Local Hero Awardee: Pioneer Valley Workers Center
Since 2003, CISA has recognized farmers, institutions, businesses, and everyday community members whose work helps sustain local agriculture. The Pioneer Valley Workers Center was presented with a 2026 Local Hero Award at CISA’s annual meeting on April 14, 2026, with these remarks:
The Pioneer Valley Workers Center is a grassroots, worker-led organization that works to build power for and with immigrant workers in our region.
Farm work is low-wage: the median annual income in Massachusetts is slightly over $40,000, in a state where a minimum living wage amounts to around $60,000 per year. It is physically demanding and often dangerous, and farm workers have limited access to health insurance and health care. And the bulk of this challenging, undervalued, and absolutely essential work is done by immigrants. According to the USDA, around 70% of crop workers in the U.S. are foreign-born, and 42% do not have work authorization.
This is not a system that emerged out of nowhere. Agricultural work in the United States has taken the form of indentured servitude, and then slavery, and then sharecropping. Guest worker programs established in response to labor shortages during wartimes brought thousands of workers from Central and South America into the United States, followed each time by violent deportations and anti-immigrant rhetoric when their labor was no longer needed to feed the American populace.
Modern labor standards, including the federal minimum wage and overtime laws, were first institutionalized through the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which entirely exempted farmworkers — a decision that was grounded in racism and nationalism.
The Pioneer Valley Workers Center was established in 2014 and it came out of the recognition that undocumented and immigrant workers have largely been excluded from the traditional labor movement. The Workers Center’s membership includes many farm workers, construction workers, and domestic workers, and a central value of their work is that it is led by and exists for immigrant workers. So throughout the organization – from the worker leaders, to the Executive Director Claudia Rosales, to the Board of Directors, the Workers Center’s leadership is made up of the people that the organization serves, working together to share knowledge, to identify shared problems, and to work together towards solutions through grassroots organizing.
The specifics of the Workers Center’s work has changed and expanded over the past 12 years, and its history includes incubating Riquezas Del Campo, a now-independent farm in Hatfield, and advocacy for the Work and Family Mobility Act, which passed in 2023 and which gives residents of Massachusetts the right to a drivers’ license, regardless of immigration status. Since then, the Workers Center has continued the work of making sure people know about that right and helping them to access it. Ongoing work includes information-sharing among workers, regular food distributions to families, and advocacy for the Fairness for Farmworkers Act, which is designed to bring the laws around farm employment into alignment with the laws regulating other industries: abolishing the lower agricultural minimum wage, requiring overtime pay for farm workers, and requiring regular paid breaks and time off.
Over the past year, as we all know, the United States has gotten a lot more dangerous for immigrants. We’re in a moment where federal government agents are routinely violating immigrants’ civil rights, violently detaining people, including children, and murdering resisters. This is a time when we can see the real importance, and the real power, of organizations that exist to serve immigrant needs and interests. The Workers Center is a founding member of the Luce Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts – a statewide, rapid response network that was born out of discussions at the Workers Center’s Springfield office. Luce runs a hotline that anyone can call if they think they see ICE in the community, and Luce will send trained volunteers to verify. Its main goal is to combat fear, panic, and misinformation, and to make sure that immigrants have verified information they can use to keep themselves and their communities safe.
Alongside this statewide work, the Workers Center has been offering preparedness clinics – because the Workers Center is active on the ground, the content of these trainings is responsive to real threats. Their Associate Director Ari Keigan told me that they have really shifted from a “know your rights” model to “how can we do everything possible to keep ICE interactions from happening, and how can we best protect ourselves and our families when they do?” because the reality is that people knowing and exercising their rights isn’t providing them with protection. An important piece of this has been work in tandem with CISA and other partners: educating farm owners about how they can put practices into place, like designating private areas on the farm and making sure they have up to date emergency contact information for all workers, to offer protection and support to their employees.
There is not yet agreement among all stakeholders around the Fairness for Farmworkers Act, but it’s critically important to continue to have ongoing, candid dialogue to get there, and everyone deserves to have a voice at the table. That is how we get to better, fairer policies. And I think that our current political moment, especially, highlights how essential it is to have an organization that is led by immigrant workers, focused on the needs of that specific community, building power and serving as a political voice. I know that conversations with the Workers Center have helped us at CISA expand our understanding of the issues facing farm workers, and helped us shape our own response to the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrant communities. In my conversation with Ari, she said, “we all know that farm workers are essential, but we have to remember that they are human beings. It’s not tenable to have essential workers but disposable human beings. We have to flip that understanding.” When I think about the moment that we’re in, one time in the long continuum of our history, it’s a stark reminder of how far we haven’t come, and how needed the Workers Center really is – alongside their peers advocating for farm workers and immigrants all throughout the country.
So, for providing essential services for immigrant workers, for serving as a voice for immigrants through advocacy and in the public sphere; and for leading the way in response to the violent and illegal actions of the federal government against immigrants, I’m proud to present this Local Hero award to the Pioneer Valley Workers Center.
