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Dulce Fernandes is associate director of the Network for New Energy Choices, a program of Grace.

Last week, at the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, a small audience gathered for the screening of H2 Worker. The film, which opened the coop’s monthly film series on food issues, is an award-winning documentary released in 1990 on the exploitation of Jamaican sugar cane harvesters working in Florida.  Shot clandestinely in the cane fields and the workers’ barracks, the film exposed the plight of thousands of  Caribbean men who came to Florida every year to work in conditions reminiscent of the days of slavery on sugar plantations. Working long hours under the scathing sun, cutting the cane by hand with rudimentary machetes, living in overcrowded barracks, poorly fed, denied medical treatment for on-site injuries and frequently cheated out of wages, these workers paid the human cost of a global system that perpetuated their exploitation.

While the sugar cane cutters in Florida have since been replaced by mechanical harvesting, that global system, and the guest worker program (under the H2 visa that gives name to the film), continue to bring thousands of workers to the United States every year. This podcast is a conversation with Cathleen Caron, executive director of Global Workers Justice Alliance, on the plight of H2 workers and other immigrant farm workers employed in the U.S. agricultural sector today.  Caron cogently explains the role of workers’ rights and fair labor practices in sustainable agriculture and talks about pending legislation and other avenues to protect immigrant farm laborers.

Cathleen Caron, executive director of Global Workers Justice Alliance