Labels Can Tell Us How Produce Is Grown—but What About the Workers Picking It?

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/09/11/worker-welfare-food-labels?cmpid=tpfood-eml-2014-09-13-foodie

Workers farm extra hot peppers in Greeley, Colo. (Photo: Kathryn Scott Osler/'The Denver Post' via Getty Images)



Labels Can Tell Us How Produce Is Grown—but What About the Workers Picking It?

A growing number of food labels are tackling worker welfare.

September 11, 2014 By Willy Blackmore

Willy Blackmore is TakePart’s Food editor.


In the 14 years since the USDA guidelines were announced, the business of organic food has gone from niche to mainstream. Economic Research Service estimates put domestic sales at $35 billion for 2014, up from $28 billion in 2012. According to a recent survey on food labels by Consumer Reports, 49 percent of shoppers look for the “USDA Organic” label when they’re at the grocery store.

The limits the federal organic standards put on chemical pesticides and fertilizers help draw in health-conscious consumers who’d prefer to limit the amount of bug-killing poison on their food. But there’s another perspective to consider in the organic debate, one that’s increasingly becoming its own field of activism, both on farms and for organizations working on labeling standards: worker welfare. The pesticides you’d rather not feed to your kids present myriad health problems to the people who spray and harvest the foods being treated with them.

In addition to concerns over worker safety, another consideration is wages—an issue the federal organic label doesn’t touch on at all. Thanks to an unfortunate quirk in U.S. labor law, farmworkers aren’t guaranteed a minimum wage, and many toil under grueling conditions to be paid pennies per pound for the food they haul in from the fields.

Although it’s been decades since Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers brought the plight of grape and lettuces pickers into the national spotlight in the 1960s and ’70s, the issue of worker welfare in agriculture is by no means a thing of the past. Consumer Reports found that 87 percent of Americans support fair working conditions for farm labor, and 92 percent support local farmers.

FULL story at link.