Dive Brief:
- Del Monte Fresh will pay $1.2 million to settle a federal class-action lawsuit related to the living conditions of migrant workers at the company's plantations in Hawaii.
- The allegations in the lawsuit were shocking—workers stripped of their passports so the couldn't flee, forced to live in uninhabitable structures without access to food, threatened with torture.
- The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed the lawsuit alleging mistreatment of workers over a three-year period.
Dive Insight:
We wish we could say that we'd never heard of anything like this before. But the truth is that the history of the produce industry is filled with nightmare scenes of exploited migrant workers. Anyone of an age sufficient enough to remember Cesar Chavez knows what we mean.