Last summer, the Colorado General Assembly passed some of the nation's most rigorous anti-immigrant policy laws. Debate was fierce -- but only because some GOP lawmakers fumed that the Democratic-engineered crackdown wasn't draconian enough.
Essentially, the state's political elite -- backed editorially by The Denver Post -- took aim at its low-wage workforce: the people who clean bedpans, prep food in restaurants, harvest vegetables, and perform other "low-value" tasks.
The new code denied most "nonessential" services, including non-emergency health care, to undocumented workers (although it didn't exempt them from paying sales tax). It also upped identification requirements to get driver's licenses, and penalized businesses for not confirming workers' documentation.
While lawmakers congratulated themselves on their foresight -- or deplored their inability to enact harsher sanctions -- immigrants began to flee Colorado. And now the state's large-scale farms, which are almost comically reliant on immigrant labor for profitability, are begging the state government to help them find workers for the growing season.
Nativist dogma notwithstanding, it turns out that U.S.-born workers in Colorado aren't clamoring to spend hours in the hot sun spraying hazardous chemicals or frantically harvesting vegetables from immense rows.
Thus desperate policymakers are turning to another despised population to fix their mess: prison inmates. The state's Department of Corrections recently announced an experimental program to make "low-risk" inmates available for work as farmhands.
On the Chain Gang
Practically speaking, the idea will likely be a bust. Colorado farms typically hire 10,000 workers per season; analysts expect a shortfall of 4,000 this year. The prison program is voluntary, and inmates will receive 60 cents a day for their labor. (Farmers will pay the state a rate roughly equal to the going wage for farm labor: about $9 per hour.) As the Los Angeles Times editorialized last week, "not too many inmates will do backbreaking field work for 60 cents a day." In other words, you can't even get native-born prisoners to do farm work these days.
What, then, will happen? Most likely, the state will quietly ease up enforcement of its severe laws. Farm owners aren't the only ones lamenting the drying up of a cheap, hardworking, and ready labor supply. Typically, 150,000 migrant workers stream into Colorado each year, the great bulk of them working in construction and food service. Once those industries register their dismay over the laws, policymakers will face even more pressure to let up on immigration.
Indeed, that already may be happening. The Post delivered a wan report last week on the failure to deliver promised savings to the state's taxpayers. "Colorado's new law banning state spending on illegal immigrants has cost more than $2 million to enforce -- and has saved the state nothing," the article opens, before quoting several deflated lawmakers and state-agency officials. "The Colorado crackdown," the Post concludes, "is falling apart."
Thus the prison-labor idea represents a limp and largely symbolic policy response to the state's farmworker crisis. But the symbology is powerful -- and it provides a stark view into our nation's relationship to food, agriculture, and physical labor.
In short, Colorado's brilliant idea suggests that farm labor has become so degraded that the only people willing to do it have to be led to the fields at gunpoint, shackled together: farm labor as punishment.
Food With No Roots
The USDA reports that 30 million people, about a quarter of the U.S. population, lived on farms in 1930. By 2000, that number had dwindled to 3 million people, representing 1 percent of the population. And many of them are "farm operators" who never get their hands in the dirt, instead managing vast labor forces -- largely foreign-born.
Every year, U.S. farm owners hire nearly 2 million workers to run machines, spray pesticides, and harvest crops. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, fully 75 percent of them are Mexican nationals -- and more than half of them lack legal status.
Over the last century, Americans abandoned their kitchens nearly as quickly as they abandoned farms. In 1929, Americans spent 17 percent of their food budgets away from home. Today, that number approaches 50 percent. As the restaurant industry has boomed, the numbers of immigrants taking low-skilled jobs such as dishwashing have swelled.
Food processing, too, has become largely the province of foreign-born workers. Last December, federal agents raided meatpacking plants owned by Swift in Texas, Utah, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota. By rounding up and taking away Swift's undocumented workers, the federal government shut down nearly all of the meat-processing giant's beef- and pork-packing capacity.
It also exposed a salient fact: native-born Americans have shunned the dirty work behind what goes on their plates. Perhaps the only truly effective way for nativists to "seal the border" would be to ban eating.
If the latest spasm of nativist feeling has accomplished anything (besides disrupting millions of lives), it has shined a harsh light on our childish relationship to food. People expect it to appear before them ready to eat, at prices unheard of anywhere else in the world, without having to look at anyone who looks, dresses, or sounds different.
In a sense, it's no wonder the native-born population has largely shunned food-related jobs. Given other choices, who would willingly harvest mile-long rows of tomatoes drenched in chemicals? Or staff an assembly line in one of those wretched pig-slaughter factories -- or reheat prefab meals in some vast institutional "kitchen"?
Clearly, our food-production system requires a huge supply of workers with no better options. And that's precisely the role Mexico plays. Since the early 1980s, when its ruling elite embraced neoliberal economic religion -- under heavy pressure from Washington and the International Monetary Fund -- its economy has been run mainly to please global investors. These policies have amounted to a direct attack on the old smallholder modes of agricultural production -- evicting millions of small-scale farmers from their land. But the promised jobs in the cities never fully materialized, sending hundreds of thousands north each year in search of gainful employment, to the delight of U.S. employers and the despair of nativists.
Brazenly enough, the exact same transnational grain-trading corporations that profited so handsomely from the industrialization of the U.S. food supply are now performing the same trick in Mexico.
These brutal trends cannot be reversed by attempting ludicrously to "seal the border" or harassing hardworking immigrants. Rather, the answer lies in revaluing food production on both sides of the border -- make it something people choose to do, not because they have no other choices. On a relatively tiny scale, that's already happening in the U.S. local-food movement, with its booming farmers' markets and CSAs. The trick for the United States and Mexico will be to stop using agriculture policy as a lever to prop up industrial food -- and use it instead to boost local and regional economies.
Michael Bennet (D-Colo.)
Mark Udall (D-Colo.)
Pollan says health-care reform will fail unless we change the way we eat
Comments
View as Flat
dohebert Posted 4:33 am
15 Mar 2007
I don't think that the food budget is really a fair measure to conclude that "Americans abandoned their kitchens." When I look at my own spending, I see that I spend way more than 50% of my food dollars at restaurants - yet I only eat only eat about 10% of my meals away from home, and prepare the rest myself. The trouble with measuring dollars is that I can buy $40 worth of groceries (lentils, flour, fresh vegetables) at the grocery store, coop, or farmers market and eat well for a week on food that I prepare myself. Or I can go to a restaurant and blow $50 on dinner for two. (Not to mention the vegetables I grow myself all summer, which further skews my food budget toward the restaurants.) Does that mean I've abandoned my kitchen? Hardly.
- dean
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Tom Philpott Posted 1:28 am
16 Mar 2007
Here (PDF) is a USDA study looking at the decline of home cooking over the past century. The reasons behind it are of course complex: women entering the workforce being a main one. Another (not explicitly mentioned in the report) is stagnating incomes requiring all adults in the household to work in order for the household to "get ahead."
But all of these factors have combined to create a vast environmentally and socially destructive convenience food industry -- one that relies on immigrant labor from the field to the kitchen. Given that, it seems absurd to me for lawmakers and pundits, most of whom wouldn't know how to grow a tomato or roast a chicken, to be bellowing and fulminating about kicking out the "illegals." Who else would feed them?
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Delay And Deny Posted 1:51 am
16 Mar 2007
Oil dollars are being spread around the world. China and India are growing a middle class and domestic industry. At some point people will not want to immigrate to the US -- because they can get just as good a deal at home.
Who is the big loser? Well, without immigrants America would be a shrinking country populated by geezers. I mean, I went to march at the immigration rally in Seattle, and everyone was under 30. Strip away the immigrants and all you got is geezers, aging b-boomers and graying 30ish GenXers.
Not a pretty sight.
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slantedplanet Posted 3:59 am
16 Mar 2007
60 cents per day, but the farmers have to pay the
state about $9.00 per hour for this contract labor. Hmmm, does anyone besides me think this
is blatantly unfair? Is the state trying to subsidize prison expenses or solve the labor problem? They can easily up the rate of pay to
$1.00 per hour at least.
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sinnerjizm Posted 4:30 am
16 Mar 2007
This all seems to be a bit to convenient.
Big Agribuisness has been using illegals workers for decades with a blind eye being turned by all administrations and it seems to me that it is only now, with the huge privatization push ,that the prison industry has come up with a solution that would get these corporations(and their bought and paid for politicians) off the legal hook.
What I see coming is a HUGE pool of virtual slave labor being created in this country.I say "virtual" because they are being paid a few cents a day, just enough to keep it from being legally called slavery.
The private prison industry will have to keep busy pushing for new and varied laws that would increase the numbers of their stock(prisoners) but they seem to be pretty good at it now.
If this doesnt worry you...
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oystercatcher Posted 3:04 am
18 Mar 2007
Of course then the consumers will join in the lamenting as their chemically grown food costs more, as well as their housing. To hit the nail on its head, prices for consumer goods are artificially low because of low wage immigrant labor and the correction is higher wage local labor. Still crying that labor cannot be found? Maybe assembly line abbatoirs, row cropping, and other inhumane business practices so go extinct.
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Earth Shaman Posted 4:00 am
20 Mar 2007
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jessifromdenver Posted 4:14 am
20 Mar 2007
Since it was obviously illogical for me to have said that last May (at least thats what I was told), clearly this article proves that I am clairvoyant.
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coveark Posted 12:56 am
21 Mar 2007
BUT...............
doing very bad things shouild not be rewarded. A MANDATORY hard days work would not make prison such a cake walk and a burden on society.
To take care of only one prisoner takes more cash than many whole families have to live on for a year with two people working. Do you think that everyone works because they WANT to? Think hard....they do it to earn their keep. They do it because they have to. Prisoners are certainly no better than the rest of us.
Prisoners want to build muscles? Work them doing something productive. If a person is tired from a good days work.........their minds have less energy to plot the awful things that happen in prisons. A tired body will need to take the evenings to rest and not be plotting drug deals and sexual battery . Think about it.........
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skwerly Posted 5:02 am
21 Mar 2007
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Stephanie Ogburn Posted 12:14 am
23 Mar 2007
In recent research, I've been thinking and writing about why the organic movement was so successful--and I think part of it has to do with the fact that it pretty deliberately chose not to address the labor issue. Now that organic's gone large, that decision has become more obvious, as Grist pointed out in the article last summer about migrant workers in Oregon's organic fields. (http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/08/02/mark/index. ...)
This is important. If we paid laborers what they were really worth, food would be a lot more expensive. And this includes migrant workers, but also the hard-working farmer on a 2-acre organic plot working seven days but barely breaking even without paying herself. This is a common scenario, and an unfortunate one. And since organic requires, usually, even more labor per unit of yield than industrial farming, then organic may rely even more on the exploitation of labor--prices would have to rise astronomically for that small scale farmer to actually pay herself a fair wage.
Which is why small scale farms, although perhaps now more popular in their organic incarnation, are not, I would argue, actually that much more financially sustainable than they were when they were growing conventionally. Either the price of food needs to go up or we need to decide to compensate farmers in a different way (conservation payments, e.g.) for the service they provide. No one can make a good living selling lettuce at $4/head without exploiting someone.
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RoboTech Posted 4:09 am
15 Jul 2007
To each their own.
I'll add my opinion as it seems it's not too popular.
It's not $0.60 a day. It's $4.00 a day plus $0.50 a day for each month the inmate works the program.
This money is kept as a nest egg to be given to the inmate upon release.
All of the inmates working this program are happy because $4.00 a day is a HUGE sum for them compared to $0.60 a Day that they normally get paid to work at the prison.
Here is an article that has both sides of the issue.
http://www.chieftain.com/metro/1184177278/1
It seems like people are forgetting that America has ALWAYS had hard labor prisons and still do in some states. And these inmates get zip for their work. So now, you are complaining about giving them an opportunity to make some money for their release?
The inmates (all women in the Pilot program) interviewed said that they are happy with the money, and they are happy because they are getting out into the sunshine, away from the prison,in shape and losing weight. Their words, not mine.
The prison officials say that they are seeing less depression in this group and most of the women have never held a job in their lives. Apparently, some self worth and self respect is being given to these woman.
And you are going to protest that, too?
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