We reached our optimum goal in just 20 days! 402 of you made it possible… 402 people… We had no idea our cause mattered to so many people, and your momentum has given us wings. That’s why we’re saying: “we can go further.”
When we designed this Goteo campaign, with all the uncertainty, we set a very modest OPTIMUM goal, which was really the bare minimum we needed to do the work until the end of the year: one part-time worker and translation. But the berry fields in Huelva cover 11,630 hectares, more than 100,000 people work in the berry harvest at the height of the season, and there are 44 settlements where people, migrant farmworkers, live in dire conditions without electricity or water… Responding to this reality is an overwhelming task, and we’ll never be able to reach everyone. But with the strength you’ve given us and the joy of being able to take our work further, we invite you to help us reach NEW HORIZONS. Let’s see how far we can go!
Faced with total abandonment by the bodies that should be protecting our rights, with the unsustainable situation we face in the fields and with the extremely harsh living conditions our sector imposes on us, we organized ourselves to create Jornaleras de Huelva en Lucha. We work together from a feminist, environmentalist and anti-racist perspective, determined to end decades of precarity and oppression.
An essential part of our work is union mediation, advice and legal support. To collect complaints, go out to the fields to inform workers of their rights (labor rights, social rights and access to healthcare), report abuses to the Labor Inspectorate and the courts, and more, we need at least one compañera working as a dedicated organizer, as well as translation.
Until now, we’ve been able to rely on our own resources for this information and mediation work. The funds that allowed our compañeras to work as dedicated organizers run out in April, and we won’t even be able to finish this year’s harvest season work.
Huelva is a very large province, and the fields and settlements are widely scattered. To keep challenging the system that oppresses us all, we need at least one dedicated organizer.
Being able to report and publicly share what’s happening is essential, and to do this in the fields, we need to stay independent. That’s why we thought a crowdfunding campaign on Goteo would be the best way to get support so we can finish our accompaniment work through the end of the berry season.
Support us to keep fighting for everyone’s rights!
Main features and goals of the crowdfunding campaign
For years, we’ve been learning and fighting, first to ensure that the existing collective agreement is guaranteed and respected, and to improve it not just on paper but in practice. Since 2000, workers have been hired in their countries of origin (Poland and Romania), and from 2006, the first groups of women arrived from Morocco to work in the strawberry fields. The human landscape of who we are, the farmworkers and the packing workers (in the warehouses), has been changing. The work is increasingly feminized and racialized, and this is no coincidence: it’s a way to make working conditions even more precarious. That’s why today a feminist and anti-racist perspective has become essential.
And this is where our work comes from. We have four lines of action: fighting for rights and reporting abuses; raising awareness and political advocacy; patching up the urgent precarity many of us are living in; and weaving anti-racist networks that unite us to achieve dignified living and working conditions.
UNION MEDIATION AND LEGAL SUPPORT
We need real agrarian reform and a change to the Immigration Law that regularizes the people who sustain food production, in order to improve the social and working conditions of all farmworkers:
-We provide union mediation and labor law advice in coordination with the Cooperativa de Abogadas Andaluzas in Seville.
-Together with other organizations and groups, we offer information and advice on social rights and regularization processes to compañeras and compañeros with irregular immigration status, especially regarding their right to register on the padrón (municipal register), an essential step to apply for residence and work permits.
-Together with Yo Sí Sanidad Universal and other organizations, we’ve created a platform of health workers through which we try to make it easier for migrant compañeras and compañeros working in the fields to access their right to healthcare.
-We denounce non-compliance with the GECCO order, which regulates the hiring of our compañeras from Morocco in their country of origin, and the total abandonment many of them face in case of illness or workplace accidents.
SOCIAL AWARENESS AND POLITICAL ADVOCACY
We carry out awareness and public denunciation campaigns through social media, media interviews and press releases, which have helped bring situations of abuse to light and reverse them. This work is vitally important, because only what is named exists.
MUTUAL AID
While we fight for everyone’s rights, we can’t turn a blind eye to the precarity many of the people working in the fields face. That’s why we help by connecting them with other existing resources or, at times, by providing direct assistance.
ANTI-RACISM
We work to eradicate the hate speech directed at the migrant population and to make it clear that this struggle is only possible through unity, for the rights of all people without distinction.
Why this is important
This project is for everyone who believes a fairer world is possible and who helps build it in different ways.
Many of us, as far as our means allow, try to consume responsibly: eating local, organically grown fruit and vegetables that haven’t reached our tables at the cost of precarious conditions for the people who grow them.
However, at the supermarket or our usual shop, it’s almost impossible to know how the workers who grew a crop were treated.
**Until there’s a “grown with human respect” label, supporting us in advancing farmworkers’ rights is one way to go ;)
Expanding access to and supporting improvements in the social, political, labor and human rights of all farmworkers is our driving motivation. A dignified life for everyone!**
Team and experience
This self-organized group of women farmworkers and packing workers has been taking action and mobilizing for years. But for about the last three years, we’ve been doing it in a more structured way, thanks to having two compañeras working as dedicated organizers.
We know that the circumstances in our sector and our province are repeated globally. That’s why we’re taking part in building a new union to serve as our tool: the Sindical Obrera Andaluza. We decided to join forces from the grassroots to create a space where we can organize in a completely different way from what we know, through cross-sector work, horizontality and a truly feminist approach. To do this, we’ve joined compañeras and compañeros from different sectors across the province, including Las Kellys (hotel housekeepers), the Association of African Workers and metal sector workers.
To carry out our lines of action and build synergies in the struggle, we weave networks and alliances of collaboration and care. In recent years, we’ve worked closely on projects and campaigns with:
-Cooperativa de Abogadas Andaluzas de Sevilla
-Oxfam Intermón
-Yo sí Sanidad Universal
-Women’s Link Worldwide
-Colectivo de trabajadores Africanos
-La Laboratoria
-Mundo en Movimiento
-Kellys Union Sevilla
-Asisti Cuenca Minera
-Asociación Las Kellys
-La Carpa
-Mujeres de la Otra Orilla
-Colectivo de Prostitutas de Sevilla
Channel 
