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Thousands of farm workers in the Mexican state of Baja California walked out of the fields on Tuesday, March 17, at the peak of the winter harvest season. This strike pits against each other two diametrically-opposed social forces. On the one side, there are some of the biggest and richest companies in the world. The large farms in Baja, about 200 miles south of San Diego, specialize entirely in produce for the U.S. market – for big companies that we all know: Walmart, Safeway, Kroger, Albertsons, and others. Mexico’s produce exports to the U.S. are a business worth more than 7.5 billion US dollars a year. On the other side are fruit pickers, the vast majority of whom are indigenous people from the southern states of Mexico. Many of them are illiterate and don’t even speak much Spanish. Trying to escape extreme poverty, they have migrated hundreds of miles north, only to be caught up in extremely bad working and living conditions. The companies pay the fruit pickers as low as 7 dollars a day for more than 10 hours of back-breaking work in the sun – if they pay them at all. The bosses often withhold the pickers’ wages in order. . . full at: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/mexican-farm-workers-strike/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
