Grocery Update Volume 2, #6: How To Make Farmwork Great.

Also: RFK Betrays/ICE Terrorizes Food Workers.

Discontents: 1. RFK Betrays/ICE Terrorizes Food Workers. 2. How To Make Farmwork Great.

1. RFK Betrays/ICE Terrorizes Food Workers.

The Border Patrol and Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) division continue to kidnap, persecute and traffic hard working, law-abiding essential food supply chain workers for no just cause.

Now is the time for the grocery industry, including retail and CPG executives, essential workers, brand founders and Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) advocates to stand up against these flagrant violations of human rights, due process, civil liberties and just plain decency.

This is about liberty and justice for all.

If you make, sell or grow food here, you belong here.

Meanwhile, RFK turns over confidential medical data of undocumented workers to ICE.

From Wired: “The Trump administration quietly ordered the transfer of Medicaid data belonging to undocumented individuals to deportation officials this week… The transfer, which was reportedly ordered by Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s office and included names, addresses, immigration status, and health claims, pertains to millions of enrollees, many in states that pay for the coverage using their own funds.” Friends, how does this MAHA?

Two dairy farmworkers and Migrant Justice leaders in Vermont were detained by Border Patrol agents in Vermont on June 14th. Jose Ignacio “Nacho” De La Cruz was driving with his stepdaughter Heidi Perez in Franklin County when they were pulled over. Agents smashed their car window and violently detained the two community leaders. Both are now at risk of imminent deportation.

Nacho is a former dairy worker, part of Migrant Justice’s Coordinating Committee, and for years has been at the forefront of struggles for human rights and social justice.

Heidi Perez, Nacho’s stepdaughter and a passenger in the vehicle, graduated from Milton High School less than a week before her detention. Heidi has led marches and rallies for Milk with Dignity and in 2024 spoke on stage at the Vermont Pride Parade.

An appeal from Farmhouse Delivery in Austin, Texas:

Paola Pineda Kidnapped By ICE

Paola arrived from Venezuela in October 2022, seeking refuge from the difficult conditions in her home country and hoping to build a better future for herself and her family.

She joined Farmhouse Delivery as a food packer and quickly distinguished herself with her dedication and work ethic. Her strong performance earned her a promotion to Pack Lead, where she continued to shine. Over her two and a half years with the company, Paola never missed a single day of work and consistently went above and beyond to ensure everything was completed.

Later, Paola helped bring her sister onto the team, who proved to be not only a valuable asset but also a wonderful addition to the workplace culture.

Paola is a true professional and a shining example of commitment and integrity. It was a pleasure to have her on the team, and we are grateful for the time she spent with us.

Twelve days ago, she attended her appointment with immigration to discuss her temporary asylum visa. She has kept up with all her appointments and has been very diligent. Although she had a work visa until 2030, she was detained. We have been unable to communicate with her, and her sister has not visited for fear that she will also be arrested. However, her sister has managed to communicate with her a couple of times and mentioned that there are people being detained with resident visas, and no one seems to care.

Stephanie Scherzer

President & Founder

And an appeal from L’Oca D’Ora, an award-winning Austin restaurant, to support their employee kidnapped by ICE:

locadoroaustin

A post shared by @locadoroaustin

2. Feature: How To Make Farmwork Great.

Farmwork, and The History of U.S. Agriculture, Is Brutal.

I have worked a lot of crazy jobs. Ridiculous jobs. Absurd and insane jobs. But I could never handle being a farmworker.

I worked as a day camp counselor in the Bronx for years, then as a mentor and afterschool counselor for neighborhood teens and tweens. I even, quite cluelessly, coached a flag football team, I was the Bronx Ted Lasso of football, no mustache though. We made it all the way to the finals after never winning a regular season game.

I was a grill cook and sandwich clerk in college, working two or three shifts a week to pay tuition, for over four years. I was an EMT-D, drove an ambulance and logged over 1,000 hours of late night shifts while carrying a full course load. I was also an occasional overnight radio DJ and editor/publisher of two student magazines, and if you can guess, my GPA was meh. But farmwork? Ha. No way.

I did some illustration and graphic design on the side, back when that part of my brain functioned. I worked in warehouses on the New Jersey Turnpike slinging books, and farmers markets in New Jersey and downstate New York slinging pickles. But I could never handle being a farmworker.

I did community gardening, community organizing and community composting, pounding the pavement in The Bronx in the heat and the snow and dodging SWAT raid drug busts and the occasional shoot-out and attempted beat down (I have never been mugged).

I worked retail, at pet supply stores, book stores, food co-ops and some grocery.

Just a little bit of grocery over the years. It was tough, but at least it was air conditioned, stocking out 70-100 cases an hour, building thousands of endcaps and remerchandising thousands of linear feet of product in stores across the country, building and opening a few new stores from the ground up. Blew out my knees and shoulder joints, fucked up my wrists again and again, did way too many overnight and “clo-pen” shifts, then went into purchasing and supply chain, negotiating with suppliers, slinging spreadsheets, traveling to farms, warehouses, manufacturing plants and trade shows, sitting across from the big shots.

I even went to the first domestic hemp harvest in decades and took this cute pic, in the weeds. Literally.

But farmwork. Hell no.

I did landscaping for over twelve years, part time, 10-20 hours a month, working for myself, bundled up in Carhartts, stained caps and work shirts, thick-soled Red Wings, neck gaiters, leg gaiters and bandanas in the extreme Texas heat and freakish cold snaps, playing nice with fuzzy tarantulas, fat rat snakes and underfed coyotes while brutally battling it out with Wild Parsnip, spikey goats heads, poison ivy, poison oak, Oak Wilt, Ligustrum, Ash Junipers, Chinese soap berries, black widow and brown recluse spiders, ten inch long Hill Country centipedes, angry red wasps and angrier, ubiquitous fire ants, armed with gas powered weed whackers, electric hedge trimmers and all sorts of chain saws, while growing melons and greens and tomatoes, raising chickens, harvesting four dozen eggs a week, and still, I could never handle being a farmworker. A real farmworker, not a hobbyist like me. No way. Never. I don’t have it in me.

Because farmwork is brutal.

Bottom of the heap. Base of the food pyramid. The shoulders that we all stand on. The grinding gears that keep the groceries coming. Ungodly hours. Blinding heat. Biting cold. Knees bent, back braced, knuckles raw, weeding, planting, sowing, harvesting. Lonely and isolated in the boonies, working to survive, but just barely.

Exempt from labor laws. Not covered under the Wagner Act, the National Labor Relations Act, a few states only recently just starting to cover these gaps due to pressure from unions. Unregulated, underpaid, underappreciated, invisible. Essential.

Historically rooted in indentured servitude, slavery and plantation economics, millions of European peasants shipped over from the Midlands and the Highlands and Fields of Athenry, along with the millions of African ripped from their fertile river-fed heartlands in Senegal and The Gambia and the Niger Delta and Cameroon to grow sugar and rice and yams and tobacco and cotton for the plantation masters that fed into the Triangle trade and the colonial global economy, all laborers trained and taught to hate and fear each other, racism, a learned trait through centuries of indoctrination by the masters.

On land only recently stolen through murder, genocide, cultural annihilation of the native peoples who had stewarded billions of acres for thousands of years into what was essentially a massive coast-to-coast food forest that the ignorant, unwashed, backwards Euro-trash explorers dismissed as “wilderness”. “Wilderness”, for fucks sake. Endless herds of buffalo, an unbroken expanse of broad lead trees from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi, three hundred foot Sequioas and redwoods, complex, egalitarian civilizations growing corn and tobacco and peppers and squash and beans that fed millions upon millions, until the smallpox blankets and broken treaties and rape and murder and land theft and reservations took almost all of it.

Then, the Jeffersonian ideal, the sturdy colonial yeoman, wholly dependent on unpaid, enslaved labor.

And then, upon manumission and abolition and the broken promises of 40 acres and a mule, 100 years of Jim Crow, segregation and share cropping, tenant farming and prison labor, the founding of the USDA to subsidize the white settler farming in the newly conquered plains states, throwing the Czechs and Poles and Swedes into bloody, final maelstrom of the Indian Wars. And a brief explosion in Black land ownership, quickly followed by a century of dispossession and ethnic cleansing colloquially known as the great migration north, fleeing the hellscape of segregationist southern white nationalist ethnic violence that would not stand for equality and upward mobility of Black people, especially owning their own land, reaping the rewards of their labor.

The New Deal, the most broad and impactful set of social improvements in American history, lifting millions of workers out of poverty and desperation. But not farmworkers, both black and white. A bone thrown to the southern Democrats, the plantation aristocracy, who would not tolerate the full humanity of their tenant and sharecropping laborers still picking their cotton, their okra, their tobacco.

Or the Chinese laborers and the Chinese exclusion act to purge the Chinese laborers. Or the Bracero program when American rural workers were going overseas to fight Hitler and Tojo and defend a democracy that was still but nascent in their home country, closely followed by the immigration raids and ethnic cleansing of the 1950s to clear out those Mexican illegals who were out there stealing jobs from the good white people. History, rinse, wash, repeat.

Then out of the ashes of the Braceros, the United Farmworkers, telling good white folks please don’t eat grapes, support the boycotts and help us organize farmworkers, a brief respite and counter current to the centuries of abuse and erasure.

And then the floods of Filipino, Mexican, Central American and Caribbean farmworkers fleeing the backwash of overseas U.S. military aggression and economic plunder, landing across the Salinas valley and Central Valley and Rio Grande Valley, undocumented and H2A, the Immokalee workers and their hard-won legally binding contracts for growers that, when combined with consumer-facing campaigns, still prevent the worst forms of labor abuse and sexual violence in the fields.

And next, automation, harvest robots, and ICE chasing farmworkers through the strawberry fields, no matter that they are up before dawn, picking lettuce, celery, cilantro, broccoli in the searing heat, freezing cold, pouring rain, pounding sun, choking on wildfire fumes or wading through floodwaters, trying not to get raped by the foreman or their wages stolen by the labor contractors, the foundation of the food supply, the shoulders of giants we all stand on. Essential.

Farmwork is brutal. I could never handle farmwork.

But that’s why we need to make farmwork great. It was never great, to be clear. But it needs to be. And right now, with few exceptions, it is 180 degrees removed from greatness. We need to fix farmwork.

2. Ten Or So Ways To Make Farmwork Great.

1. All farmwork must be fully covered by labor laws and then some, no exceptions. Paid a living wage, with benefits, child care. Factored into the cost of production, not externalized or invisibilized. Forty hour work weeks, eight hour days, after a few years scaling back to 32 and 8 because this is hard work.

2. Amnesty and citizenship. First stop the ICE raids and disband ICE. Next, if you grow food for Americans, in America, then you should get to be an American, if you want. No more H2A, H1B, undocumented masses toiling away to grow the vast majority of food consumed because no one in their right mind would put up with the conditions, the hours, the treatment that farmworkers do. Borders, after all, are bullshit, just imaginary lines in dirt. But if you grow food, you are never illegal.

3. Full safety protections from weather, especially heat and cold exposure, agricultural chemicals, on the job hazards. This will mean reinvigorating and fully funding regulators to keep employers honest and up to speed.

4. Skill building with upward mobility. Apprenticeships, journeymen, expertise, a career path with clear wage increases based on skill acquisitions. Farmwork is skilled work. It is a profession that should have the pride and legacy of all skilled trades, like carpentry, plumbing, metalwork or welding.

5. Expand the most successful farmwork models, including unionization, sectoral bargaining and legally binding, worker-driven contracts like CIW. These are all proven to bring more wealth to farmworkers while preventing the types of violence and exploitation that have become endemic to the sector.

6. Set commodity price floors for farmers based on price parity and factoring in the costs of production to the farmgate price. Farmers should not need to absorb higher costs of production out of their margins. There should be a true cost to production, and if that cost flows back to farmworkers in the form of higher wages and wealth building, it enables them to put more wealth back into the economy. Studies have shown that paying farmworkers a living wage in certain crop systems like berries will have a minimal impact to consumer prices.

7. De-risk marketing and contracts for food growers, i.e., specialty crops, through production subsidies and public and private sector contracts that guarantee markets for products. And tie all such subsidies to the learning, use and continual expansion of organic, regenerative and biodiverse growing methods. This could feed into a ten year “Just Transition” for the grocery industry that introduces and expands Values Based Procurement frameworks across the $1 trillion industry. And consumer facing subsides, such as expanding SNAP to cover all fresh produce, could mean a huge upcycling of wealth into the food system, with low estimates showing that $1 of SNAP produces $1.79 of value, and higher estimates showing over $10 of value in the long term.

8. Let farmworkers guide the introduction of new techniques and technologies, not just Silicon Valley tech bros, VC’s, entrepreneurs, business owners or academics without practical and hands on experience. Conversations of food tech innovations rarely include farmworkers, nor are farmworkers represented on the National Organic Standards Board or boards of regenerative agriculture certifications.

9. Make farmwork cooperative and municipal. Share the labor, share the gains. Farmwork should not just be segmented out by farm and business unit. Labor works best when it is based on cooperation and collaboration, and not just competition, for the greater good of the community.

10. Keep farmers on the land and keep the land in rotation and holistic production. It can build enormous shared wealth while growing the best, most diverse, abundant and nutritionally dense foods imaginable. But not if farms are abandoned, rural communities are gutted and the land is neglected.

    Humans are part of the landscape. We thrive when we are rooted. In diasporic Judaism this is “Doi-kayt”, we make home where we are. Good food for all.

3. Ten Or So Organizations That Can Make Farmwork Great.

These organizations each have something to offer the movement for better, more fair and more sustainable farmwork. None have all the answers, but each has solutions that should be part of making farmwork great.

UFW Begun in the early 1960s by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Larry Itliong, and other organizers, the United Farm Workers of America is the nation’s first enduring and largest farm workers’ union. The UFW continues its activism in major agricultural sectors, chiefly in California. UFW contract agreements protect thousands of vegetable, berry, winery, tomato, and dairy workers in California, Oregon, and Washington state. More than 75 percent of California’s fresh mushroom industry is now under union contract. Many landmark recent UFW-sponsored laws and regulations protect all farm workers in California, especially at non-union ranches. They include the first state laws in the nation providing farm workers with overtime pay after eight hours a day in California, Washington state, and Oregon; the first comprehensive standards in the U.S. to prevent heat deaths and illnesses in California; and recent COVID19 protections for agricultural workers. The UFW is a leader in the national movement for immigration reform. It’s most recent reform bill for immigrant field workers passed the U.S. House on a broad bipartisan vote last year. The union continues proactively championing legislative and regulatory reforms for farm workers covering issues such as overtime, heat safety, other worker protections, and pesticides.

CIW The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is a worker-based human rights organization internationally recognized for its achievements in the fields of social responsibility, human trafficking, and gender-based violence at work. Built on a foundation of farmworker community organizing starting in 1993, and reinforced with the creation of a national consumer network since 2000, CIW’s work has steadily grown over more than twenty years to encompass three broad and overlapping spheres:

The Fair Food Program is a groundbreaking model for Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) based on a unique partnership among farmworkers, Florida tomato growers, and participating retail buyers, including Subway, Whole Foods, and Walmart. The Fair Food Standards Council, a third-party monitor created to ensure compliance with the FFP, conducts regular audits and carries out ongoing complaint investigation and resolution; and

Participating buyers pay a small Fair Food premium which tomato growers pass on to workers as a line-item bonus on their regular paychecks (Since the Program launched in 2011, $40M+ in Fair Food premiums have been paid into the Program).

The FFP standards are enforced through market consequences guaranteed by CIW’s legally binding Fair Food Agreements, in which participating buyers commit to buy Florida tomatoes only from growers in good standing with the FFP, and to cease purchases from growers who have failed to comply with the code of conduct.

WSR Network WSR provides a proven new form of power for previously powerless workers to protect and enforce their own rights. The WSR paradigm is founded on the understanding that, in order to achieve meaningful and lasting improvements, human rights protections in corporate supply chains must be worker-driven, enforcement-focused, and based on legally binding commitments that assign responsibility for improving working conditions to the global corporations at the top of those supply chains.

Regional Workers’ Centers, such as the Workers Center of Central New York. WCCNY is part of a nation-wide network of innovative workers’ centers affiliated with the Chicago-based Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ). It operates in and around the city of Syracuse, a city with one of the highest rates of poverty in the country, driven by deindustrialization and deunionization, the entrenchment of widespread joblessness and the proliferation of low-wage jobs. The Workers’ Center facilitates worker empowerment and leadership development through trainings related to workers’ rights and occupational health and safety, orchestrates campaigns to combat wage theft and to promote employer compliance with the law, and engages in organizing and coalition-building to push for policies that will increase wages and workplace standards and promote human rights.

ALBA ALBA’s Farmer Education and Enterprise Development (FEED) program develops organic farming and business management skills of individuals in the agricultural sector to enable farm business ownership, career advancement, or a more inclusive agriculture sector. The program utilizes ALBA’s experienced bilingual staff, a trusted network of farm service providers, and a 100-acre organic farm training facility in the Salinas Valley.

Each year, approximately 80 farmers with limited resources receive affordable education, land, farming equipment, and technical assistance. Through hands-on, land-based learning, they acquire organic production and business management skills, enabling them to pursue the goal of farm ownership or find better job opportunities.

RAA The Regenerative Agriculture Alliance was created in 2018 as the non-profit arm of a larger ecosystem designed to build a regenerative, equitable, and socially just agriculture sector. We are focused on scaling up a systems-level regenerative poultry solution that restores ecological balance, produces nourishing food, and puts money back into the hands of farmers and food chain workers. To do so requires a completely new supply chain that integrates grassroots organizing of farmers with physical infrastructure and other regeneratively stacked enterprises.

Regenerative agriculture is a large network of farmers who are dedicated not only to aggregating their production, but also to pooling their knowledge and resources to ensure success for everyone.

ROC The leading regenerative agriculture certification with a broad set of labor and social criteria, with millions of acres in production.

Regenerative organic agriculture is a collection of practices that focus on regenerating soil health and the full farm ecosystem. In practice, regenerative organic agriculture can look like cover cropping, crop rotation, low- to no-till, compost, and zero use of persistent chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Regenerative organic agriculture is a collection of practices that focus on regenerating soil health and the full farm ecosystem.

US Federation of Worker Cooperatives. Our mission is to build a thriving ecosystem for worker-owned and controlled businesses and their cooperative leaders to power movements for racial justice and economic democracy.

As a grassroots member-led movement, our membership is our power and our strength. The USFWC welcomes membership from worker cooperatives, other democratic workplaces, cooperative developers, and allied organizations.

The USFWC represents the interests of worker cooperatives with federal agencies and elected officials. In addition, our staff and Board support national, state, and local advocacy initiatives.

AgSocio AgSocio is an agricultural labor and service provider that helps clients comply and compete in the highly regulated and rapidly evolving agricultural labor market, dedicated to an agricultural work system that benefits farmers, farmworkers, and the broader food industry.

Equitable Food Initiative EFI’s programs to increase assurance, improve quality and drive business performance are all grounded in processes that engage workers through training to develop their agency and provide channels for worker voice.

EFI recognizes that the skills and contributions of farmworkers create healthier work environments and produce safer food. EFI promotes a culture of continuous improvement in which workers and managers are encouraged to speak up when things aren’t working, and where they have the skills and incentive to solve problems. EFI’s products and services offer fresh produce companies support in taking a continuous improvement journey for social responsibility.

Tierra Y Libertad Farm A cooperative farm owned by Mexican and Central American farmworkers based in the Pacific Northwest.

The California Fast Food Council: Sectoral Bargaining On September 28, 2023, Governor Newsom signed into law AB 1228, the Fast Food Restaurant Industry legislation that raises the hourly minimum wage rate for certain fast food workers to $20 effective April 1, 2024. In addition, the legislation establishes a Fast Food Council within DIR to establish an hourly minimum wage for fast food restaurant employees and develop standards, rules, and regulations for the fast food industry. A first-in-the-nation fast food council that offer workers and labor advocates a way to set industry working conditions, hammering out rules directly across the table from franchise owners and representatives of restaurant chains such as McDonald’s and Burger King.

This is all but a sketch. We have so much more work to do. Let’s make farmwork great. Protect farmworkers. Rebuild the food system.

peace.

(Perspectives are 100% our own and do not reflect sponsors.)