The Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs reminds us who makes most of our meals possible:

On Labor Day, farmworkers will go to work. They have been going to work on Labor Day just like it was any other day, ever since the holiday was established 122 years ago. As manual laborers performing the most difficult and often very complex tasks in order to feed the rest of us, farmworkers should be the first to get a day off as a reward for working the rest of the year. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

"Farmworkers harvest the food that other Americans eat at their Labor Day picnics and barbecues,” says Daniel Sheehan, Executive Director of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs. “The fact that they themselves can’t afford the time or the money to eat that food flies in the face of the core values this country was meant to uphold.”Fortunately, the National Farmworker Jobs Program, authorized under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), provides an avenue for farmworkers to advance. Through it, farmworkers are able to train and up-skill for more stable and secure employment in and out of the agriculture industry, and improve their lives and earn those paid holidays, too, now mostly denied to them...

The Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs (AFOP) has been an advocate for migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the United States since 1971. The thread that binds the Association is the concept that training and education can provide a launching pad to a better and more stable life for the workers who plant, tend, and harvest the crops that Americans consume at their tables.