The closest that the average UF student comes to seeing the working conditions on an American farm is the occasional visit to FarmVille. (Well, for some unfortunate souls, this has become an all-too-frequent visit.)
While the riveting game is enough to capture the attention of more than 60 million Facebook users (we still don't know how), it lacks a few crucial elements of reality.
Most glaring among them is the absence of farmworkers. In reality, roughly one million laborers, many of whom are unorganized immigrants, toil on farms every year to produce food and other consumer goods we take for granted.
With the interests of these too-often invisible farmworkers in mind, a coalition of student groups met at the UF Foundation's Fall Board Meeting on Saturday to protest low wages and poor working conditions of tobacco farmworkers in North Carolina.
Rumored to be in attendance was UF alumna Susan Ivey, CEO of R.J. Reynolds, the second-largest tobacco company in the U.S.
With the power a firm like R.J. Reynolds holds over its suppliers, labor activists may find success in lobbying Ivey for a wage increase plan similar to the penny-per-pound surcharge that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers was able to squeeze out of fast food companies like Burger King.
If correctly implemented, a plan like this could increase costs for cigarette consumers by trivial amounts, while dramatically increasing the wages of farmworkers.
Now if these activists could lobby FarmVille to incorporate underpaid, exploited farmworkers into the game, maybe UF students would take notice of this issue.
