Earlier this month, the James Beard Foundation announced the winners of their Journalism Awards. In the category “Food Politics, Policy, and the Environment,” the award went to Tracie McMillan for her article “As Common as Dirt,” which I wrote about earlier this year. The piece was published as a collaboration between The American Prospect and the Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN). As FERN editor-in-chief Sam Fromartz writes in a rightfully proud blog post,
Considered the Pulitzers of the food reporting world, the Beard Award was FERN’s first journalism prize, and also came within our first year of publishing.
The story revealed the systematic practice of cheating farm labor contract workers of their wages, to keep costs low. Outsourcing labor to contracting companies also allows farm businesses to distance themselves from the practice, which has prompted law suits as well as state and federal actions. McMillan told the story by focusing on 75-year-old Ignacio Villalobos, who has been a farmworker his entire life and who is a plaintiff in one of these law suits.
The story took several months to report, requiring multiple trips to southern California and many hours of interviews with farmworkers, government and industry officials, and legal advocates. The project took patience and tenacity, qualities which are frequently lacking in a time of highly constrained resources and constant deadlines….
“The exploitation of farm labor has long been one of the great scandals of American society—it dates back at least to the beginning of the 20th century—and persists to this day,” said [American Prospect Editor-in-Chief Kit] Rachlis. “Tracie’s piece looks at one of its most insidious practices—institutionalized wage theft—and shows its devastating effect on people’s lives. At once intimate, authoritative, and moving, the article ranks as one of the best the Prospect has ever published.”
Last fall I posted about coverage in The New York Times of, as I wrote then, “the cause of a small but persistent number of deaths on U.S. farms each year: grain storage buildings, or—more accurately—employers’ failure to ensure that proper safety procedures are followed when workers are inside them.”
It was a great piece of reporting that helped bring to light needless and senseless worker deaths. I was glad to see the issue getting additional in-depth coverage last week from NPR and the Center for Public Integrity in a special series titled, “Buried In Grain.” A number of audio pieces from NPR’s Howard Berkes aired throughout the week, and print versions are available online. I highly recommend them. As reported in the first entry,
on a stifling hot day in July 2010, [14-year-old Wyatt] Whitebread joined his buddies Alex Pacas, 19, and Will Piper, 20, at the Haasbach LLC grain storage complex. Piper had begun working there the week before, and it was Pacas’ second day on the job.
The boys carried shovels and picks as they climbed a ladder four stories to the top of the grain bin, which was twice as wide and half-filled with 250,000 bushels of wet and crusty corn. Their job was to “walk down the grain,” or break up the kernels that clung to the walls and clogged the drainage hole at the bottom of the bin.
The work went well at first, with the boys shoveling corn toward a cone-shaped hole at the center of the bin. But around 9:45 a.m., Whitebread began sinking in the corn. He was sucked under in minutes and disappeared. Pacas and Piper also began to sink and desperately struggled to stay on the surface.
Six horrific hours later, only Piper was carried out alive.
The story details how simple safety precautions, which are required by current law, can prevent such tragedies. It also documents how ineffective the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been at tackling this ongoing problem. As the report describes,
“At some point we’re going to have to decide whether these incidents are just accidental … [or] somebody’s really making horrendous decisions that approach a criminal level,” says [Bill] Field [a professor of agricultural and biological engineering] at Purdue, who is often enlisted as an expert witness in grain death lawsuits and as a safety consultant for the grain industry and OSHA.
“It’s intentional risk-taking on the part of the managers or someone in a supervisory capacity that ends up in some horrific incidents,” Field adds. “The bottom line is if you ask them why they did it, it was because it was more profitable to do it that way.”
Field counts more than 660 farmers and workers who suffocated in nearly 1,000 grain entrapments since 1964 at both commercial facilities and on farms. Nearly 500 died in grain bins. One in four victims was younger than 18.
Head to the home page of the series here , where you’ll find links to NPR’s four stories, photos, documents obtained in the investigation, and links to related reports from the Center for Public Integrity, the Kansas City Star, and Harvest Public Media.
Yesterday was Easter. It also would have been the 86th birthday of farm-labor organizer and activist Cesar Chavez. Internet giant Google recognized the latter with an image of Chavez on its main search page. Scandalous, yes? Um, no. But some disagree, it seems. As Dana Hull writes for the Mercury News,
Conservative commentators lashed out at Google … over the company’s decision to feature labor and civil rights legend Cesar Chavez, instead of an Easter-related theme, as its “Google Doodle” Sunday.
Chavez was born March 31, 1927, and would have been 86 years old Sunday. A devout Catholic, he dedicated his life to improving wages and working conditions for farm workers and was among the founders of the National Farm Workers Association, which became the United Farm Workers of America.
Talk show host Glenn Beck and Fox News Contributor Dana Perino were among those leading the criticism on Twitter Sunday.
“I thought the Chavez-google thing was a hoax or an early April Fool’s Day prank … are they just going to leave that up there all day?” wrote Perino, a former press secretary for President George W. Bush, on Twitter.
Aargh. For more of the absurdity (as well as some nice links), check out Hull’s full piece, Brad Knickerbocker’s post for The Christian Science Monitor, and especially this appropriately snarky report from Chris Matyszczyk at CNET.
It’s National Farmworker Awareness Week, a program of Student Action with Farmworkers that aims “to raise awareness about farmworker conditions and to honor their important contributions to us every day.”
In that spirit, I thought I’d point you to a couple recent pieces. The first is an essay in Good Magazine from Sanjay Rawal, director of the forthcoming documentary film, Food Chains (which I posted about when its Kickstarter campaign was underway). As Rawal writes,
Farmworkers, whether documented or not, aren’t protected by the same labor laws as the rest of us are. They are also paid by how much they pick which pits workers against each other to harvest more than one another—in the heat and without regular water breaks.
Worse, the power dynamic in the fields is akin to that of a master and serf. Workers are too intimidated to complain when their rights are violated. Women can be raped and are regularly harassed. In the worst cases, workers have actually been enslaved: working for no pay and under the threat of beatings or death.
The undercarriage of our magnificent food production system, second to none, is rusted and decayed. The system is fueled by inequity and fear.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Rawal goes on to describe the struggles (and successes) that the farmworker organization the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has had. Check out his full piece here.
For more on that subject, check out this recent article from Ryan E. Little reporting for Naples News in Florida. As he writes,
Hundreds of Immokalee farmworkers and their supporters held out open hands to [grocery chain] Publix on Sunday [March 17] demanding they join a coalition that works for farmworker’s rights….
The Sunday afternoon event was the end of a 200-mile march from Immokalee to Lakeland; workers endured uncommon cold, rain and blistered feet to protest in front of Publix stores….
The two-week-long march is part of a four-year effort to bring one of the nation’s 10 largest grocers into the Fair Food Program, which unites farmworkers, growers, consumers, and 11 retail food leaders in support of fair wages and human labor standards. Some of Publix’s competitors, including Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, have already joined the program along with companies like Chipotle, Burger King and McDonald’s.The program is well known for its call for an extra penny per pound on the price of tomatoes, but it also created the Fair Foods Standard Council, which operates to ensure participating farmers are meeting the program’s requirements.
Find Little’s full article here. And, for some of my earlier posts on related farmworker issues, check out the following:
- Tomatoes, tasty versus tasteless
- A Fair Deal for California’s Farm Workers
- Farm-labor contractors and the dirty secrets behind low-cost produce
Awhile back, I posted about the (thus-far unsuccessful) efforts of two Girl Scouts to get palm oil removed from Scouts’ cookies, since worldwide demand for palm oil is leading to deforestation and resulting habit loss for endangered animals like orangutans.
Palm oil continues to become a major commodity crop, with complex implications for localities where it is raised. Yesterday the PBS NewsHour ran an informative piece examining the issue from special correspondent Steve Sapienza, as part of a collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. As Sapienza describes,
In Malaysia’s Sabah province, migrant workers hustle to keep up with the rising global demand for palm oil. Made from the fruit of oil palm tree, it is now found in more than half of all the products sold in U.S. supermarkets, from cookies to cosmetics.
This labor-intensive work has changed little since the 1960s, when the government first pushed the expansion of palm oil production. Today, palm oil is Malaysia’s top crop, netting $25 billion dollars a year, and driving the spread of palm oil plantations into the wilderness….
One big reason the oil is so cheap to produce is the steady supply of migrant labor. The palm oil sector relies on some 500,000 foreign workers to feed global demand for the product and fuel Malaysia’s economic prosperity….
More of the world’s working children are employed in agriculture than in any other sector, according to the International Labor Organization. In Sabah, surveys show that more than half of the children without schooling end up working as child laborers.
For more details, including one bright spot — a collaboration between a plantation and an NGO to provide schooling for farm workers’ children — head here for the streaming video, along with an MP3 audio version and full transcript of the story.
Another report yesterday from the Sapienza’s fellow Pulitzer Center grantee describes how pesticide use in Malaysia’s palm oil production is resulting in the deaths of pygmy elephants. As Jason Motlagh reports for The Christian Science Monitor‘s Global News Blog,
A rare breed of elephant appears to be the latest casualty of the palm oil boom that is sweeping Malaysian Borneo, reigniting an already heated debate over the pros and cons of the world’s cheapest cooking oil.
Malaysian wildlife officials say 14 dead pygmy elephants were found last month in the wilds of Sabah Province, apparently poisoned by chemicals used by farmers to keep pests from eating the palm fruit grown on plantations that blanket vast swaths of the countryside.
As if that weren’t troubling enough, Morlagh notes that
A joint study published in October by Stanford and Yale universities revealed that land-clearing operations for plantations in Borneo have emitted more than 140 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 alone, equal to annual emissions from about 28 million vehicles. Over the past two decades, about 6,200 sq. mi. of primary and logged forested land have been destroyed in Borneo.
Next time you’re in the grocery store, check an ingredient list or two; you might be surprised where you find palm oil.
Thanks to Grist, I recently came across the infographic below, which was put together by Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. It details the large and growing influence that mega-retailer Walmart has in the American food system. Even if you never set foot in a Walmart, you and your neighbors are feeling its effects. As such, the infographic is well worth a read, so check it out.
As reported by Doug Erickson in the Wisconsin State Journal, yesterday saw the release of Just Dining: A Guide to Restaurant Employment Standards in Downtown Madison, a project of the Workers’ Rights Center and the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice in South Central Wisconsin. As Erickson describes,
The guide awards up to seven stars [though no restaurant earned all seven] based on factors such as starting wages, health insurance coverage and sick pay. Food quality doesn’t play a role.
The big winners: Ian’s Pizza, Ancora Coffee, the Dayton Street Grille, the Plaza Tavern, all of the Food Fight restaurants and the numerous public dining establishments operated by UW-Madison.
“At the end of the day, if you don’t have great people and treat them well, it’s hard to grow or be successful,” said Greg Frank, a Food Fight managing partner who said he was pleased with the company’s rating….
“We’re really holding up those employers that go above and beyond,” [Workers' Rights Center director Patrick] Hickey said. “Hopefully by highlighting them, the other restaurants will see something they can aspire to.”
The guide is not without critics, or at least folks who question its focus and methods. As Erickson reports,
Pete Hanson, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Restaurant Association, called the guide “well-intended” but questioned whether the methodology was sound. He took strong issue with the wording of much of the guide’s introduction, which calls the quality of restaurant jobs “often distressingly poor” and says racial and gender discrimination is widespread in the industry.
The guide “is filled with erroneous information and plays on stereotypes about the restaurant industry” that are not true, he said.
The report is definitely partial. In July, Nick Brown of MadTable wrote,
Hickey says that some employers are naturally skeptical of the project, and are less willing to release information such as wages, citing proprietary reasons or saying they don’t want such information leaked to competitors. But he says restaurants from all categories — from fast food chains to fine dining — have largely been cooperative in supplying data.
Pushback from employers decreased “once we explained to them that we’re not asking, ‘Was this a good job?’ and instead ‘what is the wage for a line cook?’” Hickey says.
Nevertheless, the State Journal notes that “Fifty restaurants in addition to the 139 rated ones got inconclusive grades — denoted by question marks — because the guide’s authors could not confirm certain policies. About 30 percent of the total 189 restaurants cooperated with the researchers, Hickey said.”
Further, as Jay Rath reported for Isthmus when the project was announced in the spring,
While the goal of such a project is laudable, some question its methodology and focus.
“If you want to reward good operators, I don’t know if this is the way to do it,” says Susan Schmitz, president of Downtown Madison Inc. “To have a good business, you need good people working there, and to retain them you have to take care of them. If you don’t, your product will suffer. It’s kind of basic. It just is.”
She also questions why the guide will look only at restaurants downtown, which for the purpose of the “Just Dining” project is defined as the area bounded by Randall Avenue to the west, the Yahara River to the east, Lake Mendota to the north and Regent Street to the south.
Schmitz argues that all restaurants across the city should be looked at, “especially when this city likes promoting — and appropriately so — locally owned businesses. About 85% of the businesses downtown are local. This doesn’t make sense.”
Mary Carbine, executive director of the Central Business Improvement District, agrees. “I am unclear why downtown restaurants are the focus of this effort, as I am unaware of any data suggesting that downtown restaurants have subpar working conditions or compensation,” she says. “I am unclear why a primarily locally owned and independent business district is the focus of this effort.”
Time will tell what kind of impact Just Dining has on Madison restaurants, but the guide itself outlines some plans for the future:
We are already thinking about next steps. As a follow-up, the ICWJ is interested in launching an effort to gather a set of local restaurateurs who have worked to offer quality jobs in the industry to foster this dialogue. The group will identify and help promote ‘high road’ paths in restaurant employment. (If you are a restaurant owner or manager who would be interested in learning more about this follow-up initiative, please contact ICWJ Director Rabbi Renee Bauer at email@example.com.)
In addition to restaurant ratings, the guide sets out to bust six myths about restaurant industry workers. Take, for example, number 4:
The industry is too competitive and the profit margins too small to provide the wages and benefits that the owner might want to offer. Either labor costs have to be kept to a minimum, or meal prices have to go up – if meal prices go up restaurants lose business.
Not all businesses, restaurants included, see an unavoidable tradeoff between supporting their workers and providing value to their customers. Managing the costs of running a business includes strategically controlling a range of expenses – including purchasing, menu design and marketing, – not just labor costs.xvi And, as high road businesses continue to demonstrate, providing quality jobs can create higher productivity: better quality (and higher sales-yielding) service, and workers who are engaged partners in informing and implementing business strategy from the front lines.
Head here to order print copies of Just Dining or access it online.
The New York Times recently ran a story about the cause of a small but persistent number of deaths on U.S. farms each year: grain storage buildings, or—more accurately—employers’ failure to ensure that proper safety procedures are followed when workers are in them. As John M. Broder reports,
Even as the rate of serious injury and fatalities on American farms has fallen, the number of workers dying by entrapment in grain bins and silos has remained stubbornly steady. The annual number of such accidents rose throughout the past decade, reaching a peak of at least 26 deaths in 2010, before dropping somewhat since.
Silos teeming with corn, wheat or soybeans become death traps when grain cascades out of control, asphyxiating or crushing their victims. Since 2007, 80 farmworkers have died in silo accidents; 14 of them were teenage boys.
The deaths are horrific and virtually all preventable.
Experts say the continuing rate of silo deaths is due in part to the huge amount of corn being produced and stored in the United States to meet the global demand for food, feed and, increasingly, ethanol-based fuel.
The full article is a thoughtful, sobering piece of reporting. Check it out here, along with photos, an info-graphic, and footage from a first-responder silo rescue training session. Also worth checking out is a well-done video version of the story, which you can find here.
Journalist Tracie McMillan recently published a great piece at The American Prospect. Entitled “As Common As Dirt,” the article details the widespread problem of wage theft by contractors who supply workers to harvest crops and perform other farm work. As McMillan describes,
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. 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. Contractors can be found in the fields of nearly every handpicked crop in the United States, organic or conventional: green beans in Florida, grapefruit in Texas, peppers in Georgia, greens in Colorado, and garlic in California.
Farm-labor contractors give American produce growers what companies like China’s Foxconn offer to Apple: a way to outsource a costly and complicated part of the business, often saving money in the process and creating a firewall between the brand and the working conditions under which its products are made. “The contractor system makes it very difficult to enforce wage and hour laws because the idea is that the grower says, ‘It’s not me, it’s him. It’s the contractor. I had nothing to do with this,’” says Rob Williams, director of the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project of Florida Legal Services and a leading farm-labor advocate.
Readers of McMillan’s recent book, The American Way of Eating, will be familiar with the various ways that workers get cheated out of wages that they earned through hours of physically arduous work. But where McMillan inserted herself into that story (à la Barara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed), the person who serves as the primary lens for this piece is Ignacio Villalobos, a 75-year-old, lifelong farm worker. McMillan has produced a serious piece of in-depth reporting, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. So, clear a few minutes from your busy day, and settle in for an eye-opening read.
As I’ve mentioned umpteen times, J and I are diehard fans of Kickapoo Coffee. Still, I enjoyed this recent article for Isthmus, in which Jason Krause reports on the relationship between Madison’s Just Coffee and standup comic Marc Maron‘s WTF podcast:
Just Coffee has been working with Maron since 2009, when his career in comedy and radio had bottomed out. After several years of doing morning radio at the chaotic, left-leaning Air America radio network, he was demoted to producing a webcast from the lunchroom. He and on-air partner Sam Seder had no advertisers when [Just Coffee cofounder Mike] Moon emailed to say how much he liked the new show. In closing, he offhandedly suggested “some sort of sponsorship of your show — maybe we could even pay in coffee.”
Maron and Seder were thrilled. “We had a failing show a couple of people liked, and we couldn’t give away advertising if we tried,” says Maron. “We were mostly excited because he was sending us coffee.”
The full piece is an interesting and entertaining read, so check it out here.
Then, go catch Maron in the new indie movie Sleepwalk With Me, which J and I just saw with friends and liked a lot. If you think that’s not food related, you don’t know about the pizza pillow (spoiler alert)!