MSNBC Reporting Describes Same Farm Worker Housing Conditions Seen by NFWM Delegation

Michael Szpak (AFL-CIO), Rick Goodman & Carol Blythe-Goodman (Alliance of Baptists), David Wildman (Executive Secretary, Human Rights & Racial Justice, Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church), John Hill (Director for Economic and Environmental Justice, General Board of Church & Society of the United Methodist Church), Virginia Nesmith (NFWM Exec Director), Ryan Nilsen (NC NFWM staff), David Anderson (Pullen Memorial Baptist Church)

On October 7^th,  NFWM led a delegation of religious leaders to North Carolina to visit farm worker labor camps there with staff of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee(FLOC).  Members of the National Council of Churches Justice and Advocacy Commission and representatives of the United Methodist Church and the Alliance of Baptists saw for themselves the deplorable housing conditions that North Carolina farm workers must return to each day.

The delegation met with workers from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras in crowded bedrooms or standing outside. There is no place to receive visitors in the camps these workers call “home” for months or years. Several workers said they hadn’t seen their families in over five years.

These same conditions have been reported by MSNBC, which went to North Carolina to follow up on the report recently released by Oxfam America & FLOC, “State of Fear: Human Rights Abuses in North Carolina’s Tobacco Industry.” (see article in our News section and find a link there to the report.)

To read and view MSNBC’s reporting, click here, “Migrants’ woes: bed bugs, foul toilets, illness.”

Labor Camp Photos by David Anderson