The political parties had been polarized with one side arguing about first dealing with border security and enforcing existing laws, while the other side focused on a path to citizenship for those people already in the U.S.

The Obama Administration has increased the enforcement of existing laws, including record numbers of deportations, as well as taking executive action to help the children of undocumented immigrants who were brought here as minors. Those actions, in essence, have helped a more bipartisan dialogue emerge.

It now appears the U.S. House of Representatives will approach reform through a series of more narrowly focused proposals that have broad support, while the Senate will develop a more comprehensive reform package. Since a bill needs to pass both the House and Senate in an identical form to be sent to the President, differences in the two approaches would be worked out in a conference committee between the House and Senate.

According to Politico, several House Republicans have been “reviewing immigration issues ranging from agricultural to high-tech visas, to border security and dealing with illegal immigrants already in the country.” It’s interesting that this wide range of discussions is happening. It is a good sign, but also unusual.

Significantly, a group of industrial food animal production and processing companies have formed the “Food Manufacturers Immigration Coalition” to encourage comprehensive immigration reform. As Mike Brown, president of the National Chicken Council, a group representing large poultry processors, said recently, “To date, much of the discussion has focused on the need to retain highly skilled workers such as scientists and engineers, and the need for additional temporary agricultural workers. These are important objectives, but they do not meet the needs of our industry sector. We are manufacturers, wanting a stable and permanent workforce that can help sustain the rural communities where we do business.”

Barry Carpenter, CEO of the North American Meat Association said, “We need a comprehensive package [that includes], obviously, enforcement and a fast way to earn legal status.” He told this to Meatingplace in an interview after the hearing. “We can’t ignore the 11 million (already in the U.S.); we need to be able to [hire] them while they earn [citizenship or residency] by whatever method it is to become legal.”

As the debate on immigration reform has sharpened, the New York Times recently editorialized that “one important issue has, so far, received only passing mention: stronger protections for immigrant workers against exploitation and abuse.”

While the Times editorial probably didn’t have agricultural workers in mind, it is important that public health advocates and organizations interested in improving the lives of undocumented workers talk about the industrial food animal production system and its impact on workers in the context of immigration reform.

The United Farm Workers of America union is pressing for “real reform” that would give current farm workers a reasonable opportunity to earn legal status and citizenship.

According to the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which released its landmark report almost five years ago:

“Infectious agents, such as a novel avian influenza virus, that arise in an industrial farm animal production (IFAP) facility may be transmissible from person to person in a community setting… Monitoring is a basic component of strategies to protect public health from harmful effects of contamination or disease, yet industrial farm animal production monitoring is inadequate. In general, public health concerns associated with IFAP include heightened risks of pathogen transfers passed from animal to humans; the emergence of microbes resistant to antibiotics and antimicrobials, due in large part to widespread use of antimicrobials for non-therapeutic purposes; food borne disease; worker health concerns; and dispersed impacts on the adjacent community at large.”

On Thanksgiving Day in 1960, CBS Reports released a documentary titled, “Harvest of Shame.” In that landmark, hour-long documentary hosted by Edward R. Murrow, the plight of America’s migrant field workers was documented. Murrow, who won fame reporting on live CBS radio during Nazi Germany’s aerial assault on London in World War II, labeled the conditions experienced by migrant field workers “as the forgotten people in America” and harvesting produce in the “sweat shops of the soil.” He was talking about those people who harvest our produce. But his comments, if stated today, could include workers in industrial farm animal production operations and slaughterhouses.

As policy makers review immigration policy, public health advocates and those representing agricultural immigrant workers should keep in mind the exposure to antibiotic resistant pathogens, novel flu viruses, methane, hydrogen sulfide, and volatile organic compounds that are part of the dominant industrial food animal production system. And they should demand that there is fundamental change in this industrial system to protect the health of workers, and the general populace, as part of any immigration reform debate.

Photo: Arthur Rothstein, The Library of Congress. 

A version of this story was originally published on the Livable Future blog.

As I discussed here, USDA made news earlier this month with a sobering message: climate change is real, climate change is the result of human action, and climate change poses unprecedented challenges to U.S. agriculture.

Yesterday, Secretary Vilsack followed up that message with both a call to action and a promise to focus aggressively on climate change:

“We’re going to be very aggressive in this effort because we understand and appreciate, after the floods of 2011 and the drought of 2012, that folks need this assistance now…And by doing this, by taking these actions, we can help to mitigate and help to manage risks.”

Amongst other things, the agency plans to ramp up its efforts to encourage sustainable farming practices, both to help farmers be more resilient to climate impacts and to mitigate climate change by reducing agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and increasing carbon sequestration. This comes as very welcome news to anyone who cares about reducing climate pollution and ensuring the stability, resilience and health of our agricultural system.

As my colleague Claire discusses in an upcoming paper on the impacts of a changing climate on U.S. agriculture, scientific experts, including leading agronomic organizations and USDA researchers, expect climate change to result in more frequent droughts, more intense precipitation events, greater water requirements for growing crops, and more significant pest problems for American farmers.[1][2]  Some of the areas that can expect to be hit hardest by climate change are also some of the nation’s most agriculturally productive.[3]

Luckily, the solution lies in practices that solve immediate environmental problems—for example, reducing soil erosion—while at the same time mitigating climate change through greater carbon sequestration and increasing farmers’ incomes both in the near and long term.

It’s not often you find such a triple threat solution to such a serious and far-reaching threat.

Specifically, USDA points to best management practices such as conservation tillage, cover cropping and greater crop diversification, as well as more efficient irrigation as a key strategy to adapt to the intense rainfall and severe drought episodes that are expected to accompany climate change. In his speech, Secretary Vilsack said his agency will take steps to encourage multi-cropping, such as planting two types of crops in an area, planting cover crops between growing seasons and integrating livestock into cropping systems.

That’s encouraging news, since farming systems that are more ecologically integrated can help farmers better conserve their lands and protect water resources in times of drought.

On the other hand, failure to act is likely to be catastrophic and will lead to huge and ever-increasing expenditures to prop up a stressed and failing agricultural system. This is not hyperbole. American farmers have already experienced nearly $14 billion in crop losses from last year’s drought alone—a drought so bad that water levels in the mighty Mississippi River dropped 30 to 50 feet below normal levels, making it nearly impassable for barge traffic.

This map from USDA’s Risk Management Agency is worth a thousand words. And that doesn’t include losses to ranchers in places like Texas, where the worst drought in state history devastated cattle herds in 2011.

USDA is not alone in identifying climate change as a risk. As my colleague Theo discussed here, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—the government’s nonpartisan watchdog—rang the alarm bell on climate change, showing how exposed federal and state agencies and programs such as the National Flood Insurance Program and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are to the devastating impacts of climate change and calling for a government-wide strategic approach with strong leadership to manage related risks.

While Secretary Vilsack spoke specifically to the agricultural community yesterday, the bottom line is that we must make all of our communities cleaner, stronger, and more sustainable. Failure to take action to reduce the pollution that’s causing our climate to change and warm means saddling ourselves with steep costs, devastating losses, and mounting dangers. An important step is limiting emissions from our largest source of climate pollution: existing power plants. You can read more about NRDC’s innovative plan to cut carbon emissions from America’s power plants 26 percent by 2020, and urge the Obama administration to take action to protect us from dangerous carbon pollution, here.

This post originally appeared on the NRDC Switchboard.

[1] Working Group Representing the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, & Soil Science Society of America, Position Statement on Climate Change (2011).

[2] C.L. Walthall, et al., Climate Change and Agriculture in the United States: Effects and Adaptation, USDA Technical Bulletin 1935 (2012).

[3] Sujoy B. Roy, et al., Evaluating Sustainability of Projected Water Demands Under Future Climate Change Scenarios, TetraTech 2010.

In the food retail sector, unfortunately, raising the minimum wage might not make much of a difference to those employees that are most vulnerable. Grocery stores and other food retail outlets are already avoiding minimum wage and benefit requirements for many workers by keeping them in part-time jobs. Realistically, if a worker can’t get scheduled for 40 hours per week of work, then minimum wage requirements cease to be effective in ensuring an annual income floor.

With support from federal and state governments as well as private foundations and businesses, communities across the country are beginning to engage in efforts to increase the number of food retail outlets in low-income “food deserts.” This is tremendously important work – according to USDA statistics, almost 40 percent of low-income Americans lack adequate access to a full-service grocery store. But as a growing body of evidence shows, there is a great deal of variation in the quality of food retail jobs, and food retail outlets focused on customer-service and sustainability are more likely to pay higher wages and provide full-time jobs than are other retailers that are narrowly focused on cost cutting.

One might ask, “Why do employers want to keep workers part-time? Can’t a business case be made for investing in employees?” The answer is simple: because they can get away with it. With high unemployment rates concentrated in low-income communities (to give one example, unemployment in parts of West Oakland is over 40 percent), employers are free to treat workers as expendable commodities. Employers know that these workers will take whatever hours they can get, even if it means waiting by the phone to hear whether they are on the schedule for that very day.

In some states, California included, the most egregiously exploitative practices are formally prohibited. If an employer sends a California worker home two hours into an eight hour shift because business is slower than usual, the employer must pay the worker for at least half (or four hours) of the hours that were originally scheduled. But perhaps unsurprisingly, research has shown that violations of the law are widespread, particularly in lower-income communities where workers are more desperate for work and have less access to legal representation and resources.

As we think about using tax credits, public investment funds, and other public resources to bring full-service grocery stores to low-income, underserved communities, we need to think creatively about how to hold these businesses accountable for providing good, sustainable jobs:

1. Tax Giveaways – We should support efforts to reform California’s state enterprise zone tax giveaway program. The program costs taxpayers over $700 million a year, and it is so broad that it competes with efforts to bring retailers to underserved “food deserts.” It also ties tax credits to all new hires, regardless of whether these represent real jobs, and provides no incentives to compensate workers above the required minimum wage and benefits. The California Labor Federation and partner groups are leading efforts to reform enterprise zones in California – support their work by attending public hearings and responding to other calls for action.
2. Local Incentives – In designing loan, grant, tax credit, or zoning incentives to draw full-service grocery stores to otherwise underserved food deserts, we should consider including a “good jobs” provision. This could be as simple as requiring benefits parity for full-time and part-time workers. This is a regulation used in Europe to avoid a disparity in fixed-costs between workers classified as full-time versus part-time. Another option would be to levy a fine when businesses go above a certain cap on the proportion of workers who are part-time.
3. Enforcement – We need to engage as community members to help with the enforcement of existing labor laws. This means providing workers with access to essential legal resources, as well as acting as citizen investigators ourselves. As shoppers, we should be asking managers and workers about the store’s practices, making it known that we care about the quality of jobs for all workers in our community.

Access to full-service grocery stores and good, sustainable jobs in food retail will not solve all of the problems faced by low-income Americans. But as more of us begin to understand the link between these two important goals, and to work for solutions that encompass them both, we will start to see progress.

Originally posted on Western States Council blog.

Today, our misguided immigration policies prevent us from providing healthy and sustainable food for all families, from upholding basic standards of human and labor rights within our food systems, and from creating opportunities for healthy communities for all children. In fact, America’s food system cannot thrive without fair, just, and humane immigration reform.

If you care about food, then you’ll be cheering that after years of organizing and advocacy in immigrant and progressive sectors, immigration reform frameworks emerging from Washington include a path towards citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Right now, no one knows the details contained in these proposals. Even so, we know we must build on this momentum to ensure that the massive public demand for immigration reform includes guarantees for immigrant worker rights and an end to detentions, deportations, punitive policies like Secure Communities, and other brutal enforcement policies. Such changes would go a long way towards ending the human rights abuses that our present food system is built upon.

The US industrialized agri-food system has always relied on cheap labor –- from indentured servants to slaves to recent immigrants — to ensure profits in an increasingly concentrated system. Low wages are coupled with poor working conditions and federal labor standards exclude workers in many sectors of the food system. Today, there are 20 million workers along the food chain in the U.S.; seven of the 10 worst paying jobs in the nation are food system jobs. In some industries more than half of workers are undocumented immigrants.

Immigrants who work in the food system, particularly those who are undocumented or with a vulnerable immigration status, are targets of human rights abuses, exploitation, and unfair labor practices. At worst, these workers experience modern-day slavery and sexual assault: in the last decade, for example, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has helped prosecute 9 cases of modern-day slavery in Florida’s tomato fields alone. At best, immigrant food chain workers experience stagnant poverty-level wages. Along the vast spectrum from field to processing, packaging, distribution, and to table, abuse and low-wages abound.

The Food Chain Workers Alliance 2012 report The Hands That Feed Us concludes that undocumented workers experience lower wages and greater wage theft than other workers in the food system. For example, from a survey of over 600 food workers:

• Undocumented workers had a median hourly wage nearly 25% lower than all other food chain workers.
  Undocumented workers were over 2.5 times as likely to experience wage theft than other food chain workers. Among workers who experience wage theft, undocumented workers lost nearly 90% more than documented food chain workers.
• Undocumented workers were over 2.5 times as likely to earn less than the legally required minimum wage.
• When food workers are exploited and unprotected, they are likely less able to provide food for their own families and to protect the safety and quality of our food. Because of their low wages, food workers use food stamps at more than 1.5 times the rate of the general workforce in the U.S. and suffer food insecurity at 1.2 times the rate. The United Food and Commercial Workers union also found that between 2001 and 2009, food safety recalls were more likely to come from non-unionized meatpacking plants than from those that were unionized.

Not surprisingly, the growing and powerful food movement – from strawberry growers to Slow Foodies – is beginning to make the connection between food and migration. In the coming round of immigration reform, the emerging convergence of food and migrant justice may be another “sleeping giant” with the power to make a difference.

The recent Brandworkers victory in New York City offers just one example of the growing collaboration between immigrant food workers, food advocates, and food consumers. On May 7, 2012, workers at Flaum Appetizing and members of Brandworkers International, a workers center that organizes food processing and distribution workers in New York City, announced that they had won a global settlement that returned to them $577,000 in unpaid wages and other compensation, as well as subject Flaum Appetizing to a binding code of conduct protecting workplace rights. The victory came after the workers had won their claim against the company for unjustly firing them for organizing. The company had fought back, claiming they did not have to provide restitution to the workers because they were undocumented immigrants.

Local victories abound and are creating vibrant new connections between the food and immigration movements. For example, in October 2012, food justice, anti-hunger, labor, environmental, faith-based and food producer groups came together to launch the US Food Sovereignty Alliance. At its first national gathering, members chose immigration policy as one of the Alliance’s three priority areas. Most recently, a new collaboration between Food Chain Workers Alliance, the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and the Movement Strategy Center is compiling stories of immigrant food workers organizing for a voice on the job, immigrant communities fighting for access to affordable, healthy food, and food chain employers who know that genuine immigration reform is in their best interest. This article is the first in a series gauging the power of the food movement as it begins to realize its influence in the current immigration policy debate.

On Sunday, Harvey’s voice was featured on a Super Bowl ad for Dodge Ram trucks featuring imagery of farmers. The audio was condensed from a 1978 speech Harvey made to the Future Farmers of America. I grew up in a rural town, my dad was born on a farm, and he and my mom opened a buffalo ranch when he retired from his career as a university professor. About the time my parents returned to a life on the land, I started working for FoodHub, a project of the nonprofit Ecotrust, which is a platform dedicated to connecting small and medium farmers with chefs, schools and other wholesale food buyers in their area. As a food system reformer and marketing professional, I had a visceral reaction to the ad. 

What was a revelation to me about the farmer spot was that in memorializing and purporting to celebrate farm families and their way of life, the ad highlighted the fact that they’re gone. We all know the short version of that history: Earl Butz said get big or get out, and they did. And during that painful transition, rural America emptied out into the cities, giant companies took control of the inputs to, infrastructure surrounding and distribution of farm products, and we made a massive cultural shift toward suburbanization and all that goes with it.

I think hearing Paul Harvey’s voice and seeing pictures of those incredible farmers and their families struck a chord because I recognized their loss as a milestone in the hollowing out of our society. Where now are the men who are strong enough to plow a field straight, have the integrity to not cut corners, and are gentle enough to splint a bird’s leg? They aren’t carrying a “murse” and pulling cappuccinos in the city, that’s for sure. Nor are there many of them in public office. And they’re certainly not wrapping themselves in the flag and listening to Rush Limbaugh. They, and the ideals being exploited by Dodge, have largely been emasculated or made obsolete.

The Dodge ad, and the “Year of the Farmer” campaign that goes with it, glosses over the realities of how food gets produced in this country in exactly the same way that past Super Bowl ads have “celebrated” military families by waving the flag and tugging at our collective heartstrings, even as they gloss over the real pain and effects of war-making. Although they aren’t likely to buy brand spanking new pickup trucks, most of the people who work the farms that feed the agro-industrial food system today are not Caucasian, they’re usually not even American. And much of the food produced and marketed in the current system is making us fat and sick. Effective as propaganda, the campaign mischaracterizes modern agriculture and ignores what consolidation has wrought.

That commercial wasn’t really about trucks or farmers. I believe the reason the ad was so compelling is that as a society we miss the human connection that came from doing physical work side by side, and then sitting together at dinner, feeling exhausted and productive. Paul Harvey’s voice, and the faces of those beautiful human beings meant to represent integrity and hard work, evoked that for me. Forging a food system that nurtures our communities, creates opportunity and pride of ownership for family farmers, and returns integrity and honor for all contributors to the system could lead us back to local and rural prosperity, better health and closer human bonds. I challenge Dodge to use “The Year of the Farmer” to help create that future.

Some of this massive produce loss is happening well before it reaches retailers, as perfectly edible produce is literally being left on the field or sent to the landfill. And many of these good fruits and vegetables are never even harvested.  A new report commissioned by NRDC investigates losses at the farm level.

Some people gamble, some play the stock market, and some grow food.  Farming is a risky business that faces the impacts of adverse weather, including crop damage and loss, as a routine part of the business.  However, it does not take an extreme weather event, or a weather event at all, for crops to go to waste in the fields.  In fact, thousands of acres of perfectly edible produce go to waste every year because of market fluctuations, cosmetic imperfections, and other reasons.

This new crop loss report, written by Milepost Consulting, surveyed a small sample of 16 farmers and packer-shippers (those who distribute the produce) in the Central Coast and Central Valley of California.  Results are by no means conclusive due to the limited data set, but they do offer an anecdotal snapshot of the extent of losses that occur.  They found that “shrink,” another word for lost product, could be as low as 1 percent for the crops which were studied and, depending on weather and market conditions of a particular year, as high as 30 percent.  Losses for plums and nectarines were on the high side; head lettuce and broccoli losses (at least where the farmer was selling florets separately) were relatively low.

This can translate to a lot of food.  If just 5 percent of the U.S. broccoli production is not harvested, over 90 million pounds of broccoli go uneaten.  That would be enough to feed every child that participates in the National School Lunch Program over 11 4-ounce servings of broccoli.[ii]

It also translates to a lot of resources used for naught. For example, if just 5 percent of broccoli grown in Monterey County, California (producer of 40 percent of U.S. broccoli) is not harvested, that represents the wasted use of 1.6 billion gallons of water and 450,000 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer (a contributor to global warming and water pollution). [iii] And let’s not forget about the energy, pesticides, land, and other resources that went into growing that food.  All told, it would amount to about a $12 million bill for broccoli farmers[iv] — a chunk of change and resources that warrant further investigation into how we might recover and improve upon some of these unnecessary staggering produce losses.

What is causing so much produce to be lost on farms?

Before you scoff at this, know that we are all to blame.  In our search for the perfectly round, perfectly colored, perfectly sized peach, we as consumers ultimately drive much of this waste.  As explained by farmer and author David Masumoto, “If we picked our friends the way we selectively picked and culled our produce, we’d be very lonely.”

Our finicky preference for perfect-looking produce not only forces some fruit and vegetables to be voted off the marketplace, it drives down the price of even slightly misshapen, smaller, or scarred fruit.  A peach grower once told me that for eight out of ten of the fruit he can’t sell, “you wouldn’t even be able to tell me what’s wrong with it.”  Yet they are considered lower “grade,” lower grades mean lower prices, and low prices are another cause of shrink.

It costs money to harvest a field.  If prices are too low, the farmer would have to pay more for people to harvest the product and for cooling and transport than he would receive in revenue.  So, that farmer is forced to deem that field or orchard a “walk by” and turn it back into the soil when possible.  Estimates of how often walk-by’s happen ranged from 1 to 30 percent of the time.  This mostly happens when the market is flooded with more supply than demand.

There’s more to the story, however.  Inherent to the produce industry is a structure of a few large buyers and many suppliers.  This leads to a situation where the largest food buyers are able to dictate the terms of a sale, and the growers are generally forced to accept them.  These terms can include formal “penalties to deliver” if the grower comes up short in quantity at the agreed-upon level of quality.  Even if that’s not required contractually, growers are compelled to ensure they meet the orders for fear they will otherwise lose their biggest customers.  Therefore, they do exactly what anyone in their right mind with a riskier-than-average business would do—they plant a little extra for insurance.  One grower estimated overplanting about 10 percent on a regular basis.  Of course, when harvest time comes, he /she tries to find other markets for the surplus, so it may not go to waste.  In aggregate, however, this adds to the overall supply in the marketplace, thus driving prices down and potentially leading again to those walk-by’s.

A farmer might also be forced to abandon a field or entire crop because he/she simply can’t find enough workers to harvest it.  Labor shortages are an increasing problem for farmers, as was demonstrated this year when in Washington apple growers estimated losing upwards of 25% of their harvest due to lack of skilled labor.

Another big driver is market fluctuation.  With highly variable prices—one broccoli grower had seen prices go as low as $6 per case and as high as $32—growers are constantly guessing on how to play the supply-demand game.  One good year can cover a series of bad ones.  This can lead to an almost gambling mentality where growers “double down” on what they are planting one year to cover the losses they incurred the previous year.  That again creates more supply potentially creating the conditions for walk-by’s.

What can we do about this?

This is complicated stuff.  Farmers are juggling a myriad of variables from weather to plants to markets and beyond.  A little margin of error is certainly expected.  At the same time, from a societal perspective, there is perfectly good, nutritious food out there that is not making it to people who could really benefit from it.  Though the problem is occurring at the farm, we all have a part in solving it. Here’s how:

Consumers, let’s all be a little more forgiving in the grocery store (and restaurants for that matter).  As David Masumoto beautifully described, “Real foods carry with them the memory of real life. No two peaches are, nor should they be, exactly alike. Natural variation is natural. Culls are part of nature. How they’re accepted becomes the question for survival.”

Businesses, you too can be more forgiving in acknowledging the challenges of farming and allowing for the occasional short volume.  Why not give your customers a try and see if they might be interested in purchasing a bag of scarred peaches?  There may even be opportunity for the creative entrepreneur in scooping up some of that extra produce and creating new products or markets for it.

Policy-makers, this could be a real opportunity to get more healthy food to people.  First, we need to understand the dimensions of it better.  As I implored in the NRDC report about food waste, we need a more comprehensive look into how many fruits and vegetables are actually going to waste and why.  We don’t need to wait for that study, however, to encourage more donations.  At the beginning of this year, California started giving a 10% tax credit to farmers for their food donations.  States like Colorado and Arizona offer similar benefits.  A federal legislation covering more states and more products could further help incentivize donations.   Policy to address the significant problem of farm labor shortages is also important to the equation.

Gleaners and food rescue organizations, keep it up!  You are doing a service to all of us, and often with mere crumbs of a budget.  We should all be throwing more moral, financial, and volunteer support your way.  And we should all consider this a problem that we can help solve.

An earlier version of this post appeared on the NRDC Switchboard. Photo credit to ironypoisoning.

[i] According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, http://www.fao.org/docrep/014/mb060e/mb060e00.pdf

[ii] The USDA Economic Research Service reports that the U.S. produced 1.8 billion pounds of broccoli in 2010, and about 38.1 million children participated in the National School Lunch Program, http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/lunch/AboutLunch/NSLPFactSheet.pdf.

[iii] Assumes 24 acre-inches of water and 180 pounds of nitrogen per acre, according to averages for Central Coast production derived from “Broccoli Production in California,” UC Vegetable Information and Research Center: http://anrcatalog.ucdavis.edu/pdf/7211.pdf. Acreage from 2011 Monterey County Crop Report: http://ag.co.monterey.ca.us/assets/resources/assets/252/cropreport_2011.pdf.

[iv] Assumes $5,038/acre as estimated in the UC Cooperative Extension “2012 Sample Costs to Produce Fresh Market Broccoli”, http://coststudies.ucdavis.edu/files/Broccoli_CC2012.pdf

One birthday of mine, I recall sneaking a view of the staff as they cooked our lunch. An older woman stood out in particular–short, with long, grey-streaked hair pulled back into a bun, standing over a large commercial-sized pot. The woman made me think of my own abuelita (grandmother), and I romanticized the notion of Vietnamese grandmothers making savory Pho with care.

But what if that woman who made my lunch that day was the grandmother of another family, not the family she worked for?  And what if the restaurant I loved so much left this woman, or others on their staff unpaid?  Would she have been able to complain to someone, found a way to get what she was owed?  Or would she have gone without electricity and eaten only rice for a spell? I hadn’t imagined it that way.

Today, I work at Workers Defense Project (WDP), an immigrant workers rights organization based in Austin, Texas, where we receive up to ten calls a day from workers in desperate situations just like this.  They build our offices, care for our children, and cook our food, often going underpaid, unpaid or worse.

In a study published by the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) this year, 86 percent of workers in the food chain reported earning low or poverty wages.  The same study cites that 79 percent don’t have paid sick days, or don’t know if they do, and over 1/3 of study participants had suffered from wage theft within one week of the time of their participation.  Of the workers who suffered wage theft, 62 percent were Latino or Asian.

And labor abuse isn’t something specific to the restaurant industry. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has a 20+ year history (and some amazing victories) struggling against poverty wages and violence suffered by workers in our agricultural industry–an industry peopled by a largely immigrant workforce.  So why are immigrants consistently exploited across the food system?  Would working towards comprehensive immigration reform help?

To be sure, we can’t prove that if workers who typically fill these crucial food system jobs had access to a full menu of civil and labor rights that it would guarantee to raise the industry employment standards. Throughout eight years of doing this work, I’ve heard a slew of reasons why these abuses happen.  Stories range from employers who feel they don’t have to pay undocumented workers and threaten to report to immigration if they complain, to the dehumanizing rationale that farmworkers are nothing but a replaceable piece of machinery. Worker fear couples with the irrational logic of abusive employers to create a toxic situation of silence. And in that silence, employers suffer no penalty, allowing the exploitation to continue.

Clearly, the endemic exploitation of food industry workers is directly related to fear.  But imagine this: when I take a call from a woman who wasn’t paid, complained, and then was fired, her voice won’t be filled with tears.  She won’t fear deportation and being torn away from her children. She will know that she’ll be able to pay her landlord at the end of the month and keep her newborn warm as the temperature drops this winter. She’ll just be calling me to ask for a phone number, and to ensure she files the right paperwork to report and resolve the problem.

Immigrant workers being guaranteed access to the basic civil protections that documentation provides might not change conditions in the industry on its own–but those workers would be able to live with less fear.  Pair that with the cutting-edge community organizing work of groups like the CIW and the Restaurant Opportunities Center to support the creation of dignified, family-sustaining jobs in the food system.  In a context where workers have basic civil protections, the work of these organizations could have an even greater impact.

With comprehensive immigration reform in place, the people who bus our tables and pick our apples will not only be able to vote and have access to basic social services. They can stop living in fear of their employers and of the police. They might one day also afford to feed their families the food they serve us, and purchase the produce we all want on our tables. Sustainable food advocates can help make this possible.

Many of us know that democracy doesn’t end at the ballot box. We recognize that it is going to take some real work in order to make it possible for everyone to have the kind of fresh, healthy, affordable, fair food we want. This work started long before the election season and must be sustained beyond it. We need concrete ways to support immigrant workers in the food system and make it possible for their families to eat as ours do, and ‘voting with our dollars’ won’t be enough.

We can educate ourselves more on the issues faced by all workers in the food system and follow the work of organizations like the CIW, ROC, and FCWA.  We can push locally-elected representatives to repeal oppressive policies like Secure Communities, which require local police departments to report to ICE officials on who they have detained, ultimately leading to mass deportations of people across the nation for minor things like traffic offenses. We can push the Obama administration on immigration reform. Finally, and most importantly, sustainable food advocates can work to change the conversation within our circles–bringing this and other issues that workers in the food system face into the dialogue about what a sustainable food future looks like for all of us.

Photo: Restaurant kitchen, by Shutterstock

In the latest report by the Food & Environment Reporting Network, “As Common as Dirt,” produced in collaboration with The American Prospect magazine, reporter Tracie McMillan investigates how farm labor contracting–a ubiquitous, but relatively unknown, practice–often blatantly disregards labor laws governing wages, safety and health. She writes that it could be the most insidious source of abuse faced by farmworkers.

“Known in some circles as ‘custom harvesters,’ farm-labor contractors offer produce growers a ready workforce, but they also give these growers the ability to distance themselves from the people who pick their crops,” McMillan reports. “These contractors control the flow of money between farmer and worker as well as all the paperwork. They track hours worked, crops harvested, and wages paid and take responsibility for everything related to labor, from verifying immigration status to providing workers’ compensation.”

McMillan, who spent several months on this investigative report, tells the story of 75-year-old Ignacio Villalobos, a California farmworker since childhood, who brought suit earlier this year against former employer Juan Muñoz Farm Labor Contractor. The suit alleges that the contractor routinely altered payment documents to undercount hours worked, failed to pay minimum wage or overtime, failed to provide safe or sanitary working conditions, and housed the workers in unsafe and unsanitary living quarters.

Farm labor contractors nationwide pay by the piece, which guarantees that laborers will work quickly. However, the suit alleges that this piece rate doesn’t account for the actual time farmworkers spend on the job and did not meet required minimum wage levels. Farm labor advocates view this systemized underpayment of labor as endemic to the contractor system.

Contractors can be found in the fields of nearly every handpicked crop in the United States, organic or conventional. McMillan reports how   federal investigations–which determine whether workers are operating under safe conditions–dropped by 60 percent at agricultural workplaces between 1986 and 2008. In 2008, inspectors visited 1,499 farms of the more than 2 million in operation nationwide. This is because, she notes, labor inspectors often rely on complaints, rather than performing surprise inspections, leaving workers at risk for exploitation.

McMillan reveals that even when contractors are taken to task, they often avoid harsh penalties. The state of California, for example, had previously charged the labor contractor named in the recent suit.  “The case was settled for $100,000, and no fines were imposed. Muñoz agreed to follow wage, hour, and safety laws going forward. Since then, Muñoz has not been inspected,” McMillan writes. As of June 2012, no payments had been made to workers, including Villalobos, who would likely qualify. Similarly, the current civil suit could take months to be decided or settled.

McMillan is the author of The New York Times bestselling book, The American Way of Eating.

Read the full report here on FERNnews’ Web site. Originally published here on The American Prospect.

Photo: Farmworkers, by Shutterstock

Sarumathi Jayaraman, co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC) and author of the upcoming book Behind The Kitchen Door, says that what’s at stake when we choose a restaurant are the lives of 10 million people, many immigrants, many people of color, who bring passion, tenacity, and important insight into the American dining experience.

The Huffington Post posted a story about working conditions for restaurant staff that recants the stifling history of the “tipped minimum wage,” the lack of regulatory influence on service workers, and the harsh realities of being paid bare minimum for hard work in situations that are neither stable nor compassionate.

Jayaraman’s promising book, Behind The Kitchen Door, investigates further and asks whether we can really eat ethically if we’re only purchasing ethical food, but not ensuring that there are ethical labor practices for the people who get the food to our plates?

I had an opportunity to talk more via eemail with Jayaraman about ROC’s work with immigrant and low-wage restaurant workers.

What was the impetus for the upcoming book?

Over the last 10 years, ROC has conducted more than 5,000 surveys of low-wage restaurant workers, 300 employer interviews, and 300 in-depth worker interviews, and has published more than 15 reports on the industry. Through all of this research, we have found that the extremely low wages, lack of benefits, and poor working conditions faced by the more than 10 million restaurant workers nationwide directly and severely impact the safety, health, and overall dining experience of every consumer who eats out.

We wanted to write a popular book to let everyone who eats out understand what’s going on behind the kitchen door, and the severe implications of the poor wages and working conditions of the people who touch our food on our own health and welfare. I wanted to share my own story – that my own dining experience has changed in learning the stories of these workers, and that I think theirs will too. Most importantly, after learning about what’s going on, we want to implore every restaurant consumer to take small actions to change the industry – use ROC’s Diners Guide when eating out, let restaurant managers know that as consumers we care about whether the workers have paid sick days or are paid poverty wages as much as we care about whether the chicken is free-range.

Ultimately, we hope to encourage consumers to let their legislators know that a minimum wage for tipped workers of $2.13 and a lack of paid sick days are simply unacceptable, both for the sake of those workers and the sake of our own health and welfare as consumers.

Who do you want to read this book?

The target audience is everyone and anyone who eats out, but frankly that includes everyone who touches this industry, including workers, managers, owners, and policy makers.

What questions do you hope this book will incite?

How did the industry get to this point? How did we allow undue corporate influence to create such incredible disparity in one of the nation’s largest industries? As a restaurant consumer, what can I do to change this situation?

Are people prepared to bare the burden of higher meal costs at restaurants in order to supplement an increase in wages and standards for working?

All of our research—and in fact research by the USDA—indicates that there would not be a higher cost of meals at restaurants if workers were paid and treated well. We have several responsible employer partners who manage to pay livable wages and provide benefits with comparable menu prices to other restaurants in their segment of the industry. Our Diners Guide has awarded restaurant companies in every segment of the industry—fast food, casual, and fine dining restaurants—that provide these wages and working conditions without high menu prices.

How can costs be covered if businesses take it on themselves to increase wages and provide benefits?

The employers profiled in my book and also in ROC’s recent report, “Taking the High Road: A How-To Guide for Successful Restaurant Employers,” talk about how providing increased wages and benefits might create an initial short-term cost, but that there are extremely high long-term costs for restaurant profit, including much lower turnover, which allows them to save the cost of hiring and training new workers all the time (most restaurants experience over 100 percent turnover in one year), increased productivity by their employees, including better service and ‘up-selling’ by dining room staff, decreased liability, increased worker loyalty and decreased theft and breakage, and more.

Are there actions that people can take after reading the book?

Yes, there are specific recommended actions listed in the last chapter. Specifically, we hope people will use the ROC Diners Guide and speak to restaurant management every time they eat out. We also hope people will let their legislators know that a $2.13 minimum wage for tipped workers is not acceptable.

What campaigns can concerned customers get involved with?

Currently, ROC has a campaign to encourage Darden, the owner of the Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Capital Grille, Bahamas Breeze, Seasons 52 and other brands, and the world’s largest full-service restaurant company, to end racial discrimination and wage theft and act as an industry leader with regard to poverty wages and paid sick days. Consumers can let the management in any of Darden’s restaurants know that they encourage the company to act as an industry leader on these issues. ROC also has engaged in local, state and federal policy campaigns.

As a result of our efforts, for the first time in 15 years, House of Representatives leader George Miller introduced a minimum wage bill in Congress that includes a significant increase in the tipped minimum wage. Consumers can let their representatives know that they should move this legislation forward, for the sake of everyone who eats out.

Not even a decade has passed since Sergio Arau filmed A Day Without a Mexican, but 2012 may go down in history as the Year of No Meals Without a Mexican because of labor shortages in American fields and orchards. Since mid-year, there have been a growing number of state and nation-wide reports indicating that hand-picked vegetables and fruits produced in the United States will be unusually scarce this year.

This is not merely because of widespread drought but also because of a paucity of Mexican-born farm laborers remaining in the U.S. Earlier this season, the American Farm Bureau Federation predicted a $5 to 9 billion dollar loss in this year’s harvest of annual vegetable crops requiring hand-picking, largely due to a shortage of farmworkers.

In fact, many states—from California to Ohio—have suffered severe reductions in planted and harvested acreages over the last five years as the economic downturn and heated nation-wide debate over immigration have sent many farmhands back to Latin America. Compared to other harvest seasons, a 30 to 40 percent shortage of skilled harvesters this year has been confirmed by California farming organizations, which note that peaches, cherries and other premium crops are going unpicked.

But now a new report—Hungry for Change: Borderlands Food and Water in the Balance—reminds Americans just how much of their entire food supply is dependent upon labor, expertise, ingenuity, seeds, seafood, and water originating in Mexico. The report, released last week by the University of Arizona’s Southwest Center, was prepared for discussion at the first-ever Border Food Summit to be held September 16-18 near Nogales, Arizona, the most important inland food port-of-entry in the world. Among its many findings are the following points:

1. Roughly 60 to 70 percent of all fresh produce eaten in the U.S. is grown in Mexico, but production and transportation of these fruits and vegetables can be easily disrupted by climatic disasters, social conflicts, or national policy shifts.
2. Three-quarters of all farmworkers in the U.S. who harvest our food were born in Mexico, but since 2009, many have returned to their homeland as the rancor over immigration has escalated in the U.S., leaving thousands of acres of food unpicked.
3. Roughly 150,000 to 170,000 tons of seafood are exported from Mexico to the U.S. each year, and three of every four pounds of fish and shellfish caught or cultured off the coast of just one Mexican state—Sonora–is served on American tables.
4. While immigration was once driven by the fact that per capita income in the U.S. is 5.6 times greater than that in Mexico, these national trends no longer reflect realities closer to the border. Today, U.S. border counties suffer poverty levels twice as high as the country as a whole, and the border states of Arizona and New Mexico being ranked in the five worst states in terms of childhood food insecurity.
5. Since the economic downturn and regional drought, the poorest of the poor in rural areas have been dramatically affected. Their emerging informal food economy has apparently become more of a safety net for their families than have government or non-profit relief efforts.

Nevertheless, because necessity is often the mother of invention, tremendous innovation in small-scale food production techniques, rainwater harvesting for gardens and fields, micro-enterprise development and food justice education are occurring within the borderlands region. Among the indicators that Spanish-speaking residents of the borderlands are “hungry for change” are the following recent developments:

• The growing number of community gardens, community kitchens and tailgate markets in Spanish-0speaking rural communities in West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California.
• The proliferation of mobile taco trucks, other food wagons, and roadside stands on both sides of the border, with Tucson now vying with Los Angeles for the highest density of food wagons in any U.S. metro area.
• The growing number of Mexican-Americans working in transient roadside food stands, farmers market booths, and as door-to-door tamale and tortilla salespersons in order to economically recover from recent unemployment.

In short, most Americans—not just those residing in the Southwest border states—have become increasingly dependent on food produced, harvested, processed and serve by Mexican-Americans in the U.S. or Mexican citizens who have recently returned to their homelands. Regardless of the tremendous growth in and success of “food relocalization” efforts across the country, most of our schoolchildren and elders could not eat a nutritionally-balanced diet without the fresh produce and seafood pouring across our borders from Mexico.

But this flow of food will not last if Mexican lands and waters are degraded or overexploited, and if the farmers, farmworkers, fishers and truckers who grow, weed, process, and deliver us much of our food are not offered liveable wages and healthier working conditions. It is time to reset the balance so that those who bring us our daily bread are adequately rewarded financially and ethically for their intelligence, hard work and sacrifices, rather than being treated as second class citizens at best and unwanted presences at worst.