foodday OCTOBER 24, 2012

6 FOOD DAY PRINCIPLES

Support fair conditions for food and farm workers

Few consumers who chew on a bright red apple or dig in to a juicy steak think of the workers who grow, harvest, and process that food. At the better farms and factories, workers enjoy safe conditions, decent salaries, and union representation. And thanks to citizen pressure, companies’ voluntary adherence to stronger standards, and government intervention, that has become more common. But still too many workers endure terrible working conditions, suffer higher rates of injury, and have fewer legal protections than just about any other workers.

Farmworkers

About 1.4 million farmworkers help grow and harvest our food, yet the conditions under which they do so remain invisible to the public. A 2011 report issued by the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation and the United Farm Workers union provides a devastating view of working conditions on some farms, as does Barry Estabrook's terrific book, Tomatoland.

Minimum wages, overtime pay, and mandatory breaks for rest or meals—none of those federal labor protections are provided to farmworkers. Smaller farms, which employ one-third of all crop farmworkers, are exempt from complying with even basic health and safety standards.

Some states, such as California, Oregon, and Washington, have more-protective laws, but they are rarely enforced. The 2005–2009 National Agricultural Workers Survey reported that about one-third of farmworkers earned less than $7.25 per hour (the federal minimum wage after July 2009), and one-quarter of all farmworkers had family incomes below the federal poverty line.

Nor is the health of farmworkers well protected. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sets standards for employers and inspects workplaces. While OSHA has separate standards for agriculture, agricultural workplaces are exempt from most of them, and small farms are exempt from even more. In short, 88 percent of all farms in the United States are not inspected for basic health and safety measures.

Pesticides pose a far greater danger to farmworkers than consumers. For both the workers who apply the pesticides and for those who may be exposed through spills, direct spray, or drift, pesticides can cause short- and long-term illness. Notwithstanding legal requirements and good-faith efforts on many farms, too many farmworkers are not adequately trained or protected before they work in pesticide-treated areas. An analysis of reported pesticide poisonings found that most were suffered by farmworkers, with the rate being almost twice as high for females as males. Long-term exposure to pesticides can cause such problems as cancer, infertility, birth defects, or neurological damage. Also, farmworkers can expose their families to pesticide residues on their bodies or clothing, and their children may play in treated fields or outdoor play areas exposed to drift.

Hundreds of thousands of children and youth farmworkers lack adequate protections. At age 16, a youth can be operating heavy farm equipment or applying toxic agricultural chemicals; the minimum legal age for comparable work in most other industries is 18. The standard minimum age for agricultural employment is 14, but there is no minimum age for children to work outside of school with their parents’ permission on small farms. As with other farmworker laws, enforcement of child labor laws in agriculture is weak. Fortunately, many responsible farms, both in the United States and on operations abroad, voluntarily adhere to higher standards advocated by citizens groups and unions.

Poultry and Meat Processors

Slaughterhouses and processing plants sometimes operate 24 hours a day, where some 500,000 workers kill and process hundreds or thousands of animals each hour in hazardous conditions. While conditions are far better than when The Jungle was published in 1906, extreme temperatures, water dripping from machinery onto floors slippery with animal fat, noise levels that prevent conversation, long working periods without breaks (even for the restroom), and exposure to caustic cleaning agents, blood, and fecal matter are still commonplace. One processing plant in Arkansas even had a policy that if workers took two bathroom breaks during a one-week period, they’d be suspended.

One of workers’ biggest concerns is ever-faster production-line speeds. While the U.S. Department of Agriculture regulates line speed with respect to food safety, there is no such regulation for worker safety. The line speed is often so fast that workers have no time to sharpen knives, making their task even more difficult. Workers repeating the same cutting motion thousands or tens of thousands of times a shift are susceptible to carpal tunnel syndrome and tendinitis.

Meatpackers suffer twice the rate of reported injuries and illnesses of other manufacturing workers, and poultry worker rates are 30 percent higher. The actual rates are probably much higher, because immigrant workers lacking union or other protections fear that any complaints could lead to being fired and possibly deported.

With its limited resources, OSHA inspection rates are low. In 2009, only roughly one out of six poultry plants and one out of 11 meatpacking plants was inspected. Fines for violations not considered “willful” are quite low, often making the costs of paying fines lower than the costs of correcting the problems. Even the higher fines for “willful” noncompliance are frequently negotiated lower because OSHA lacks the resources to litigate.

Next Steps

Our nation’s access to affordable food should not be at the cost of the health of those that labor to bring it to us. Conditions for agricultural and food-processing workers can be improved both through the enforcement of existing regulations and the enactment of stronger protections. Considering the historic inadequacies of governmental protections, probably the most effective means of winning better working conditions would be to increase unionization of those who endure the backbreaking work of harvesting crops and of those who process meat and other foods.

Resources:
Inventory of Farmworker Issues and Protections in the United States
Farmworker Justice
National Center for Farmworker Health, Inc.

Food Day was created by Center for Science in the Public Interest