Food Chains exposes daunting truths of farm labor

If there is anything that could fill Red Emma’s coffee shop and bookstore to the point of standing room only on a Thursday night, it’s a call for social justice.

In an impressive display of community zeal, people from all over Baltimore city crowded into Red Emma’s to watch Food Chains, a documentary that exposed the farmworker slave system existing in present-day America. The documentary featured Eva Longoria and Eric Schlosser. The Baltimore Food & Faith Project (part of the Center for a Liveable Future at Hopkins) and the Marc Steiner Show sponsored the event.

While the farm laborers in Immokalee, Fla. may provide food for the majority of the country, the wages they receive for this undertaking are disproportionate to their efforts.

The laborers’ typical living conditions are hardly ideal. Decrepit trailers are packed with up to 16 people due to high rent, workers must leave home at 5 a.m. only to return at 8 p.m. There are only a few breaks during these 10-12 hour shifts, not to mention the extreme heat and major pesticide exposure.

One man in the documentary presented his usual paycheck for one day of such labor. The check was only for $42,27. One Immokalee resident concluded, “The workers on this farm aren’t poor. They’re screwed.”

The majority of the documentary centers on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a group dedicated to ending the poverty and exploitation of food workers. Gerardo Reyes Chavez, one of the CIW leaders, addressed the issue.

“To live hungry while you are working – that’s not a dignified way of living,” he said.

The group’s most recent campaign in March 2012 was against Publix, a major Florida supermarket chain as well as one of the top national suppliers of tomatoes. The CIW ran a six-day hunger strike at Publix headquarters to demand one more penny per worker for each bucket of tomatoes they pick. This extra money would go directly to the worker’s wages.

Historically, Immokalee has struggled with slave-like working conditions for many years, as demonstrated in the 1960 CBS documentary entitled Harvest of Shame. Edward R. Murrow, a CBS journalist, took his audience through the labor hiring process. Murrow showed men loaded onto a truck bed like cattle and also focused on the brutal field environments. His exposé came out during a time when most Americans thought the Great Depression, hunger and worker exploitation were all things of the past.

Farm workers, however, have continued to be the foundation of a massive supply chain, with huge grocery chains like Publix, Kroger and Wal-Mart situated at the top. These chains bully the farmers and villainize them as the ones responsible for their workers’ job conditions. In reality, farmers have little to no control over the system.

“Agriculture’s doing great, as long as you’re not a farmer,” explains a farmer. Meanwhile, the supermarket chains have enormous buying power.

The film relays some startling statistics. For example, it costs Americans three times what it did about a decade ago to grow tomatoes. While production costs have increased over the past three decades, supermarkets continue to demand that farmers maintain their prices, thus cutting down on their profits. As a result, hundreds of thousands of farmers have only a select few supermarket giants to which they can sell produce.

In addition, the workers’ salaries vary; some weeks they range between $300 and $400, others between $50 and $100. While they pick, carry and throw approximately 4,000 pounds of tomatoes every day, they each earn only about one penny per pound.

Meanwhile, vineyard laborers in California’s Napa Valley face similarly unforgiving work environments. While a bottle of Napa Valley wine can cost between $40 and $1,000, each laborer is usually paid only about 0.25 cents per bottle. In addition, affordable housing near the vineyards no longer exists, and employees must travel long distances to get to work. Many set up homeless encampments on-site, structures comparable in squalor to the cramped trailers of the Immokalee workers.

The documentary challenges its audience to look at the origins of farm labor in the U.S.: slavery. Time and again, powerful people in this country have used wave after wave of migration to make the farm labor system function smoothly, a pattern referred to in the film as “the search for a new peasantry.” In a work environment in which middlemen in a parking lot administer paydays, making complaints is cause for being fired and almost 80 percent of female workers have experienced sexual harassment, it comes as an unwelcome surprise that there are only 14 government-employed labor inspectors in Florida to oversee over 40,000 in-state farms.

The documentary concludes with an unexpected triumph for the CIW, a well-deserved outcome for years of unrelenting advocacy. After a six-day hunger strike, a three-mile march and two years of intense negotiations behind closed doors, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers made great strides in 2014 by convincing Wal-Mart to join their Fair Food Program. This will increase the wages of tomato growers in Florida by about $1.5 million per year and hopefully influence other supermarket giants like Publix and Kroger to make the same sort of change.

After the screening, Marc Steiner of The Marc Steiner Show hosted a panel with Ken Brown, Sergio España and Rachel Winograd, all advocates from similar organizations to the CIW, to discuss how members of Baltimore communities can make a difference in this fight against U.S. farm labor conditions. After this engaging conversation, Baltimoreans left anxious to combat the forces of current U.S. slave labor.