NY Times Op/Ed: “The strongest model for farmworkers today is in Florida…”

An auditor from the Fair Food Standards Council, the third-party monitoring body tasked with ensuring the implementation of the CIW’s Fair Food Program, conducts an interview with workers on a tomato farm in Florida.

Author Miriam Pawel: “The strongest model for farmworkers today is in Florida, where the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has achieved major gains – not through state law but through years of patient, creative organizing that produced a framework to improve wages and working conditions, with effective enforcement.”

Monday’s New York Times carried a provocative Op/Ed by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Miriam Pawel on a recent, and significant, legislative victory for farmworkers in New York State.  But while Pawel’s take on the new law is indeed intriguing – and merits serious consideration by farmworkers, farmworker advocates, and consumers fighting for a more modern, more dignified food system – her comments on the CIW and the Fair Food Program are certainly worth noting, as well.

Pawel – author of both the definitive biography of the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) founder Cesar Chavez (“The Crusades of Cesar Chavez”) and the most authoritative history of the UFW to date (“The Union of Their Dreams”) – opens her piece with a nod to the law’s historical significance:

After more than a decade of contentious debate, New York has passed a law that entitles farmworkers to basic rights that most workers take for granted — the right to earn overtime, have a day off, collect unemployment insurance and join a union. The law corrects injustices that date back to the exclusion of farmworkers and domestics from the National Labor Relations Act, in an effort to win Southern votes by exempting the largely black work forces…

But she simultaneously sounds a strong note of caution about the new law’s potential for bringing about meaningful labor progress in the fields, drawn from her study of the UFW’s history in California, where a similar law was passed decades ago:

… Yet this victory may prove to be largely symbolic. That is the sad lesson from California, which has had on the books for more than 40 years a farmworker statute hailed as the most pro-labor law in the country. The Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975 grants farmworkers the right to unionize, sets up procedures for speedy elections, allows union organizers access to growers’ fields and provides remedies for workers who are unjustly fired or penalized, including back pay.

But today, the board that administers the law is virtually moribund; it has not met in public since January. For most of the year it has lacked a quorum. And nobody seems to notice. Certainly not farmworkers, an overwhelmingly undocumented work force whose wages and conditions are for the most part arguably no better than decades ago.

The rest of the piece goes on to develop that central theme, captured in this sentence:

… The New York law, which Gov. Andrew Cuomo has endorsed, is a milestone, not to be minimized. But to deliver on the law’s promise will require effective grass-roots organizing in the fields.

And it is on that final note – “to deliver on the law’s promise will require effective grass-roots organizing in the fields” – where Pawel directs the reader’s attention to Florida, and the Fair Food Program:

… The strongest model for farmworkers today is in Florida, where the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has achieved major gains — not through state law but through years of patient, creative organizing that produced a framework to improve wages and working conditions, with effective enforcement. The organization is led by workers, with broad-based support, using many of the techniques pioneered by the United Farm Workers in its heyday.

Pawel is right.  While laws can set forth the rights that we, as a community, wish to see (whether that community is a town, a state, or the country as a whole), rights cannot enforce themselves.  And rights without the power and mechanisms to enforce them are just words on paper.  

To make the new rights for farmworkers in New York State real, to change workers’ lives on the ground, will require tireless organizing and a laser-like focus on enforcement.  The challenge now, now that the law has passed, is to build a movement with sufficient power and effective means for enforcing those new rights on farms across the state.  While the New York law provides for enforcement through the establishment of a state labor board, Pawel would argue that the California law did the same, and today the labor board in that state is little more than a shadow of what it was during the  UFW’s heyday.  In the end, like rights, even effective mechanisms are rendered useless without the power to hold them accountable and the movement to generate that power. 

You can find the Op/Ed in its entirety here.  It is a must-read for anyone – farmworker, farmworker advocate, or consumer – who dreams of a more just food system for the 21st century.