return home. This bracero program was used from 1942 (in the build-up to World War II) to 1964, to force immigrant workers into the worst slave labor conditions under threat of immediate deportation.
The bracero program is to guarantee a mass of workers under the direct control of the US government and bosses to work for the lowest wages and worst conditions in agriculture, construction and other jobs. It means that all farmworkers and other workers will face downward pressure on their already poverty wages and dangerous working conditions.
The bosses constantly try to pit worker against worker using their racist borders as a battering ram. In the face of this mounting attack, in the bosses' build up to wider war, workers need to build unity between immigrants and citizens, and between those who have been in the US longer and the coming braceros, who will be used as a threat against workers fighting the growers. The bosses use their borders to drive down the wages and conditions of all workers as they must produce more food inside the US for war. We need unity to destroy capitalism, its borders and its racist wage slavery. Farmworkers have a history of militantly fighting the racist growers in the US, Mexico, Central America and worldwide.
This time, our fight must be for communism. ICWP invites farmworkers to join us to mobilize for communism, to get rid of borders, and wage slavery to produce for profit, so that we can collectively produce only to meet the needs of the international working class.

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