Note: For the next few days I'll be reporting from Eco-Farm, the annual conference held by the Ecological Farming Association of California. At Eco-Farm, some 1,400-1,500 organic farmers, Big Organic marketers, and sundry sustainable-ag enthusiasts pack into a rustic, beautiful seaside conference hall an hour-and-a-half south of San Francisco to talk farming amid the dunes.
The ever-excellent investigative writer Eric Schlosser kicked off Eco-Farm with a hard-hitting keynote. He noted the stark fact that "without agricultural surpluses, there can be no leisure -- and no writers." And he thanked the assembled for their work in the fields and groves.
Echoing the unsparing analysis in his landmark Fast Food Nation, Schlosser teased out the fascist elements inherent in industrial food: the worship of regimentation and control, the fetishization of "uniformity and conformity." He summarized the mentality by citing an old McDonald's corporate slogan: "One world, one taste."
Schlosser argued that the whole edifice of fast food rests on the mass production of ignorance: The food industry spends some $3 billion per year marketing a scrubbed vision of "happy meals," masking a system that relies on animal cruelty, environmental devastation, and exploitation of workers.
To drive that point home, he noted that working conditions in Florida's fruit and vegetable fields, source of much winter produce throughout the U.S., have gotten so dreadful that even the Bush Administration's Justice Department has seen fit to intervene.
Just last week, federal officials charged a large-scale Florida farmer with enslaving immigrant farm workers -- systematically "underpaying the workers, forcing them into debt, and physically threatening them if the workers left their jobs before paying off the debts," according to one press account.
Even when they're not being literally chained to farm trucks, tomato pickers in Florida are ruthlessly exploited, Schlosser said. "They've been getting paid the same wage since the '70s ... That amounts to a huge pay cut." He added a bit of good news: a hard-won raise is imminent for Florida's tomato pickers.
Blood Money
Organized by the heroic Coalition of Immokolee Workers, tomato pickers had managed to cajole major tomato buyers Taco Bell and McDonald's to agree to pay an extra penny a pound for tomatoes -- enough to double the wages of workers.
But Burger King has refused to go along with the hike, a move that threatened to scotch the deal. By holding back on that penny per pound, Schlosser reports, Burger King saves itself $250,000 per year -- a rounding error compared to annual profits, and a fraction on a fast-food CEO's annual pay.
Schlosser himself recently brought that story to broad public attention with an op-ed in The New York Times. And while he didn't mention it in his speech, it was almost surely his high-profile expose that inspired Bernie Sanders, Ted Kennedy, and other senators to get involved, pressuring Burger King to relent. Schlosser predicted that to get the senators off its back, Burger King would likely soon pay the extra penny.
While he treated his audience with great respect -- and won enthusiastic applause in response -- Schlosser didn't let the assembled growers off the hook. He noted that organic standards make no stipulations about how growers treat workers. For him, he added, organic means nothing if workers are systematically mistreated. His remark must have caused some unease (though the cheering audience didn't show it). As my friend Bonnie Powell of Ethicurean writes in her account of Schlosser's speech, "labor is an Achilles-heel issue for many organic farmers." Bonnie reminds us that:
A 2005 report published by researchers at UC Davis found that of 188 California organic farms surveyed, a majority failed to pay a living wage or provide medical or retirement plans.
There's nothing easy about that issue. As I wrote when the UC Davis study came out, organic farming is so labor-intensive, and its profit margins remain so low, that most small- and mid-sized growers would probably go out of business if they paid a decent wage.
That's a jarring fact -- something to think about next time you're marveling at the bounty of a Whole Foods produce section, or the farmers' market, for that matter. It doesn't mean that farm workers deserve their low wages. It means that if we want healthy food grown by a fairly treated workforce, we as a society need to figure out new models for food production -- one that pays farmers a fair price while also ensuring that everyone can afford healthy, responsibly produced food.
I admire Schlosser for using his stature to stand up for disempowered workers against industrial-food giants -- and for reminding organic farmers that they, too, have a responsibility to treat their workers fairly.
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Comments
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Kit Stolz Posted 2:25 am
25 Jan 2008
Thanks for covering this issue. I would be very interested to see how much more it would really cost consumers to pay farmworkers decent wages for produce of different types, organic or otherwise.
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Martha Hagood Posted 2:29 am
25 Jan 2008
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amazingdrx Posted 3:06 am
25 Jan 2008
Robots make better slaves. People need better paying, more productive jobs. Like building, operating, and maintaining robots.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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caniscandida Posted 3:35 am
25 Jan 2008
<<
He noted that organic standards make no stipulations about how growers treat workers. For him, he added, organic means nothing if workers are systematically mistreated.
>>
Yes, and not for him alone.
Similarly, if not yet with the same recognized moral impact, "organic" as a label on animal products tells the consumer nothing about how animals are (mis)treated, save perhaps a minimal bit about what they are fed. Worse, other labels positively suggest humane treatment of animals, when in fact they mean nothing of the kind.
Why is it that Americans are so reluctant to ask about the circumstances in which their food is produced? Why do we require a monumental spectacular labor equivalent to Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," every few years, to prick our consciences?
The mistreatment of farmworkers is of course a part of the current highly charged discourse on immigration. Since very many farmworkers are undocumented immigrants ("illegal aliens"), any demand for fair treatment of them becomes part of how we are to assess our treatment of all such immigrants.
In CNN's debate in Myrtle Beach, SC, last Monday, Joe Johns asked Barack Obama an intriguing little question about his policy statement on health care reform: Should guaranteed health care include illegal immigrants. Unfortunately Obama said, simply, "No," and so missed a terrific opportunity to present what a truly civilized and humane society ought to value and to do.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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SMLowry Posted 9:35 am
25 Jan 2008
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bookerly Posted 11:07 am
25 Jan 2008
Thanks Tom for reporting on this. A subject near and dear to my own heart.
In addition to the problems mentioned with undocumented workers, we should pay attention to the problems workers have under so-called "guest" programs. Most of these have no to little to weak programs to protect the rights of workers. If we do have guest workers (I am against it), we must at a minimum protect their rights.
We should also note increasing trends of using prison labor in farms (small, but scary). Images of workers in chains picking cotton appear in my mind.
And we should never forget our poor native workers. Contrary to what is becoming an American myth, there are still native workers who are migrants. I have met and worked with them (and taught their children as they briefly sojourned in schools). The low profile of rural poverty means that most Americans know even less about it than urban poverty (though that hardly seems possible).
Tom is absolutely correct when he suggests that we not see this as just a problem of individual farmers, but a systemic problem in the way we produce our food. The vast majority of farmers don't like the system, but have no ideas as to how to change it.
One idea is for the national government to get back into the business of building low income housing, but this time build some housing for temporary workers (migrants) in rural areas as well as housing in urban areas. A rural-urban political coalition around this idea could make it a powerful force in politics.
patrick in Beijing
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