ABOUT
Since our founding in 1974, EASTERN FARM WORKERS ASSOCIATION (EFWA) Central New York has signed up over 30,000 members who work at dairy farms, vegetable farms, orchards and greenhouses, as well as service workers, “gig” workers, warehouse workers and home health aides.
These workers perform labor essential to the economy, yet their pay leaves them vulnerable to eviction and hunger, lack of access to medical and legal services, and deprivation of other basic necessities. Decades of government policies have aided the increasing concentration of wealth at the top while condemning more and more workers to poverty wages and job loss.
In light of these conditions, low-income farm and service workers are uniting, along with family farms, local and regional businesses, students, religious and civic organizations, and others who are concerned, so together we can fight for an economy that works for all of us.
Founding EFWA members decided that EFWA would be 100% volunteer-run, and would neither seek nor accept government or other strings-attached funding. With so many working people living on the edge, EFWA’s strategy included developing a self-help membership benefit program, built on principles of self-help through members participating, with the alliance of others in the community. The benefit program delivers day-to-day necessities, teaches basic organizing skills to all who wish to learn, and provides a measure of stability to those whose precarious circumstances impact their ability to play an active role in organizing for change.
Benefits include emergency food, preventive health care through volunteer medical professionals, free legal education and advice through volunteer attorneys, and more (see our 11-point Benefit Program).
EFWA members have fought denials of health care, utility rate hikes, obstacles to employment, and much more. With farm workers suffering from dangerous heat waves, poor air quality from wildfire smoke, and lost income as growing seasons change, we’ve demanded that the government act to stop and reverse climate change. And we’ve spoken out against policies of those in power that help billion-dollar corporations, and that keep those of us in the productive economy divided and fighting each other.
Only by organizing together, starting with those, such as farm workers, who endure the harshest consequences of our economy and the policies that shape it, can we gain the strength to make real change that benefits all of us!
Begun in 1974…
Illustration by James Hoston
In this era, most farm workers in Central New York were African-American migrants, who followed the migrant stream all the way from Florida, Georgia and South Carolina where they worked during the spring and summer seasons to finish out the year picking apples in the Finger Lakes region after grading potatoes in Long Island. EFWA’s original membership were primarily migrant orchard workers in Wayne County.
Home-grown organizing won victories and spread…
Illustration by Raúl Colón
Farm workers and service workers banded together to fight their displacement by government-connected developers.
Farm worker members organized with local farmers to prevent the Immigration Reform and Control Act from destroying poor workers’ jobs and devastating the ability of local farms to survive without their workforces. Churches, students, lawyers and groups of small farmers and regional processors united behind EFWA members.
Members won $900 million in reductions of rate hikes that the Public Service Commission was prepared to hand to multiple utility companies.
From organizing farm workers in Wayne County only, EFWA has grown to work with low-wage workers and with farm workers in nine counties (and counting…).
Run 100% by volunteer power!
EFWA has always been all-volunteer, and always will be. We come together around our shared conviction that through organization we can make a difference, and that all of our futures are connected. All volunteers can train on-the-job in the basic organizing methods that have allowed us to grow and develop.
Self-help Membership Benefit Program
Members work together to organize needed benefits, involve the broader community, and defend each other from detrimental effects of government policies. The benefit program is not a charity, but mutual benefit.
Every Day A Victory…
Emergency food benefits filled daily
Thousands of pounds of fresh food distributed weekly to members enrolled in the Benefit Plan II budget-saving program
Preventive medical sessions at farm camps and medical education and information sessions by medical professionals every quarter
Volunteer attorneys provide legal education and advice