Project Description
I had the opportunity to work with Dillon Honcoop when I was at Cascade Radio Group before starting Swell Media Solutions. He’s passionate about farming and farmworkers’ rights. He comes from a farming family and many of the people in his community are farmers and farmworkers. He recently reached out to Swell to ask for our help with creating an image that captured an issue he’s working on to support farmworkers. The campaign is Let Us Work and we’re running ads on Google, Social and YouTube to help inform the public.
The Issue: Farmworkers have been voicing their frustrations with Washington State’s overtime law which mandates that employees receive time and half after 40 hours of work. While in many industries this is a wonderful thing for workers! But in a seasonal industry like farming (or fishing), it doesn’t work. Farmers have very thin margins as they don’t set the price of their products, the price of fuel and equipment has skyrocketed, and to make ends meet they’re dependent on the weather for good crop yields.
There is a short window of time each season where it’s critical for farms to operate long days to harvest their crops, while the remainder of the year is slow for work. Enforcing the mandatory overtime law on farmers has forced them to limit farmworker hours, which means workers are now working two and three jobs to make the earnings they need during their season. Because of this, the workers have banned together asking law makers to make a seasonal exemption for the overtime law, allowing them the right to choose the hours they work. Learn more about the issue here.
Our team created this design to help the workers get their message across to the public.
