Migrant Justice (Justicia Migrante)

Year Founded: 2011

Migrant Justice addresses the root causes of farmworker poverty through its Milk with Dignity program, which rests on five key elements: a farmworker-authored Code of Conduct defining standards for wages, safety, housing, and dignified treatment; culturally appropriate worker education delivered on the clock; independent enforcement through the Milk with Dignity Standards Council that monitors compliance and addresses grievances; economic redistribution where corporations pay premiums to suppliers that fund compliance costs and worker benefits; and legally-binding agreements requiring corporate participation. 

The program reverses typical downward pressure on farmworker wages by leveraging corporate buying power to improve conditions and enforce rights. Milk with Dignity creates a win-win-win by benefiting workers through better conditions, farms through improved retention and premium funds, and companies through supply chain transparency and verifiable ethical sourcing claims.

Migrant Justice was born from tragedy in 2009 after eighteen-year-old José Obeth Santiz Cruz died on a Vermont dairy farm, revealing a community of approximately 1,200 immigrants sustaining the state’s dairy industry while facing extreme isolation, sub-minimum wages, 70+ hour work weeks, unsafe housing, and pervasive abuse. His death inspired the documentary Silenced Voices and catalyzed farmworkers—primarily from rural Mexico and Central America, displaced by U.S. policies and climate change—to organize regional assemblies with support from the Vermont Migrant Farmworker Solidarity Project. Community leaders emerged to form a statewide Farmworker Coordinating Committee, establishing Migrant Justice as the first and only organization founded and led by immigrant farmworkers in Vermont.