Lucas Benitez
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filed under:
Food & Farming,
Social & Environmental Activism
Lucas Benitez is a farmworker and co-director of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. He is originally from Guerrero, Mexico, and he came to the U.S. when he was 16 to help support his five brothers and sisters. By organizing fellow migrant farmworkers, Lucas helped secure the first wage increase for tomato pickers in 20 years. He also exposed and stopped two slavery rings, and launched a Labor Action Rights program that collected nearly $100,000 in back wages. In 1999, Lucas was the recipient of the prestigious Do Something BRICK Award, which recognizes and honors ten outstanding leaders under the age of 30.
Learn more:
- Palm Beach Post - Editorial
- Mother Jones - Power to the Pickers
- The Progressive - Interview
Related Products & Presentations
- Lucas Benitez, champion of labor rights, left Mexico at age 14 to work in the fields in the US. Benitez has led campaigns for living wages, and ending farm worker slave camps. By organizing boycotts and hunger strikes, he and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers have forced the world's largest and richest fast-food chains to the negotiating table.
- Este campeón de los derechos de los trabajadores que salió de México a la edad de 14 años para trabajar en los campos en los E.E.U.U., ha conducido campañas para los salarios para sobrevivir, y para eliminar campamentos de esclavitud para los trabajador de granja. Organizando boicoteos y huelgas de hambre, él y la Coalición de los Trabajadores de Immokalee han forzado las cadenas más grandes y más ricas del mundo de comida rápida a la tabla de negociación.
