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Health & Fitness

What's So Unfair about Trade? Part 3: Agricultural workers in the U.S.A.

Agriculture has been described as an industry which "combines 21st century technology with 19th century labor practices". This is true in many countries—including our own.

Ramiro Carrillo Rodriguez had been working all day in the Fresno County vineyard. He had complained to his supervisor that the July heat was getting to him—he felt dizzy, disoriented, sick to the stomach. His foreman eventually agreed to take him home, towards the end of the day. Upon arriving at home, Mr. Carrillo Rodriguez passed out. By the time he was brought to the hospital, he was dead.

Ramiro Carrillo Rodriguez was a father of two teenagers. He was the fourth California farm worker to die from heat exposure in the summer of 2008.

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In the last installment of “What’s So Unfair about Trade?” I discussed some of the horrendous conditions that exist in large factory farms in northern Mexico. Most of these factory farms use cheap labor, under exploitative conditions, to provide cheap fruits and vegetables to U.S. agribusiness.

The really remarkable thing is that the people working in Maneadero are migrant agricultural workers. Most of them are not native to northern Mexico: they came to Maneadero voluntarily. Most of them came from rural indigenous towns and villages in southern Mexico.

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So why would anyone voluntarily choose to work under these conditions? We’ll get to that in the near future. For now, though, let’s take a look at a different community of migrant agricultural workers—the people working on large factory farms in the United States.

Agriculture has been described as an industry which “combines 21st century technology with 19th century labor practices”. This is true in many countries—including our own. In the search for a cheap product, the large factory farms which produce fruits and vegetables for many major supermarket chains and restaurants look for the cheapest labor possible. Often (but not always) this means exploiting the labor of immigrants from other parts of the world.

Phrases like “exploited” and “difficult labor conditions” can have little significance until you see these things firsthand, however.

I have had the privilege of visiting the hardworking young men who pick fruits and vegetables in North San Diego County over the past few years. A local Catholic church holds a regular Mass in the fields near where the young men live and work, bringing donations of food and clothing. On a couple of occasions, the young men I met at Mass invited me to visit the encampment where they lived. Located in a nearby ravine, the workers were sleeping on the ground, on pieces of cardboard, under tarps a few inches off the ground. The first time I visited the encampment was in the winter; the workers explained to me that temperatures on the ground became near-freezing at night.

Conditions in this particular part of North County weren’t always this hard. Years ago, the migrant workers had set up shacks and houses in McGonigle Canyon nearby. An entire community of families lived in the family, until local anti-immigrant groups pressured the city to drive the people out of the canyon. An excellent film, “The Invisible Mexicans of Deer Canyon”, covers the story of the men who continue to sleep in the fields near where they work.

What is seldom talked about, however, is why these men are forced to sleep outdoors.

To be succinct—it’s cheaper for the farm owners to have the workers sleeping outdoors. Cheaper than providing some sort of barracks or trailers. And, as is the case with much farmland in California, the fields butt up against multi-million dollar residential neighborhoods, which means there is no affordable housing for rent anywhere near these fields. Until (a) the landowners provide some sort of shelter for the workers, (b) a low-rent apartment miraculously appears in suburban Del Mar, (c) land owners stop planting crops, or (d) the people living near these fields open their doors to the people picking their tomatoes, these men will continue to be forced to sleep outside, on the ground.

The workers of Deer Canyon, and the tragic story of Ramiro Carrillo Rodriguez, are anecdotal stories. They are illustrative, however, of a bigger picture in agriculture. As long as agriculture is dominated by large, soulless, “factory farms”, profit will take precedence over the wellbeing of the people picking the fruits and vegetables.

This is something that goes beyond undocumented workers—many cases of illness, heatstroke, death, pesticide poisoning, and inhumane conditions have affected documented guest workers and U.S. born workers as well.

It goes beyond this particular period in time, as well. As far back as 1939, Carey McWilliams published “Factories in the Field”, a book which discussed the human cost of mass-produced corporate agriculture. The faces of these workers have been diverse—U.S.-born Anglos from Oklahoma, African Americans from the Deep South, immigrants from China, Japan, the Philippines, Mexico, Armenia, and elsewhere. Years later, Daniel Rothenberg described a remarkably similar situation in his book, “With These Hands”.

Little has changed since 1939. The norm in much of corporate agriculture continues to be for profit to take precedence over everything else—over the value of the lives of those picking the fruits and vegetables we eat.

* * * *

One thing should be mentioned about the sorts of situations that exist in migrant agricultural labor today, in the U.S. and elsewhere. These conditions were created by the Invisible Hand of the Market. When profits and business are placed on an altar above all else, turned into an idolatrous sacred cow, this is what happens.

This is because The Market does not have a soul. The Market, in and of itself, has no conscience, no heart, no concern for human wellbeing. The Market is just like most soulless economic systems that have existed in human history (Roman Imperialism, Soviet Communism, European Feudalism). The Market, unlike a human being, does not have the ability to act consciously. It lumbers along, seeking profit with no awareness of any other motive.

Sometimes, of course, the Market creates wealth and prosperity. Sometimes it creates cheap prices and efficient companies. But sometimes it creates misery, suffering, impossible conditions for working people.

The Market is neither good nor bad—it just is.

And sometimes The Market creates a situation like what you see in Deer Canyon and other parts of California’s farmland. The Market needs these people to harvest the crops in these fields. But The Market makes it impossible for them to have a place to sleep at night. And sometimes the Market demands that people work until their bodies are unable to keep working.

Only by human beings stepping in and doing something—demanding better pay, housing rights, etc.—can this happen. The Market will never worry about these people.

 

The good news is that we do not have to disregard human life when we buy fruits and vegetables. We don’t have to fill ourselves with self-loathing and guilt, refusing to buy anything, or cynically say “well that’s just the way the world works” and be indifferent to the people who picked our fruits and vegetables.

 

As with all other products, there are ways to be a “conscious consumer”, to purchase products that were produced ethically. This is what we will discuss in the next installment of “What’s So Unfair About the Way We Do Trade?”

 

 

“In the Strawberry Fields”

 

 

http://www.ncfh.org/?pid=4

“The Human Cost of Food”

 

 

Book: “With These Hands: The Hidden World of Migrant Farmworkers Today”

By Daniel Rothenberg

 

Study on Indigenous Farmworkers

http://www.indigenousfarmworkers.org/index.shtml

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