Hard Labor

Very good piece on the plight of farm workers - yes, even those on organic farms. all the more reason to *BUYLOCAL* from a family farmer or co-op, or join a CSA. then you can be absolutely sure that your food is being grown by people that are being treated with dignity and the planet isn't harmed. and you get some mighty tasty and nutritous food out of the deal as well! it's a win/win.
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original

Hard Labor

by FELICIA MELLO




The Grimmway packing plant in Arvin, California, a drab farmworker town fifteen miles southeast of Bakersfield, is where carrots go to be reborn. After months of being coaxed and weeded in the nearby fields, the vegetables are yanked from the ground by a mechanical harvester. A convoy of open-bed trucks carries them to the plant, a cluster of tan, windowless buildings with mysterious-looking pipes and gadgets protruding from the sides. Here they are washed, sliced, sanded and emerge as "baby" carrots--the snackable treats in the cellophane bag familiar to health-conscious shoppers everywhere.

Once the carrots pass through an opening in the side of the main building, they enter a world that seems miles away from the fields and orchards outside. Dozens of machines fill the chilly air with a deafening noise. Employees wade through pools of water several inches deep on the plant's rubber floor. There are carrots everywhere--scattered on the floor, piled inside carts and vats, in heaps at the base of the metal equipment.

At the grading tables, the new arrivals float by teams of Latinas in masks and hairnets who separate the good ones from those with imperfections. Supervisors stand by to time bathroom breaks of no more than seven minutes and to scold the women if they speak or glance up from their work.

Here, surrounded by the rhythmic thwack-thwacking of the machines, Beatriz Gonzalez stands for eight hours a day and sorts. Wearing rubber gloves and down ski pants to keep her warm, she deftly reaches into the orange tide, plucking out defective specimens and tossing them into a center tub. Years of performing the repetitive motion have swollen her forearms and left her with arthritis in her knuckles. When she started working in the Arvin plant, she earned the state minimum of $6.75 an hour. Four years later, she makes $7.30.

A petite woman with fluffy bangs and rounded features, Gonzalez studied law in her native Mexico but left school for the United States in search of wealth. "Now," she says sadly, "I have neither money nor education."

Gonzalez's workplace looks like any number of packing sheds in California's fruit and vegetable industry, where the state that grows half the country's produce has for decades relied on a low-paid immigrant workforce to tend and harvest its crops. But this is no ordinary plant--Gonzalez's employer is a leader in the organic food business, an industry that prides itself on a gentler approach to the land and the people who work it. Her experience illustrates just how far the organic food movement has yet to go to fulfill its promise of a more socially just food system.
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full articlehere

some people will say that she paid a high price, but made the right choice. One less lawyer in the world!

They need those little fingers to pick the baby carrots. :sarcasm: So if you don't use herbicides you need to pay some workers (and their parents) to pick the weeds. And since organic growing is more labor intensive you need more workers.

Farm labor has been a low paying back breaking work in this country since oh lets say 1650. Nothing much has changed. Is it a surprise that organic crops aren't grown is some make believe land where the workers make a living wage. In fact per the article Organic crops are worse for the workers.

Oh well.... Unintended consequences keeps life interesting.

smaller family farms that specialize in CSA and farmer's market type stuff. i know the 2 CSAs i use have been using the same folks for years. most of the seasonal workers are college kids although there are some who come up from the south. everyone is treated like family by the family that owns the farm. but there ain't no getting around farming is hard work. all the more reason we should go the extra mile and ensure that farmworkers are paid a living wage.

:applause:


But as organic becomes less about a social lifestyle and more the yuppie equivalent of fat free. Large farming operations will continue to move in and possibly dominate the market.

Labor practices are at the bottom of these consumers concerns.

the puzzle, as i'm sure you're aware. it doesn't do much good to eat organic letttuce in NE Maine if it had to be trucked in from southern California. eating local is just as big a part of sustainability as organic/bio intensive growing processes. an we really need to change the way we lookat and perceive our food producers. when they're our neighbors and we know them maybe they'll we won't begrudge paying them what their labor is actually worth and showing them them the proper respect for their knowledge and ability to coax food from from the ground and deal with the vagaries of weather. i know it's beyond me on any type of scale.