… a free and voluntary, private, unincorporated membership association of community activists, students, seasonal workers, clergy and other concerned residents. We are dedicated to materially assisting seasonal, farm and service workers struggling for collective solutions to their poverty conditions through their own independent, community-backed organizing efforts.

Membership in FSSW is open to all who desire to build a vehicle through which concerned individuals and groups can help publicize the plight, and contribute to the positive actions, of seasonal, farm worker and service worker organizing drives. FSSW volunteers give of their time, skills and resources to help fight for improved living and working conditions in our lowest-income communities. By necessity, this began with and continues to this day to include fundamental survival needs such as emergency food, clothing and preventive medical care to help make it possible for low-income workers to take on organizing campaigns for long-term change.

FSSW volunteers aid in production of publications, carry out community outreach and other means of publicity about low-income workers organizing efforts. FSSW volunteers also participate in enlarging the resources and involvement necessary for expansion of critically-needed benefit programs built by organizing drives of low-paid workers. FSSW has no paid employees, provides no form of remuneration to its staff from top to bottom, accepts no government funding nor any moneys with strings attached, and instead exists only through the dedication and generosity of its membership. Outside its stated goal, no other aim or aspiration is being served.

FSSW was established in April 1982 by a group of individuals in the Portland, Oregon area who had been doing informal support work for low-income worker organizing drives since the fall of 1981.