Social Justice

This week, after months of hard work, we launched the new version of the MCN website. The improved functionality, and its new design and navigation will assist us in our important work to provide peer support, resources, innovative programs, and quality education to clinicians on the front line. Here are some of our favorite features of the new website:

Just in time for Thanksgiving week, a new movie about food justice called Food Chains came out this past Friday and chronicles the battle of southern Florida tomato pickers to secure fair wages and to improve working conditions through their Fair Food program.

As Thanksgiving week approaches, more and more attention has been given to the upcoming feast. But what about the leftovers? Over at NPR in association with Harvest Public Media, a series on food waste sums up what many of us already know: we waste too much food. As much as 40% of all food is wasted, according to Harvest Public Media, who wrote:

October is not just a big, long prelude to Halloween night; it’s also Fair Trade Month, when we celebrate the movement to provide third-world farmers and farmworkers a fair wage and safe working conditions through our purchases. Additionally, October is the start of the cocoa harvest in West Africa, the region that grows most of the world’s cocoa, some of which will likely end up in your child’s plastic jack-o-lantern bucket this evening.

With your help, MCN added more than 17,000 voices to the call for stronger workplace protections for our nation's farmworkers. 

La Madre - acrylic

The proposed revisions to the Worker Protection Standard have many positive elements and I, along and many others concerned about farm worker health applaud the EPA for this long-awaited proposal.  In particular, for the first time an age requirement has been proposed to determine who is eligible to handle pesticides.  However, for unknown reasons the proposed age requirement has been identified as age 16 when it should be age 18.   There is no rationale to suggest any minor, i.e.

Last week, President Obama and every member of Congress received a copy of Seth Holmes’ Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies.  For nearly two years, physician and anthropologist Seth Holmes lived and worked as a migrant farmworker.

A missing screw on his license plate may take a single father away from his daughter.

Today and tomorrow on Capitol Hill, more than a dozen farmworkers from across the nation are meeting with their members of Congress to call for the implementation of stronger protections for farmworkers from pesticides. MCN's Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Ed Zuroweste, MD, will join the farmworkers and a coalition of allied groups at a briefing for members of Congress and their staffers about the urgent need for an update to EPA's Worker Protection Standard. Here is the statement he will deliver today at the briefing: