PNN - Interviews Jeannie Economos

Join News Director Rick Spisak

Jeannie Economos has worked for over 25 years on issues of environmental justice, immigrants’ rights, and labor.  Since 2007, Jeannie has been the Pesticide Safety and Environmental Health Project Coordinator for the Farmworker Association of Florida (FWAF) http://www.floridafarmworkers.org/. She coordinates trainings in Florida that teach farmworkers how to identify workplace violations of Worker Protection Standards, and healthcare providers how to recognize pesticide exposure. They annually train over 500 farmworkers on their rights and protections in the workplace and how to protect themselves and their families from pesticide exposure.  Jeannie is also engaged in local, state, national and international coalitions and collaborations related to farmworker rights, health and safety, and pesticide reduction.  From 1996-2001, she served as FWAF’s Lake Apopka Project Coordinator, addressing the issues of job loss, displacement and health problems of the farmworkers who worked on those farmlands before they were closed in 1998.  The bird mortality crisis in 1998-99 turned her focus to the pesticide-related health problems of the former Lake Apopka farmworkers who had been exposed to the same damaging organochlorine pesticides that were implicated in the bird deaths.