Thanksgiving break, for many of us college students, signals the annual festivities of conniving professors to cancel class, mad rushes to the airport and reuniting ourselves with the sweet aromas of home-cooking. However, as a student of this university community, I urge all of us, when we sit down at the dinner table with our family and dearest friends, to also give thanks for the farm workers who have harvested our food.

On the day after Thanksgiving in 1960, Edward R. Murrow’s documentary “Harvest of Shame” was aired, exposing millions of Americans to the daily degradation and oppression of the nations’ migrant agricultural workers. When Murrow asked growers in Florida about the working conditions of their workers, some of them admitted: “We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.”

Unfortunately, nearly 50 years later, working conditions for today’s migrant farm workers have hardly improved. Because farm workers continue to be excluded from the protections of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, they receive no overtime pay (despite 14-hour workdays), receive no health benefits of any kind, and are denied the right to form unions in order to change these conditions. In the most extreme cases, workers are forced to work against their will by the threat or use of physical violence. In the past 11 years, seven federally-prosecuted cases of modern slavery have been uncovered in Florida, involving more than 1,000 workers. These cases were tried using anti-peonage laws passed during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.

The farm workers who face these conditions in harvesting our food are not asking for empathy or even charity — they are depending on the consciousness of those who consume the food they pick. In 2001, a group of farm workers organized themselves as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), and with the support of students, faith communities and fair-food allies, they launched the Campaign for Fair Food to call on major purchasers of tomatoes to take responsibility in addressing the dehumanizing working conditions created by their high-volume, low-cost purchasing practices. In the eight years since, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway and Whole Foods have all entered into agreements with the CIW, committing to pay at least a penny more per pound to workers harvesting their tomatoes, implement a code of conduct in their supply chain to guarantee basic human rights protections, and work together with the workers in the development and implementation of these reforms.

During the four-year national boycott of Taco Bell, students at more than 300 high schools and universities engaged in coordinated actions, hunger strikes, marches and educational events, leading to the successful removal of 25 Taco Bell restaurants. These non-violent actions of civil disobedience by students around the country ultimately helped bring about the groundbreaking human rights agreements between migrant farm workers and the world’s largest fast-food corporations.

This Thanksgiving, while I wait my turn to give thanks, I will think of the farm workers who, far from their own families, have endured so much in harvesting the food at my family’s table. However, I will also give thanks knowing that thousands of other students will be saying the same words, and that together, we will work throughout the year to ensure that with each coming Thanksgiving, our food will increasingly be harvested with justice and dignity.

Laura Emiko Soltis is a fourth-year student in the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies from Northfield, Minn.