Confronting the Global Food Crisis: Advocacy for Farm Worker Rights

Logo from the event

This weekend, I attended the Community Alliance for Global Justice's Confronting the Food Crisis: Cultivating Just Alternatives to the Corporate Food System teach-in (it was nice to run into you there, Dave!). The workshop that stuck with me most was called Farmworker Victories and Organizing in WA State. It featured an immigrant clam-digger and organizer who lives and works in Shelton, a farmer from eastern Washington who runs a non-profit that prioritizes justice for immigrant workers, and my friend Stephanie, who I was surprised to see representing the Student Farmworker Alliance, a group I didn't know she, or anyone else at the University of Washington, was involved with.

First, we heard from each of the activists. Julio, the clam-digger, told us in Spanish about the hard work he does digging for clams at night (when the tide is low) in winter, and how little he gets paid for it. Clayton, the farmer, told us about his organization's successes at empowering workers, and how unjust the system can be for people without documents. Stephanie described the campaigns and victories of the Student Farmworker Alliance over the last eight years.

Then, we split up into groups to discuss and come up with questions about the topics in the discussion. My group addressed organizing around farmworker justice. We came up with a couple questions we could provide preliminary answers two, and one that keeps re-asking itself in my head. To How can a consumer engage in the struggle for farmworker justice? and What ways are more effective at reaching the corporations that make the situation unjust? we answered solidarity and using our privelage as citizens to defend immigrants' rights, and also be careful of identifying changing consumption patterns as the only option, because the injustice in the system is not the consumers' fault and listen to human stories - look horizontally for power.

I also found myself asking What is the end goal of labor organizing in the industrial food system? The system is based on injustice - food can only be as cheap as it is if the people who tend and harvest it are paid very little. Workers can win demands for one penny more per pound of tomatoes, like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers which the the Student Farmworker Alliance supported with its campaigns, but they can't really ever find justice within the existing system, without completely transforming it. But it doesn't make sense to abandon the workers the system abuses while we focus all our enegry on alternatives to the system, either. What should our goal here be?

After the workshop I talked to Stephanie about her work with the Student Farmworker Alliance, and found out that although she knows a lot about what's been going on with the group and has participated a little bit through the Student Labor Action Project on campus, our school is pretty tuned-out of farmworker issues. We decided to try to engage the environmental group I lead, the Sierra Student Coalition at UW, in these issues. I left the workshop with more questions than ever, but feeling ready to make change anyway.


Ariana Rose Taylor-Stanley