As the climate crisis worsens, some of the most vulnerable and essential people are facing economic exploitation and the harshest working conditions with little protection for their safety. Workers are the backbone of our agricultural and food systems; however, they have been significantly impacted by longstanding exploitation.
As a 2023 UCS report noted, the 2.4 million agricultural workers working on US farms and ranches encounter a variety of hazards, from pesticide exposure to extreme heat. Additionally, food system workers reported health and safety violations and food insecurity due to low wages.
These ongoing injustices are not new but born from the historical exclusion of agricultural and food system workers from federal policy and the formation of a perilous consolidated food system.
Origins of exploitation in the food system
As noted in my previous blog about the longstanding racial injustice in the agricultural system, the United States was born from the plantation system of the antebellum South, rooted in the oppression and exploitation of Africans and their descendants through forced slavery. The remnants of that system are embedded in the fabric of our current food system and exacerbated by agricultural industrialization.
The African slave trade, rooted in the exploitative production of labor-intensive agricultural commodities such as tobacco, cotton, and cane sugar in the American South, set the precedent for the treatment and value of agricultural and food workers, showing little dignity or respect for the profession and those who toil to produce and process our food. Black slaves suffered harsh and inhumane treatment through commodification and dehumanization, only valued for their labor while lacking the basic human and civil rights we all deserve.
Though the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery, Black Americans continued to face economic duress and violence to maintain the plantation-style economic system. Today, the demographics of agricultural and food workers have shifted, but economic exploitation continues to plague our food system as workers, predominantly people of color and immigrants, face similar injustices and lack of protections in exclusionary labor laws.
Exclusion in labor laws
In 1940, 31.8 percent of African Americans were employed in agriculture nationally and more than 40 percent in the American South. A deal struck between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Southern Democrats rooted in anti-Black racism and the preservation of the plantation economic system led to the exclusion of agricultural workers in many crucial and protective pieces of labor legislation, including the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Specifically, the FLSA was created in 1936 to provide valuable rights for workers including federal overtime payment and a federal minimum wage.
Though the FLSA was modified in the 1960s to include some coverage for agricultural workers, they are still excluded from overtime pay, minimum wage, and collective bargaining. As noted in President Roosevelt’s 1938 State of the Union speech, “More desirable wages are and continue to be the product of collective bargaining.” Without the ability for agricultural workers to bargain for fair wages, they continue to be exploited.
However, this exploitation is not solely due to their inability to bargain for fair wages, but a larger structural issue within the design of our food system: consolidation built from historical policies that allowed the food system to be driven by a big-business mentality.
Effects of a consolidated food system
In the 1970s, President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz infamously told farmers to “get big or get out” and that agriculture “is now a big business.” During this time, the judicial system also relaxed its interpretation of antitrust laws, allowing for more mergers and acquisitions in all industries and legalizing many business practices once considered anticompetitive. Farms continued to grow and consolidate, increasing land value and producing more. Between 1960 and 1982 the number of large farms doubled, and the number of small farms was cut by more than half.
This consolidation not only happened horizontally, with farms buying out other farms, but also vertically, with everything from production to processing owned by one agribusiness firm. As processing began to become consolidated both horizontally and vertically, the entire agricultural supply chain became reliant on an industrialized and corporatized food system. This notably had a direct impact on agricultural and food system workers because workers, farmers, and the environment are all systemically interconnected in a consolidated system.
Slaughter and processing workers in this type of system—disproportionately rural, immigrants, refugees, and people of color—are vulnerable to dangerous and precarious work conditions. Within poultry processing, the focus on production led to increased line speeds from 70 birds per minute in 1979 to 91 in 1999 to 140 in 2015, even though there are proven and well-documented dangers of faster line speeds, making animal slaughtering and processing facilities the sixth most dangerous workplace for severe injuries.
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, workers were greatly impacted by the virus, with 59,148 meatpacking workers, 18,793 food processing workers, and 13,776 farmworkers testing positive, leading to nearly 466 deaths. These deaths stemmed largely from inadequate leave policies and lack of safety precautions.
Sadly, exploitative practices against workers in the agribusiness sector also make them extremely vulnerable and susceptible to low wages, predominantly because of the lack of competition in the system. The consolidation of market structure by large food corporations over the last century has stifled competition and enabled the industry to unabatedly commit a series of labor violations. The limited competition within the system allows these corporations to illegally fix wages or pay workers below the market wage. As a former UCS colleague noted, food workers have the highest participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) among all workers, greatly attributable to their low wages.
Ending the harms against workers
It is beyond time that our labor and agricultural laws work together to benefit all within the system, especially those who toil to put food on our tables.
Unfortunately, the US House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture passed a farm bill that does nothing to help workers, but instead causes harm by loosening requirements on important pesticides and limiting the ability of local and state governments to protect the safety and well-being of their residents. It also could prevent victims of pesticide exposure from receiving compensation, a prime example of Big Ag’s influence on federal policy.
The historically deleterious consequences of exclusionary policies, corporate consolidation, and industrialized power are more than evident today. Agricultural and food workers are essential, and we all—from policymakers to everyday citizens—must recognize the vital role they play to make systemic changes for a more resilient and fairer food system.