Wealth & Money Quote by Cesar Chavez

Chavez frames inequality the way organizers actually experience it: not as an abstract moral failing, but as an accounting trick. The punch of the quote is its repeated, courtroom-simple question - who gets the risks, who gets the benefits - as if the system could be made just by forcing it to answer out loud. That repetition matters. It turns exploitation into a ledger, and once you see the columns, the deal looks obscene.

The intent is agitational and diagnostic. Chavez is directing attention to a quiet feature of modern capitalism: corporations monetize upside while exporting downside. "Given" is the dagger. Risk is not a natural hazard that happens to workers and consumers; its distributed, assigned, offloaded. The "unsuspecting consumer" line widens the coalition beyond the fields, implying that harm travels through supply chains and into kitchens and bodies - pesticides, unsafe food, hidden costs - while the branding promises cleanliness and choice.

Subtext: the marketplace isn't a neutral arena. Its tilted by information gaps and power gaps. Workers with the least leverage absorb health risks, wage volatility, and retaliation; consumers absorb uncertainty and externalities; executives and shareholders collect profits insulated by distance, lawyers, and plausible deniability.

Contextually, Chavez is speaking from the farmworker movement's front lines, where the glamorous story of American abundance depended on labor treated as disposable and often invisible. The quote works because it strips away sentimental narratives about "hard work" and "job creation" and replaces them with a single moral audit: if you don't share risk, you haven't earned the reward.