Food writer Mark Bittman visits farmworkers in Immokalee

Recently, Mark Bittman went to Immokalee, Florida to see for himself what has been happening with the workers who harvest nearly all of the winter tomatoes grown in the U.S. Bittman is renowned for his recipes and his long-running weekly New York Times column “The Minimalist,” and has appeared on dozens of TV shows.

Here are some of Bittman’s initial thoughts:

I spent a couple of hours talking to workers and organizers at the offices of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, went for a walking tour of workers’ housing (the lattice over the windows is there to reinforce a ban on air conditioning, a ban that has been lifted in at least one instance as an indirect result of the recent agreement), even visited three workers in their “home,” and saw the house where several workers had once been held in slavery (not “like” slavery — slavery, as defined), chatted with one of the more progressive growers, and was driven through the fields, whose winter/spring crop is over, though not entirely picked…

Though far from North Carolina, the tales of abuse and exploitation from Immokalee are very close to home. We have seen cases of modern-day slavery here in NC, and we are all too familiar with the poverty wages and substandard living conditions so prevalent in south Florida.

But this story is not all bad news. While Bittman’s visit will help to raise the profile of farmworker issues, farmworkers themselves in Immokalee have been making progress over the last few years. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has challenged major fast food chains and grocery stores to take responsibility for their supply chains. Many companies – though not all – have taken responsibility, and workers in Immokalee are starting to see the difference.

Field and poultry workers in North Carolina, including the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, are working to make changes here too. Nationally recognized experts on food – like Bittman and Eric Schlosser – are joining the conversation and making a difference.

Will you join it too? Click here to endorse the Harvest of Dignity campaign pledge.

Foodies and farmworkers

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser explains “Why being a foodie isn’t ‘elitist.’” 

In short, he says:

A food system based on poverty and exploitation will never be sustainable.

To see the “poverty and exploitation” on which our current system is based, we don’t have to look any farther than the farmworkers who make agriculture possible.  In North Carolina, half of farmworker families face food insecurity at some point during the year.  Annual incomes for farmworkers average less than $12,000.  Most farmworkers are exempt from minimum wage laws, and all are exempt from overtime provisions, despite long work days during peak harvest.

How much exploitation went into this salad?Schlosser argues that large agribusinesses “don’t want people to think about what they’re eating. The survival of the current food system depends upon widespread ignorance of how it really operates.”  One of the crucial cogs in this industrial machine is the backbreaking human labor required to hand-pick 85% of the fruits and vegetables we eat.  But if we are going to be honest with ourselves, if we are going to move towards a truly sustainable food system, it’s time to make changes in the way we treat field and poultry workers.

It’s time for farmworkers to reap a harvest of dignity instead of exploitation and abuse.  It’s time for poultry workers to have safe working environments.  No one should have to risk his or her health or future for a job. 

Schlosser’s article is a reminder that this topic is never popular.  It’s always easier to ignore the difficult questions than to raise them. 

Now you have been warned: you might be called an “elitist” if you ask who picked your food or if you include farmworkers in your table prayers.  But we can’t afford to ignore this reality any longer – our current food system remains unsustainable because it is based on poverty and the exploitation of the workers who reap our harvests.

You can make a difference - click here to get involved with the Harvest of Dignity campaign.

A state of fear

Human rights abuses in North Carolina’s tobacco industry

Last week Oxfam America and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) released a groundbreaking report on the conditions in North Carolina's tobacco fields.  Tobacco has always been a vital cash crop for NC, but this report confirms that too often workers at the heart of the supply chain live and work in slave-like conditions. 

The study includes direct quotes from tobacco workers:

Tobacco work is hard, but they don’t pay us like it is… the chemicals are very strong and they make you dizzy, sometimes you vomit, you get nauseous, it’s very tough….Your whole body feels tired, you don’t know… if it’s the spray [chemicals] or the tobacco.

—Jaime Arroyo, farmworker in Johnston County, North Carolina

I think our housing is disgusting. Not everyone has a mattress to sleep on, and there are 10 men in one room. There are three showers, but only one works, and the same goes for the toilets.  We don’t have a refrigerator or good ventilation.

—Aparicio Rosales, farmworker in Wilson County, North Carolina

Read more: Executive Summary | Website

Read more about FLOC's campaign with RJ Reynolds - a Winston-Salem-based company with over $2 billion in annual profits - to improve conditions for farmworkers.

Children at work?

By Emily Drakage.  Cross-posted at NC Policy Watch.

These days there is a lot of great advice on how to keep our children safe and healthy. Don’t let them sit too close to the TV. Feed them pesticide-free fruits and vegetables. No cell phones, no fast food, no riding bikes without helmets. We have a law that protects children from being bullied by their peers at school and, recently, there was even a recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics that children continue to sit in booster seats while riding in automobiles until they enter middle school.

Yet, amazingly, the North Carolina child labor laws continue to allow children as young as 12 years-old to work an unlimited amount of hours, outside of school, in agriculture.

There’s a special irony in this exception to our usual cautionary approach when it comes to children’s well-being in agriculture. The agriculture industry is consistently ranked as one of the most dangerous industries in the U.S. by the Department of Labor, right behind mining and construction. In North Carolina, children pick blueberries for our pies, tomatoes for our salads and sweet potatoes for our Thanksgiving casseroles. Children who are years away from being able to legally purchase a pack of cigarettes are also harvesting tobacco, being exposed to the equivalent of more than a pack’s worth of nicotine every day.

Laboring in the fields takes a heavy toll on a child’s life. Children are especially vulnerable to the dangers of heat stroke, nicotine poisoning, pesticide exposure and working with heavy machinery. Many pesticides used in the fields are known to have a more significant effect on children than adults, since their bodies are still growing and developing and they have a higher skin surface area to weight ratio. This means farmworker children are at a higher risk of developing cancer, nervous system problems and infertility down the road than most of us.

The physical wear and tear from doing heavy lifting and bending several hundred times a day in the field stays with children, affecting the growth of their developing bodies and often causing muscle and joint problems that will endure for the rest of their lives.

Moreover, many children literally give up their lives doing farm work every year. The children also risk losing their education. It’s estimated that more than half of the children who regularly work in the fields will drop out of high school.

The logic behind this outdated practice in North Carolina is that family farmers need their kids to work on the farm alongside the family. While the tradition of family farming should be preserved, the modern day reality is that the majority of children currently working in agriculture are hired by contractors to work on industrial-scale farms. This is a shameful oversight by our state’s leadership and by all of us as North Carolinians, and one that we should waste no time in addressing.

Recently, State Representative Jonathan Jordan (R-District 93) filed a bill in the General Assembly that would bring the agricultural child labor law up to date while preserving the exceptions for children working on their families’ farms. Simply put, the bill would treat children working in agriculture the same as children working in every other industry in our state. Now is the time to ensure the safety and well-being of all of North Carolina’s children for generations to come.

Emily Drakage is the North Carolina Regional Coordinator for the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs.

Tuesday 3/29 Galaxy Screening a Success!

Thanks to all who came out in support of the Harvest of Dignity last night at the galaxy theater! We had about 200 people in all and the event was a great success!

Contact us to host your own screening at harvestofdignity@gmail.com!

Catching workers before they fall

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, a deadly sweatshop fire that killed almost 150 people.  US Labor Secretary Hilda Solis wrote a column in the Washington Post that puts contemporary challenges facing working people into a historical context:

Today, workers and their allies are being met with that same kind of opposition. In states nationwide, working people are protesting the actions to strip them of collective bargaining. The Triangle fire and the Upper Big Branch explosion a century later make clear to me that workers want and need that voice — about wages and benefits, yes, but about more, too. Collective bargaining still means a seat at the table to discuss issues such as working conditions, workplace safety and workplace innovation, empowering individuals to do the best job they can. And it means dignity and a chance for Americans to earn a better life, whether they work in sewing factories or mines, build tall buildings or care for our neighbors, teach our children, or run into burning buildings when others run out of them.

I’ll be thinking about all of this as I make my way to New York on Friday for the 100th anniversary of the Triangle factory tragedy. The building is still there; it now houses offices for New York University. Thousands are expected to mark the occasion with a march, speeches, the reading of the victims’ names and the laying of flowers in their honor at the site by schoolchildren. It will be a powerful reminder of what we’ve lived through, and what we still have to do.

History is an extraordinary thing. You can choose to learn from it, or you can choose to repeat it.

For me, the choice is clear, as it was for Frances Perkins. We must always be a nation that catches workers before they fall.

Will North Carolina be a state that catches farmworkers before they fall?  Over the last decade, we have seen workers die in the fields from heat stroke.  We've seen mothers exposed to so many toxic pesticides that their children were born with severe birth defects. 

Farmworkers do some of the hardest, most dangerous work in the country for poverty wages.  They labor in relative obscurity, isolated from society and often taken for granted.  Join the Harvest of Dignity Campaign to help ensure that something like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, or deaths in the fields, won't happen again.

EPI: Farmworkers not seeing benefits of rising agricultural exports

An important new report on farmworkers’ wages and international competitiveness of U.S. fruit and vegetable harvests is available from the Economic Policy Institute.

The value of agricultural exports rose 2.5 times between 1989 and 2009, but the average hourly earnings of U.S. farmworkers increased only $1.52 over the same period. In other words, farmworkers have hardly benefited economically from the increase in agricultural exports.

A new Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper, Farm Exports and Farm Labor: Would a raise for fruit and vegetable workers diminish the competitiveness of U.S. agriculture?, finds that a 40% increase in farmworker earnings would only raise U.S. household spending by about $16 a year. The report, by Philip Martin, a Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis, also provides an outline of fruit, vegetable and horticultural (FVH) production in the United States and a discussion of the earnings of the immigrant farmworkers who work on FVH farms.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States and around the world. 

Click here to read more.

1st Screening of Harvest of Dignity @ Galaxy theater- Cary, NC

Come join us during National Farmworker Awareness Week, March 27^th-April 2^nd for…

The Harvest of Dignity

Opening Night Film Screening and Panel at the Galaxy Theatre!

Tues. March 29^th, 2011 7-9 pm

Galaxy Theater Location: Village Square Shopping Center, 
770 Cary Towne Blvd.
Cary, NC 27511         

Spanish and English with subtitles. Show will begin at 7 pm, panel discussion to follow. $5.00 at the door. To secure your ticket ahead of time, go to: http://www.mygalaxycinema.com/

Update on Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 9:20AM by Bart Evans

Download the Flyer for the Screening! In Word and PDF Formats.. Please distribute widely! See you on the 29th!