Care about food? Care about farmworkers

‘Buy local.” “Buy organic.” “Buy sustainable.” “Buy from a ‘good farm.’ ” Food justice advocates encourage us to fundamentally change the way we purchase our food and feed our families in New York. Yet too often they fail to ask, is our food labor-friendly?

An attendant we encountered at the Union Square Farmers Market in New York City recounted having received every inquiry imaginable about food at the market, including if the buyers’ tokens were made of recycled wood. Not once had he ever been asked about the farmworkers who grew the food.

There’s an inherent contradiction in allocating praise and wholesomeness to land and farmers without recognizing the workers who pick and produce the food. Consumers are identifying benefits of local food, but these are not being passed on to workers’ needs for improved rights and working conditions.

The farmworkers’ labor rights movement began long before the food justice movement, but while food justice has become a cause célèbre, the farmworkers’ labor rights movement has been left behind — with farmworkers paying the price.

Those who staff local New York farms do not have the right to overtime pay, the right to take a day of rest, or any collective bargaining protections. Almost every other New York minimum wage worker enjoys these rights. All of this could change if the Legislature were to pass the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act.

What would passage of this law mean for farmworkers?

In interviews we conducted, Miguel reported working more than 80 hours each week on a family-run fruit and vegetable farm. Despite the physical hardship and time away from his family, he liked the work. Miguel would have made 25% more income for his family if he had the right to overtime pay.

With a day of rest, Maria, who packed apples, could have taken her young children to church and made her traditional Sunday dinner.

And Crispin Hernandez, if he had had collective bargaining

protections, would still be employed on the dairy farm from which he was fired. Hernandez had met with coworkers to discuss asking their farmer to purchase critical worker safety gear. And while Hernandez and the state’s farmworkers won an important court victory last week — a New York court found their exclusion from collective bargaining protections were unconstitutional — that win remains tenuous as their case will be appealed.

A report from the Fiscal Policy Institute, to which we contributed, demonstrates that the benefits of overtime pay will multiply into our rural communities. Another recently released report about collective bargaining by the National Employment Law Project examines the broken promise rooted in the Jim Crow era. Both address the how the bill will benefit farmers.

New York has a $5 billion agricultural industry and is a top national producer of 15 popular farm products. The industry uses the claim that it is on the brink of collapse as the reason why farmworker rights will harm farm owners and the industry at large. This has been the go-to excuse. It was used to oppose a bill for pesticide notifications (1980s), workers’ right to toilets and drinking water in the fields (1990s), as well as minimum wage increases (2010s).

All of those bills passed, and yet New York’s agricultural industry is still going strong. Why? Because the state’s farmers are smart and savvy businesspeople with the ability to adjust their practices.

Food justice activists need to recognize that whether the organic fresh kale is purchased at a Stop & Shop or at a “farm-to-table” restaurant is irrelevant to the treatment of farmworkers. Until this bill is passed, farmworkers will be exempt from protections all other hourly workers are granted in our state. And that needs to change.