| Remarks by Kerry Kennedy, President
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights
UFW 20th Constitutional Convention dinner
May 19, 2016—Bakersfield, California
We wish to thank Arturo Rodriguez and recognize this evening’s other honorees:
Little Joe Hernandez;
Anna Guerrero, chief of staff for Mayor Eric Garcetti;
And two dedicated union members who have sacrificed for decades on behalf of their co-workers, Justo Tovar from Monterey Mushrooms and Olga Verlarde with D’Arrigo Brothers.
Receiving this honor for the efforts my organization—Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights—wages across the globe means so much to me because of my family’s long history with this movement.
We just came from La Paz in the Tehachapi Mountains, where Cesar Chavez lived and labored his last quarter century. We toured the beautiful grounds—including the Cesar Chavez National Monument. We paid respects at the gravesite and visited with Cesar’s widow, Helen Chavez, who is an old friend of my mother, Ethel Kennedy.
It was 50 years ago that my father, Robert Kennedy, came to Delano for the first time. That was six months into a bitter five-year strike by Filipino and Latino grape workers.
To everyone’s surprise—including Cesar’s—my father visited a vineyard picket line and spoke with the strikers at their union hall.
He was the first national political leader to embrace their struggle without reservation. When a reporter asked whether Cesar and the strikers were communists, my father retorted, “No, they’re not communists. They’re struggling for their rights.”
From that day a close personal bond was forged between Daddy and Cesar. Two years later, my father returned to Delano when Cesar broke his 25-day fast for nonviolence, calling him “one of the heroic figures of our time.”
Since then, our family and I repeatedly stood with Cesar and his cause. I learned about him, first from my father and later my mother. I was with Cesar last in 1988, when he ended his 36-day fast in Delano over the pesticide poisoning of farm workers and their children.
There was no quality Robert Kennedy admired more than courage. My mother said Daddy told her Cesar was the most moral man he knew.
“Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence,” my father said. “Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world, which yields most painfully to change.”
That may explain my father’s admiration for Cesar. They were about the same age. They were devoutly Catholic. They both had big families and they were both personally driven in their struggles against injustice.
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Just as Cesar and my father shared much in common during their struggles of five decades ago, the two organizations that continue their legacies today—the United Farm Workers and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights—share common purpose on behalf of many of the same people who still suffer in this world.
The UFW confronts the same virulent opposition from the same wealthy industry that sternly resisted the grape strikers’ modest demands 50 years ago. Yet, as one international union president observed, the UFW has shown remarkable success in the toughest organizing job in America.
We stand in admiration of the union contracts you recently negotiated or re-negotiated with some of the nation’s largest vegetable, strawberry, mushroom, wine grape, tomato and dairy companies.
Seventy-five percent of California fresh mushroom workers are now protected by UFW contracts. Justo Tovar and his fellow mushroom pickers at Monterey Mushroom now average forty-five to forty-eight thousand dollars a year—with a defined-benefit pension plan and full family medical, dental and vision benefits under the Robert F. Kennedy Medical Plan.
In addition to higher pay, Olga Velarde and her fellow lettuce and vegetable workers at D’Arrigo Brothers recently negotiated complete family medical, dental and vision coverage under the Robert F. Kennedy Medical Plan. Their employer pays 100 percent of the costs.
UFW contracts now cover about thirty percent of the fresh tomato workers in California. The average tomato picker at these unionized companies earns twenty-three dollars and eight-four cents an hour. They are the highest paid tomato workers in America.
All California farm workers—union and non-union—benefit from recent UFW legislative and regulatory victories.
Many lives have been saved through the first state rules in the nation to prevent death or illness from extreme heat the UFW convinced Governor Schwarzenegger to issue. You won more effective enforcement of those heat standards with last year’s settlement of lawsuits brought against the state by farm workers with help from the UFW.
This year’s UFW legislation in Sacramento would end the disgraceful 78-year exclusion of farm workers from earning the same overtime pay after eight hours a day that nearly all other American workers have enjoyed since the 1930s.
The UFW is also aiding thousands of farm workers outside of union contracts by helping them file major wage and hour class-action litigation to recover pay when they are cheated and to battle gender discrimination.
You are helping lead the national fight for immigration reform. The UFW negotiated with the growers to fashion the agricultural provisions of the bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill passed by the U.S. Senate in 2013. Arturo Rodriguez and the UFW worked directly with President Obama and the White House on his 2014 immigration executive action—making sure it covers hundreds of thousands of farm workers.
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With globalization transforming agriculture, the UFW has embarked upon novel programs to remedy miserable pay and conditions in other states—as well as in Mexico, Central and South America. You co-founded the Equitable Food Initiative—EFI. It is a “strange-bedfellow” consortium of unions, consumer and environmental groups, growers and major buyers.
Under EFI, retailers will only purchase from growers—and pay premium prices—if growers observe fundamental labor, safety and environmental standards. That premium pay enables employers to observe new worker rights:
—A minimum wage exceeding government-set minimums paid in U.S. states and other nations.
—Ending exclusions of farm workers from state and federal laws so they can get worker compensation and paid work breaks.
—Protections from pesticides exceeding federal requirements.
—Eliminating abuses in the recruitment of guest workers.
—And an absolute prohibition on sexual harassment.
The UFW has been working in Mexico since the mid-2000s, developing a network of partner organizations. You founded CIERTO, working with both workers and employers to remedy abuses of guest workers, stabilize the work force and stamp out fear.
Nicaraguan coffee workers are here to celebrate your partnership with a coffee farm and specialty roasters that is increasing workforce training, quality and stability—and boosting worker earnings.
The UFW Forced Labor Program attacks labor trafficking, debt peonage and slavery in U.S. agriculture through education, outreach and collaboration with law enforcement agencies.
The UFW is first to admit much more work remains. But the union has done a lot—and it keeps fighting.
* * *
To keep my father’s memory alive after his passing, our family formed what is now Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. We work on four continents to celebrate, support and give voice to the grassroots, frontline activists on the ramparts of the international human rights movement.
We have helped reduce infant mortality in a small village in Kenya and helped advocate for civil society in Swaziland, Zimbabwe and the Gambia.
We support battles to end child labor and empower the impoverished in Asia, and stand for civil society and against government repression in Bangladesh.
We continue my father’s championing of American farm workers in Florida and New York State. We work with partners across the Americas and Africa to end violence against women, to protect the vulnerable and halt corruption and genocide.
We help press Guatemalan officials to hold police and prosecutors accountable for an epidemic of gender violence by failing to investigate rapes and murders, prosecute perpetrators and sanction those found guilty.
We work to strengthen nations’ justice systems—to actually deliver justice for woman and girls who are victims of sexual and gender crimes.
We helped local activists overturn Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act. One of our pilot projects seeks to ban torture of LGBTQ people arrested under anti-sodomy laws there. And we continue opposing the spread of anti-LGBTQ statutes in Gambia, Nigeria, Eastern Europe and former Soviet states.
We support courageous Russian human rights advocates resisting police abuse, torture and human rights violations.
Our unique Speak Truth to Power human rights education program teaches one millions students around the world each year to be human rights defenders in their own communities across the United States and on four continents.
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At the end of this month, I’m leading a delegation to South Africa to commemorate the 50th anniversary of one of my father’s greatest speeches, at the University of Cape Town. White students there, haunted by Apartheid and seeking a different course, invited my father despite repression from their government. Robert Kennedy told the students their cause was not in vain—that while the night is very dark, dawn would come again. He said,
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
My father stood with Cesar Chavez and the strikers nearly 50 years ago because he admired their courage and perseverance. That’s why I proudly stand with you now.
Let us all continue striving to give life and voice in our own day and time to the values and passions that inspired so many people five decades ago—so those ripples of hope will keep forming mighty currents that sweep down walls of oppression and resistance.
Thank you. And Si Se Puede! |
