The previous blog post was on the conditions for workers in China.
American working conditions can be little different as this story from In TheseTimes demonstrates.
Exploitative conditions on factory farms have rightly drawn
the attention of academics, activists, and journalists. Indeed, the vast
majority of research on farmworkers focuses on the largest farming sites.
Consumers are offered countless reasons to avoid produce from them—but few
alternatives other than to “buy local.” The localist advocates say that when we
buy locally grown food directly from farms, we not only secure fresher, more
seasonal produce, but we also create an intimate, trusting relationship with
the farmer and they have highlighted the many positive aspects of local food
systems: economic and social justice, the sense of community facilitated by
face-to-face interactions with food producers, and the civic engagement and
democracy promoted by alternative agri-systems. This supposed bond reinforces
the common understanding that the local food production process is more
wholesome than the industrial agricultural system.
In promoting local diets as healthy and righteous
alternatives to the capitalist-industrial monoculture food system, such writers
have sold us an idea premised on a false dichotomy. On one hand, they demonize
factory farms for poisoning the land and local waterways, for confining and
mistreating animals, and for exploiting their workers in the name of earning
profits. On the other hand, they promote local agriculture as the antidote to
the factory farms’ corporate ills and ensure animals are treated humanely. The
food activists use terms like local, alternative, sustainable, and fair to
distinguish local food production from the hated factory farm. But they often
conflate these terms. And with all of the positive attention heaped on local
farms, it is easy to imagine that these benefits extend to their workers.
We don’t think about workers on local farms. Instead, we
assume these farms are mom-and-pop operations, or imagine that farm laborers
have the sustainable jobs that the local food movement has promised. We have
oversimplified alternative agriculture’s economy, while glorifying the ethos of
family farming. As a result, we have largely ignored farmworkers. farmworkers
feared employer retaliation. “If you behave there is work.” The threat of
deportation is real, and since employers, by law, do not have to verify their
employees’ documents, workers with false documents will try to limit their
grievances to deflect attention from their legal status.
But research, dating back to 2000, by Margaret Gray, an
associate professor of political science at Adelphi University, reveals that
working conditions on local farms in New York’s Hudson Valley are not very
different from those on the factory farms that dominate the headlines. 99
percent were foreign born. The vast majority, 71 percent, were non-citizen
Latinos; 20 percent were on H-2A guest-worker visas and hailed from Jamaica or
Latin America. Most of the Latinos spoke little English, had low literacy in
their native languages, and, on average, received a sixth-grade formal
education. The lack of English skills actually benefits their employers, who
see learning the language as a stepping-stone to becoming American. Hudson Valley farmworkers were not primarily
migrant workers: they lived in New York year-round, even if their farm jobs
were seasonal. Many acutely analyzed their positions—they were utterly
dependent on farm wages, lonely, and alienated.
The work they perform is difficult, dirty, and strenuous; it
requires repeated bending or crouching, sometimes with sharp implements, and
sometimes in extreme weather for long hours. “You are dead by the end of the
day; your arms and your feet ache because of standing all day,” one worker
said. A field hand thought dogs were treated better than he was. There are
stories of wage theft, human trafficking, sexual harassment, illegal firings,
and intimidation. But even if employers were prosecuted for such violations of
existing law, the job would still exploit workers. In New York—as in most other
states—farmworkers do not have a right to a day of rest, they do not have a
right to overtime pay, and they do not have a right to collective bargaining.
This means that some work eighty to ninety hours a week, for
minimum wage, sometimes over seven days. Farmworkers argue that the law sets
them up for exploitation since it fails to recognize them as equal to other
workers. Workers’ disempowerment in the workplace is the most critical issue
they face. While getting paid for hours worked is the most basic element of the
labor contract, many farmworkers reported that their paychecks would have missing
several work hours. But, like many of the most vulnerable laborers, they were
too afraid to say anything. Guest-workers repeatedly said that they were
“taught to be quiet.” They explained that if they joined a union or questioned
their employment benefits, they would not be allowed to return to the United
States.
The plight of hyper-exploited workers on small farms will
remain hidden if activists continue to portray factory farming as a unique evil
facilitated by some kind of spiritual disconnect from the land, rather than one
particularly telling example of capitalism’s inhumanity.
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