Migrant Justice, a Vermont-based, farmworker-led organization, is pushing for fair wages for the workers that underpin the US dairy industry.
Enrique Balcazar remembers the disillusionment he felt the day he arrived in Vermont from Mexico to work on a dairy farm for the first time.
He was excited to begin a promising new life in America, with opportunities and comforts he could never have imagined back home. But this fantasy was quickly shattered by the harsh reality of dairy farming.
“When I got there, I saw that I was going to be living in an old trailer all by myself,” he says. “No cellphone service. No internet. Just totally alone and isolated. That was my first shock.”
When Balcazar began work a few days later, he didn’t know how to do the job and didn’t understand the language. But he immediately began putting in long hours, seven days a week.
He was excited when pay day came around and he got his first check. “When I opened it, my heart sank. I was only getting paid $3 to $4 an hour,” he says. “For the work I was doing and as hard as I was working, it was much less than I expected.”
Balcazar approached the farm manager, who told him, “it is what it is,” and if he stuck around, he might eventually get a raise.
Months passed, but the raise never came.
Balcazar’s story is typical for undocumented migrant farmworkers in Vermont, who now comprise the overwhelming majority of dairy workers in the state.
Dairy farms in the region are under immense pressure to cut costs due...
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