Ramon Zepeda (L) is a program director at Student Action with Farmworkers, a non profit that works to improve the conditions for farmworkers throughout the South. Here he is leading a Know Your Rights training session.
Ramon Zepeda
2 of 3
Ramon Zepeda sits in a corn field in Mexico with his brother. The two siblings were helping their father fertilize the fields.
Ramon Zepeda
3 of 3
Ramon passes out flyers about a worker's union in front of a chicken plant in Morganton, N.C. He has spent much of his career supporting workers' efforts to get better wages and safer working conditions.
Ramon Zepeda
Foreign-born farmworkers are vital to the American food system. But while most of the produce that ends up on American plates is handpicked, the day-to-day lives of people laboring in the fields still remains more or less invisible. Ramón Zepeda is a 28-year-old working to change visibility of farmworkers.He grew up in a small farming community in Jalisco, Mexico. Most of his family members have spent time in the fields, and he has devoted his life to working in solidarity with underrepresented workers.
In high school, he helped start a club to support other migrant students; in college, he documented the working conditions at a North Carolina pork processing plant, and today he works as a program director at Student Action with Farmworkers. Host Frank Stasio talks with Zepeda about his commitment to social justice work and life path from Jalisco, Mexico to Raeford, North Carolina.
Anita Rao is an award-winning journalist, host, creator, and executive editor of "Embodied," a weekly radio show and podcast about sex, relationships & health.
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.
The United Auto Workers union is celebrating a huge win at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee. Organizers hope they can continue a push into the rest of the south, including North Carolina and South Carolina, which have very low union participation rates.
A deadly fungus could destroy most of the world’s supply of Cavendish bananas, but a company in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park is trying to save the banana through gene editing.
A state Court of Appeals panel ruled unanimously Tuesday that a trial judge erred when he rejected claims by the North Carolina Bar and Tavern Association and private bars that their constitutional rights to earn a living and for equal treatment under the law had been violated.
The CROPS Project, funded by the National Science Foundation, will build a 42-county Ag Tech Corridor with the help of several universities across North Carolina.
Unlike in many states, North Carolina public school teachers can not collectively bargain contracts. Nor can they legally strike. The situation has broad effects for public school employees.