Thank you. We’ve been asked to address how farmworkers are affected by the food system – in our case, the $50 billion, labor-intensive fresh produce industry — in which our members work.

We’ll start with the short answer: Farmwork is the worst job this country has to offer.

Farmwork is the worst combination of sub-poverty wages, dangerous, back-breaking working conditions, and lack of fundamental labor protections or benefits of any American occupation. There may be more dangerous jobs, there may even be worse paying jobs, but no single job combines the whole miserable package like farmwork.

And you don’t have to take our word for it. Labor markets don’t lie. There simply is no job in this country where the workers dream about the day they’ll finally be able to walk off their current job, grab a bucket, and pick and haul tomatoes under the Florida sun at 50 cents for every 32 pounds they pick.

People always dream of moving out of farmwork into other jobs. Never the other way around.

But it is possible to bring the fortunes of farmworkers more in line with the true value of their labor, and with the principles of balance and equity that underlie the rest of the sustainable food movement. To do so, we need to start from a clear measure of the problem of farm labor exploitation and seek to understand its origins.

In the remainder of our comments we will address these three questions about farm labor in the plantation-scale produce industry today:

* Just how bad are farm labor conditions?

* Why are they so bad?

* What can be done?

How bad are farm labor conditions? Since we’re here in Washington, we’ll cite government sources to make our case.

· In 2000, the U.S. Department of Labor described farmworkers as “a labor force in significant economic distress,” citing “low wages, sub-poverty annual earnings, [and] significant periods of un- and underemployment” to support its conclusions.

· In 2005, the Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) determined that farmworkers’ average annual incomes range from $10,000 to $12,499.

· In 2008, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) re-affirmed the Department of Labor’s findings from 2000. It reported that farmworkers remain “among the most economically disadvantaged working groups in the U.S.” and “poverty among farmworkers is more than double that of all wage and salary employees.”

· And, as if grinding poverty weren’t enough, widespread labor and human rights violations – including wage theft, sexual harassment, and systemic minimum wage violations — remain commonplace in the fields. In Florida alone, there have been 9 federal prosecutions for modern-day slavery since 1997, prompting one Department of Justice prosecutor to call Florida’s fields, “Ground zero for modern-day slavery.”

So the answer to the first question is pretty clear. The second question — “Why are farm labor conditions so bad” — gets a bit more complicated, and brings us straight to the heart of what’s wrong with the food system in the 21st century.

To be sure, when a situation is as dire as is farm labor exploitation, there is no single answer as to why it is so. But there are historical and modern-day factors that contribute to the farmworker’s plight today:

· Throughout the long and unhappy history of labor-intensive agriculture in the US, the vast majority of farmworkers have never had any real bargaining power in relation to their bosses. The sordid pre-20th century history of large-scale agriculture speaks for itself, while in the early 20th century, Jim Crow-era exclusions from federal workplace protections (National Labor Relations Act, Fair Labor Standards Act) contributed mightily to the stark imbalance of power still seen in the fields today.

· But, today, if you are looking for the most immediate cause of farmworkers’ increasing poverty — and the most correctable — your search is best directed to the marketplace. Farmworkers toil at the very bottom of a food supply chain that is every day more and more top-heavy, and this unprecedented consolidation of market power at the top of the retail food industry has created an unrelenting downward pressure on prices — and therefore wages and working conditions — at the bottom. And the bottom of the “bottom” in the food supply chain is the person picking fruit in the fields.

The retail food giants today – companies like, but not limited to, WalMart — buy tens of millions of pounds of tomatoes a year. At those historically unprecedented volumes, they are buying an ever-bigger share of any single grower’s production and are therefore able to leverage that tremendous market power to demand ever-lower prices from their suppliers.

Yet those suppliers, at the same time, are faced with rising input costs for diesel fuel, tractors, land, and pesticides. Caught in this cost/price squeeze, the only place growers can turn to maintain shrinking margins is to labor.

In 1992, according to USDA statistics, the farm share of the US consumer dollar spent on tomatoes was 40.8%. 40 cents of every dollar spent at the cash register on tomatoes went back to the farmer in 1992.

By the end of the decade, that number had fallen to 20.5%. Farms lost fully half of their share of the retail price to the retailers themselves.

Today, while growers have managed to stop the bleeding and recover some of their lost share, the overall picture is the same: Increasingly unequal bargaining relations mean that, when farmers bring their crops to market, the buyers almost always win. And the farmworkers pay the price.

In its excellent working paper entitled, “Ending Walmart’s Rural Stranglehold,” the United Food and Commercial Workers quoted none other than John Tyson of Tyson foods who, when confronted by an activist farmer on the untenably low price paid for meat to the farm, said, “Walmart’s the problem. They dictate the price to us and we have no choice but to pay you less.”

That exact same dynamic – that exact same unequal bargaining relationship – exists at the next level down the chain, between the farmer, or grower, and his labor. And so the cut in pay is passed along to the last person, the picker, after whom there is no one left to turn to in the chain.

As a result, tomato picking piece rates have remained stagnant — and in real terms, wages have steadily fallen — over the past thirty years. This parallels exactly the rise of corporate food giants like WalMart, Kroger, Giant, Stop & Shop, and Publix (Florida’s largest privately held corporation), not to mention the fast-food industry where single chains combine the purchasing power of tens of thousands of restaurants.

So, in short, WalMart makes farmworkers poor. But not just WalMart – all the major retail food brands that have grown at meteoric rates over the past 30 years have used the same volume purchasing strategy to drive their profits and growth at the expense of the workers who make that growth possible.

That’s the problem. Now, what can be done?

Well, here’s what we believe: What the retail food giants taketh away, they can giveth, too, … if properly motivated.

If the cause of farmworker poverty lies, in significant part, in the overwhelming market power of the highly consolidated retail food chains, then the solution to farmworker poverty can be found there too.

And, indeed, we have shaped the Campaign for Fair Food expressly to reverse the effect of the retail food giants’ power:

By building coalitions with students, faith communities, and the labor movement, we have built an alliance of farmworkers and consumers that – through old fashioned protest and 21st century social technology – has managed to bring nine multi-billion dollar retail food chains to sign Fair Food agreements

Through those Fair Food agreements buyers agree to:

· Pay a Fair Food premium to support a raise in workers’ wages

· Support the Fair Food Code of Conduct

· Purchase only from participating growers

· And shift purchases away from any grower who fails to comply with the Fair Food code

With this approach – which combines new market incentives in support of fairer farm labor conditions at both the retail and the produce industry levels — we have managed to kick start an unprecedented transformation of farm labor conditions in Florida’s tomato fields, including:

· A Worker-to-worker Education Process – on the farm and on the clock – by which workers learn of their new rights under the Fair Food code;

· A participatory Complaint Investigation and Resolution Process, or grievance system, through which workers are able to identify abusive bosses and workplace conditions and eliminate them, without fear of retaliation;

· The elimination of “Cupping”, or the forced overfilling of buckets, until now a standard practice in the industry that can reduce a worker’s piece rate wages by as much as ten percent.

· The institution of Worker Health and Safety Committees designed to create a space for discussion of workers concerns ranging from pesticide poisoning to sexual harassment.

· Concrete changes in the fields, from the provision of shade to prevent heat-related illnesses to time clocks so that workers are paid for all the hours they are on the job.

Now, this is all very new, and it is limited at this time to the Florida tomato industry.

But we already know this: The early success of the Fair Food Program in Florida’s notoriously harsh tomato industry strongly suggests that the market power of the retail food chains can be harnessed to improve, rather than impoverish, farmworkers’ lives.

Indeed, it is not too much to say that what is happening in Florida’s fields today is a strong and promising first step toward a future of food that respects human rights, rather than exploits human beings.