Section » Labor
Victory for Florida tomato pickers, or a sneaky worker-around?
Many months ago, thanks to a vigorous, multi-level campaign, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) secured pledges from big buyers like Burger King, Subway, McDonald's and Whole Foods to pay an extra penny a pound to Florida's tomato harvesters, bringing the per-bucket wage from 50 to 82 cents. (Workers earn about $50 on a good day, without health
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Animal welfare hot topic at Kansas Livestock Association convention
Moan on the range: Multiple speakers at the Kansas Livestock Association convention recently addressed public relations injuries to the livestock industry, thanks to animal welfare groups and others. The good news is that speakers acknowledged that the industry would
Sustainable food movement has a class problem
The flavor of fairness: When a recent UC Santa Cruz study asked grocery shoppers on California's Central Coast to rank their concerns about the food system, respondents prioritized animal welfare above the treatment of human workers on the farms. This is but one example, says Bay Guardian reporter Caitlin
Farm Labor Experts: The Solution is Not For Sale
Friend o' Ethicurean Twilight Greenaway writes about sustainable food for San Francisco's Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA), which nourishes, inspires and educates SF residents and visitors by running the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market and other
Bush regulations for farm workers suspended
A labor department that works for labor? Shocking!: Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis has suspended for 9 months the regulations adopted by the Bush administration to govern wages and recruitment of immigrant guest workers for agriculture. Farm worker organizations had criticized the Bush regulations, saying
BAMCO backs Florida tomato pickers in fight for fair labor standards
CIW's Lucas Benitez and BAMCO CEO Fedele Bauccio in Florida. Photo from Straus Comm. release Jane Black reports in the Washington Post that the gigantic U.S. food-service company Bon
Digest - Features: Hawai’i uh-oh, simplicity sells, anti-union strategizing
Hawaii plays canary: The genetically modified seed industry has become Hawaii's rising star, reports a cover story of the Honolulu Weekly; it accounts for about a quarter of the state’s total farm revenues, eclipsing every other commodity. In the past two decades, the Islands have hosted some 2,252
Digest: Funny honey, the pork disease, and White House eats
Angry Buzz: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a series of articles on the sticky state of the honey industry. Start with the two-part report on honey, which introduces readers to honey laundering and continues to meaningless
Human Rights Day revelation: Global food companies suck
I have a background in human rights work, so I was especially chagrined to discover this afternoon — having spent the day skulking about my office and being generally useless — that today was International Human Rights Day. The discovery came in the form of a press release from the nonprofit International
The invisible workers: A Labor Day tribute
It's still Monday on the West Coast, so here, under the wire, is my second annual Labor Day ode to workers in the food system. (The first one is here.) Although I was busy staffing the tap water dispensary for most of Slow
Animal behavior: Crackdowns on meatpacking workers give new meaning to ‘inhumane’
Mainstream media and many of the blogs covered the raid of the Agriprocessors, Inc. meatpacking plant in Postville, IA when it took place back in May. It was the largest immigration raid of a single site by the Immigration
Bill Moyers Journal looks at worker safety in the poultry industry
Back in February, the Charlotte Observer published a shocking six-part series on the human suffering involved in producing cheap chicken. "The Cruelest Cuts" package looked at typical
Rock bottom of the food chain: Children in the fields
Prepare yourself for Food and Society Conference overload — Elanor and I are here in Chandler, AZ, at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's annual food-movement meeting and thanks
Digest - Blogs: Farmers as serfs, re-naturalized landscapes, Logsdon on carnivorism
"Kill your buddy": A guest post uses Pilgrim's Pride poultry operations in North Carolina to explain what a clustercluck our supposedly free-market meat industry is. "Like all integrators, Pilgrim’s Pride determines the cost of the farmer’s investment, and therefore debt, determines
Coming home to industrial ag: A tour of the Central Valley
There’s an image that’s stuck with me from the cross-country drive that my dad and I took last summer. It was one of many late-night stints at the wheel, perhaps 11 p.m., and we were hurtling along through the Utah desert. A sign at the last gas station had warned us of a nearly 100-mile
