farm workers

EPA Won’t Ban Chlorpyrifos Pesticide Despite Proof that It’s Dangerous

Chlorpyrifos is a pesticide that has the potential to harm both children and farm workers, but the EPA – the same agency that drew these conclusions – says it will not ban the chemical.
On March 26, 2017, EPA chief Scott Pruitt rejected his agency’s own chemical safety experts who, under Barack Obama, had recommended that chlorpyrifos – one of the nation’s most widely used insecticides – be permanently banned from agricultural use nationwide because of the danger it poses to farm workers. [1]

The Boycott Legend Sacrifices the Movement

About three months after Cesar Chavez died in April 1993, The Nation magazine published an essay by Frank Bardacke on the famed farmworker union leader-organizer. Entitled “Cesar’s Ghost: Decline and Fall of the UFW,” the article asserted that the United Farm Workers was no longer primarily a farm worker organization, but instead a “fundraising operation, run out of a deserted tuberculosis sanitarium,” one “staffed by members of Cesar’s extended family.”