Let’s Not Forget The Farmworkers This Labor Day

(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

My Labor Day Weekend began this Sunday morning – I jumped on a TriMet bus for a quick ride out to my Sunday farmers market to pick up most of the food I’ll eat this week, directly from some of the people responsible for growing it.  We all enjoyed those few hours in that little Clackamas County town; and then I hopped on the bus back home to my tiny urban inner SE Portland apartment just as they began to pack up their stands and crates onto their trucks and into their vans to scatter back out to their wide open lands in random towns, villages and hamlets all throughout the Willamette Valley.

It’s September tomorrow, and the transition will come soon – the squash become harder, the berries give way to apples and pears…salads and light sandwiches step aside to make room for soup and chili, potatoes make the move from cold salads to hot and creamy au gratin.  I’ll enjoy these last few weeks of fresh local tomatoes; even as I get the oven ready for heavy-duty work again on these upcoming wet and windy 40 and 50-something degree days and 30-something nights, and dust off my butternut squash sauce and (in)famous Oregon Winter Pizza recipes…

Of course, the current American ‘food’ system overall is hardly pastoral or idyllic…and exploitation is the rule for the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of farmworkers and food processing plant workers who make possible the many great holiday feasts of millions of Americans on these occasions.

Crossposted from La Vida Locavore, more below the fold…

Thanks to the foresight of previous generations of Oregonians, our local food system here in Portland is amongst (if not the…) the strongest in America.  Unfortunately, it’s certainly not all farmers markets, CSA’s and local artisan producers even here.

To the millions upon millions of Americans bringing out the grills this weekend for the final hurrah of Summer 2008, take a moment to consider the situation of the people who made your meals possible –

The main reason a U.S. company moves to Juárez is to pay lower wages. The only reason poor people in Juárez sell drugs and die is to earn higher wages. The only reason they go north is to survive.

As the author of that article makes clear, there’s no possible way to create a ‘free market’ for the movement of goods while at the same time trying to regulate the movement of people.  It’s really amazing how closely linked the drug trade  and the industrial food system are, eh?

Farmworkers have never been protected under federal labor laws here in the US, and multinational food processing conglomerates have also figured out how to get in on that gig through abusive “staffing agencies”.  These workers have always been easy targets for the phony “populists” amongst us…but I must ask – what’s on the Lou Dobbs family grill this weekend?  Hypocrite…

The fact that farm work is seasonal has also helped the large growers avoid organization efforts, but some workers in British Columbia have acted towards putting an end to that exploitation –

A group of Mexican agricultural workers at a Surrey farm have banded together in what is believed to be the first unionization of seasonal agricultural workers in B.C.

The workers joined the United Food and Commercial Workers Union earlier this month.

Besides struggling for fair pay, and the fact that they fed thousands and thousands of people; they never even had clean water –

“Now we are hoping we will get our pay on time. We hope now we will finally get clean water. The water now isn’t even good enough to take showers. Some of us are getting sick. We’ve never had decent water,” he said, speaking through interpreter Erika Del Carmen Fuchs of the advocacy group Justicia.

The Greenway worker — call him Carlos — has been coming to B.C. to work since 2004. The income from Canadian farm work supports him and his family. He claims to have been unable to find work in his home country.

Asked why he was interested in joining a union, Carlos replied: “The bad treatment by the boss. We have been under a lot of pressure. For example, we don’t have adequate housing and the water situation is bad. The water is contaminated and people are getting sick. The boss said he didn’t have time to fix it. People were getting sick.”

The owner and administrators of Greenway Farms did not answer repeated calls placed to their numbers by The Tyee.

Here at home, PCUN is working towards organizing my fellow Oregonians, no matter where they’re “from”…the same people who tend our farms, orchards and forests year-round; and do their part to make our state one of the greatest places in the world to live.  I’m not “from” Oregon myself, but I did eventually find Home here.  

Why was I welcomed here so easily, when hard-working people who contribute just as much as I do to society aren’t?  The joke amongst my friends here is that I’m from a foreign country myself.  I was born and mostly grew up in New Jersey, and in cultural terms I think they do have a point.  But my assimilation here involved nothing more than a trip to the Post Office, and a quick test at an Oregon DMV branch to exchange my NJ drivers license for an Oregon license.

Despite a fantastic resume and excellent references, I had some trouble finding work here at first myself…and ended up working through one of these ubiquitous “staffing agencies” myself last year.  I swept floors and did setups and breakdowns at the Oregon Convention Center and the Rose Garden last year.  I manned public parking lots and set up arenas for rock concerts and Blazers basketball games.

But I never really dealt with this –

Oregon’s farmworkers:

The fruit and vegetable growers of the Willamette Valley have depended heavily on Mexican labor since the 1940’s. Reforestation and plant nurseries emerged in the 1970’s as major winter occupations, enabling thousands of area farmworkers to remain in Oregon year-round.

Employees in these areas generally work long hours for low wages, with no overtime pay, paid breaks, seniority, job security, or other benefits. Seasonal workers are often housed in squalid labor camps owned and operated by growers or labor contractors. They are exposed to a myriad of chemicals and pesticides sprayed on crops and often lack the proper protective gear and training to apply pesticides. They also lack the right to collective bargaining, which is guaranteed to all other industries under the National Labor Relations Act.

One more thing to mention – it’s against Oregon law to charge employees for required protective gear; but as I found out myself working for a Boeing contractor up at PDX for 3 months earlier this year, that statute is unenforceable for an individual just working to pay the bills.  I raised hell, eventually secured my current job at a non-profit, and then raised more hell while I was still there at the old place.  My “reward” was having my two-weeks notice rejected, and being officially escorted by security and then barred from company property on that morning I gave my notice.  I’m sure I’ll always be on some official “Boeing banned employee list” somewhere…

Nobody deserves treatment like this, and especially not those who feed much of America.  What actions do we take as a society to honor the sacrifices of Central and South American farmworkers whose labor stocks the shelves at Fred Meyer and Albertson’s?

For every column by ‘mainstream’ hacks hinting at ‘elitism’ and etc. that I’ve read over this past week about those of us in the “Slow Food” movement…I’d ask what are they doing to improve the conditions of  the farmworkers who make their convenience possible?

I’ll put my farmers market carrots, tomatoes, potatoes and onions against their foie gras any day of the week, and twice on Sundays.  And it just so happens to be Sunday…