MEMBERSHIP
WHO ARE OUR MEMBERS
EFWA’s members are low-income workers who do farm work, landscaping, construction, care for the elderly and disabled, do cleaning and more.
WHY WE ORGANIZE
In unity there is strength! By joining together we can build a floor that no one can fall below and unite with students, small businesses, clergy and professionals.
WHAT ARE OUR GOALS
Our goal is to eliminate poverty in all its forms everywhere, which also requires stopping the environmental destruction of our planet.
Illustration by John H. Howard
ORGANIZE
From the Farms to the Streets:
Uniting Suffolk County’s Farm and Service Workers
EFWA’s members work on Suffolk County’s farms planting, picking, pruning, packing and doing other farm work that makes our region’s thriving agricultural economy possible. Some of these workers migrate thousands of miles to Long Island to work the harvest. Other EFWA members work in restaurants, hotels, wineries, as home health aides, ride-share workers and other service jobs. While essential to the economic well-being of our region, farm and service workers often face precarious living and working conditions, especially as the cost of food, housing, utilities and other necessities rises.
In order to change these conditions, workers need to have organization. EFWA members and volunteers organize resources requested by low wage workers, such as clothing, food, space heaters, sun protection and cooling equipment, tick repellant, and deliver those resources to Suffolk County’s farm labor camps through Operation Camp Crew. EFWA volunteers also fill benefit requests for utility advocacy, legal advice, preventive medical care, job referral, seasonal budget savings programs and other benefits through our 11-Point Membership Benefit Program and Benefit Plan II program.
Low wage workers join EFWA as members and attend membership meetings to discuss how to expand self-help benefit programs and join other organizational activities, thereby learning organizing and leadership skills.
Sustainable Organization is
Here to Win, Here to Stay with EFWA!
EFWA provides a chance for workers to speak for themselves
No other interest save the workers’ themselves is served
Join as a member
JOIN
Membership is open to anyone who is, has been, or in the future may be employed in farm work or service work or other types of low-paid work – domestic work, temporary work or work done as an independent contractor. EFWA members are nursery workers and landscapers, they harvest row crops, work in vineyards and do other field work. Many are seasonal workers and have to find what work they can during the off-season. Other members are employed in Suffolk County’s burgeoning service industries and gig economy — in hospitality and food service, hotel and office maintenance, security and as delivery and ride share workers. They are the backbone of the economy, but often receive wages that don’t cover survival needs for a family. EFWA members also include those who worked when they could, and now are elderly and/or disabled and live on inadequate fixed incomes.
Build self-help membership benefits
BUILD
Members are entitled to share in a group of benefits, designed by members for members, that respond to the needs of farm workers and service workers in Suffolk County and throughout Long Island as identified by the workers themselves. As a self-help organization, members participate in the building, functioning and oversight of the benefit program. The Benefit Program is designed to meet as many of the immediate survival needs of our members as possible so that members can organize to eliminate the cause of their problems – poverty – at the root. The expansion of the program is overseen by the membership leadership body, the Suffolk County Workers Benefit Council (WBC) that oversees the organization’s benefit programs.
Lead house meetings in your area
LEAD
EFWA canvassers convey the message that we must become a united group to become a force to be reckoned with. Canvassers recruit interested members to host membership house meetings in their homes or yard, and invite newly signed members and other neighbors, family and friends to learn more about EFWA and how to join with others to forge long-term solutions to problems we face collectively. New or potential members have an opportunity to ask more detailed questions, raise concerns and get immediate input.
Coordinate action through the WBC
COORDINATE
The Suffolk County Workers Benefit Council (WBC) is a body of members who take on leadership roles in the organization. WBC decisions are made by consensus where membership delegates who represent fellow members from the same occupation, worksite or neighborhood determine the course of action EFWA will take towards problems and needs expressed by the Council members, and how the Benefit Program will grow in the interests of working people in Suffolk County and throughout Long Island.
Become a delegate
BECOME
As part of the WBC, members can take on a role as a delegate to bring the concerns of other members working in the same industry or living in the same neighborhood to the WBC meetings. Delegates publicize organizational activities and benefits available to association members and conduct visits to the farm labor camps and door-to-door canvasses in their neighborhoods, and help organize and run distributions of food, clothing and other supplies to other members.