For Labor Day: Farmworkers’ Rights Still in the Toilet

Today is the start of the Labor Day holiday weekend, a time when most Americans think of barbecues and Mondays off, not so much the laborers themselves.

This weekend, spare a thought for the people who picked the potatoes in that salad and the peaches in your cobbler, or who slaughtered and processed the steer that became that hamburger. Chances are they were paid very little for this hot, often dangerous work.

As the Inventory of Farmworker Issues and Protections in the United States outlined in painful 65-page detail, federal and state laws treat farmworkers differently than other workers. Children as young as 12 can legally work in the fields, with no restriction on the number of hours they can work during non-school days. Agriculture workers of all ages have fewer legal protections against unfair labor practices such as sexual harassment and don’t even have the legal right to organize. Even in California, where thanks to the activism of César Chávez, farmworkers have stronger legal protections than in other states, a lack of enforcement makes it the top state for farmworker deaths due to heat exposure and other risks.

Here’s a small but telling example of the indignities that farmworkers have to put up with. These two photos were taken by a friend visiting a labor camp for a large sweet potato grower in eastern North Carolina.  The picture of the toilets shows only a part of the line of toilets in the men’s bathroom: Only every three or four toilets are separated by a curtain. None of the facilities has a door. The gymnasium-style showers also provide no privacy whatsoever to workers.

These conditions are legal in North Carolina. In other words, there is no requirement to provide workers with privacy, either when using the toilet or showering.

Can you imagine workers in any other industry being subjected to this?

This Labor Day, please join us in thinking about how we can work toward a day when the people on whom we depend to pick our food will enjoy not only basic workplace dignity, but also the same wage and other occupational protections as employees in other sectors. The reality depicted by photos like these really leave a bitter aftertaste.

NY Times asks: Could farms survive without illegal labor?

There’s a fascinating set of responses to today’s New York Times Room for Debate question: Could farms survive without illegal labor? And if American growers are, as most think, so dependent on illegal labor, would strict verification drive up prices for labor and, ultimately, for fruits and vegetables? The paper also asked the six respondents whether consumers are too accustomed to inexpensive produce to accept the cost of legal labor to produce it, but alas, none actually addressed that one in their response.

The consensus among the six immigration and labor experts and a lone farmer was that No, farms could not function without such labor. Not because they would have to charge higher prices, but because they would not be able to find legal workers, American or immigrant, to pick the food.

Some choice quotes:

From Benjamin Shute of Hearty Roots Community Farm in New York’s Hudson River Valley: Read the rest of this entry »

Skewed values: Farmworkers earn less than landscaping crews

Every day, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service sends out a chart from its trove and a brief description of what it covers. Today’s chart shows how the U.S. economy values farm labor. Really: the people who pick our food are less important to us than the people who leaf-blow our lawns?

Here’s the data, which comes from the USDA/ERS’s Farm Labor report:

Average hourly earnings of non-supervisory farm laborers stood at $10.22 in 2010, compared to $19.07 for private sector nonsupervisory workers outside of agriculture. In real terms, farm labor wages have risen at about 0.9 percent per year since 1990, compared to 0.6 percent per year for nonfarm nonsupervisory workers. The 2010 wage for farm laborers is comparable to the average wage for maids and housekeepers ($10.17), but lower than the wage for landscaping and groundskeeping workers ($12.23) or for construction laborers ($16.15), according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Statistics program.  This chart appeared on the ERS website, in Farm Labor, updated in July 2011.

The latest on our speaker lineup — and a request for help

We’re pleased to announce that Gerardo Reyes-Chavez (in photo, top right), one of the leaders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers , will be joining us to speak in our Movement session. Gerardo has worked in the fields since age 11, first as a peasant farmer in Zacatecas, Mexico, and then in the fields of Florida picking oranges, tomatoes, and watermelon. He joined the CIW shortly after his arrival in the United States in 2000, when his fellow farmworker roommates, who had previously escaped a violent slavery operation hidden in the swamp south of Immokalee, FL, invited him to come to the CIW’s Wednesday evening community meetings.

Also on board for the Movement session are Nikki Henderson (left), the executive director of People’s Grocery, which is invested in creating place-based change and health parity through improvements to the food system in West Oakland, California, and Joann Lo (right), the executive director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, a coalition of worker-based groups organizing to improve wages and working conditions for all workers along the food chain.

We need your help with our Money session, however. We’d like to invite a speaker from an industry that relies on unskilled, largely immigrant labor — from a large (as in million-dollar and above) non-farm company that has implemented fair-labor practices for these workers in the United States. Oddly enough, we’re having trouble finding such a company. If you know of any hotel chains, domestic-worker companies, food processors, or other businesses that fit this bill, please leave a comment or email bonnie@tedxfruitvale.org.

We’re now accepting applications…

in English (here) and Spanish (here)!

The rules for hosting a TEDx conference require a specific process for participants, including an application process for those interested in participating, and a strict limit of 100 attendees. Alas, this number includes speakers, performers, and all the staff and technicians in the room for the event.

Given these tight constraints, we would like to ensure that our audience represents a diverse mix — farmworkers, farmers and other businesspeople, activists and advocates, students, professors, artists, filmmakers, media, and others. If you can’t attend, we hope that you’ll consider hosting a viewing party to watch the live stream of the event! We’ll be offering several resources for creating a fun gathering around the webcast, with opportunities to interact with the speakers and guests via Twitter and a post-event Q&A.

TEDxFruitvale is starting to come together

Ten days ago, the TEDxFruitvale planning team met for an all-day brainstorming session about everything from our final speaker lineup to what kind of water glass we want to use.

We determined that given the TEDx rules limiting our number of attendees to a mere 100 — including speakers and support staff! — we will have to ask guests to apply. We very much want to ensure a balance mixture of farmworkers, farmers, students, farmworker and other nonprofit organizations, academics, businesspeople, media, and artists. If you would like to be notified when we begin considering applications, please fill out this form here.

Since then, we’ve reached out to a number of speakers, and we’re pleased to report that we have confirmed two new ones: Robin Romano, the director of The Harvest/La Cosecha, a just-released, searing documentary that follows three under-age migrant farmworkers as they struggle to help support their families, and Nikki Henderson, food-justice activist and executive director of People’s Grocery. They join our speakers Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society; Barry Estabrook, author of Tomatoland, an expose of the Florida tomato industry; and farmer Jim Cochran, cofounder of Swanton Berry Farm, the first organic farm to sign a labor contract with the United Farm Workers. We hope to have even more exciting news in the next few weeks.

Watch the trailer for Harvest, or find a screening near you:

“The Harvest/La Cosecha” Trailer 2010 from U. Roberto Romano on Vimeo.

We’re live!

We are excited to launch the website for TEDxFruitvale: Harvesting Change! We’ll be bringing together a diverse collection of speakers and attendees to celebrate farmworkers on Friday, October 14, 2011. Watch this website for details!