This is the second and third parts in a series of blogs Nourishing the Planet will be writing about workers in the food system. Nourishing the Planet research intern Ronit Ridberg recently spoke with Erik Nicholson, National VP of the United Farm Workers of America. In the first part of this two-part interview, Erik talks about the global agricultural system and the role American consumers play in it. Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.
Name: Erik Nicholson
Affiliation: National Vice President, United Farm Workers of America; International director of the Guest Worker Membership Program. Founded in 1962 by Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers of America is the nation's first successful and largest farm workers union currently active in 10 states.
Location: Tacoma, Washington
Bio: Erik Nicholson has worked extensively on pesticide issues affecting farm workers and their families as well as child labor, housing, consumer outreach, education and legislative issues. He currently serves as one of two national farm worker representatives to the Environmental Protection Agency's national pesticide advisory committee, the Pesticide Program Dialog Committee.
Nicholson led the two-and-a-half year organizing campaign at the national guest worker labor-contracting firm Global Horizons, resulting in the first national guest worker union contract in the history of the United States. He currently is working to develop an international infrastructure to better advocate on behalf of guest workers.
Can you please contextualize the work you do, in what has become a global system of agriculture?
We are now importing the majority of the food we eat. The overwhelming majority of workers who harvest the food we eat in the United States are not from this country. And many if not most of the workers employed in the fields in the United States are displaced farmers from their own countries (mostly Mexico but not exclusively.) So we're seeing that many of the same pressures and challenges that are facing farmers in the US are the very same ones that are displacing small farmers in the global South and resulting in them coming in search of employment to the United States, Canada, Australia, and European Union. At the same time, farmers and sometimes their spouses in the US are looking for second jobs in more urban settings.
When Vietnam entered the global market with coffee we saw an unprecedented exodus of coffee farmers out of eastern Mexico. When NAFTA was signed, mass exodus of corn farmers - so we see a direct correlation between these international trade policies and agricultural practices and kind of the global crisis of agriculture that we're facing.
Within that context you look at agriculture in the United States and pretty much anyone born in this country has no aspirations to work in the fields. And I think if we're honest with ourselves, the reason is because we all know the conditions are not good, the pay is pretty bad, and there's really no benefits. As a result we have depended on immigrant workers to come up and do the work that we haven't wanted to do. And so if you look at the history of the United Farm Workers, we've had workers literally from around the world as members - from Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Yemen, African Americans and of course, Mexicans, Central Americans, and the internationalization of the work-force continues. We now have workers working under contract from Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, and it's very much become a global workforce that is harvesting the food we eat.
UFW recently hosted an international gathering of farm workers from 14 different countries. Can you share some of your impressions of that gathering?
It was just amazing to have people who are doing the same work we've been doing for fifty years in the United States, together in the same room. We were in awe of just how bad it is out there. We think it's bad here, and then you talk to folks from Ecuador or Peru, who come to the States telling us, "What are you guys complaining about? You don't know the half of it." And so as we really compared notes, the contexts were different but it was appalling just how bad it is for farm workers across the world. That was sobering.
But at the same time, it was tremendously exciting to meet people who give a damn, and who are actually out there in the trenches trying to make a difference. It was a very lively conversation. We did a lot of work just getting to know each other and the different contexts in which we're working and actively looking for ways to collaborate. One of the first things that came to mind for all of us was that we need to educate the world about how bad it is for farm workers and why everyone who eats should care! We've established relationships that have never existed before, and are actively working to build upon those to see what we can do for workers globally.
What do the popular "food movements" of today have to do with farm workers' rights, and how can individual consumers get more involved in supporting change around the world?
Just look at the whole conversation about "sustainability", the Buy Local fad, and that was preceded by the organic fad, and the whole mythology that was erected around those concepts that included somehow that workers were going to be treated better. When the reality is there are local farmers I would never ever in a million years buy something from, and gladly pay a premium to have it flown in 2000 miles because I know workers are treated well. And while workers aren't exposed to as many toxins in organics, there are still toxins in the organic world that are allowed, and organics does nothing on the labor front. So I think we need to make sure that labor is part of the equation.
I've found that people are frequently reluctant to dirty their hands because you're dealing with three very politically charged issues: the sustainability of small farmers, immigration policy, and labor. If you really want to stand with the people who are out there right now in the field, rather than projecting a better future theoretically, find out who's picking your food and how you can stand with them. Boycott Arizona and let your voice be heard that those types of laws are unacceptable. Support immigration reform, so we can provide legal status to the hundreds of thousands of people that put food on our table. And then really be an advocate to help support the people that are here, now, in their struggle to make a better life for themselves.
It is incumbent on us as people who care about food and care about the viability of small farmers, to understand that these realities are the same for hundreds if not millions of people worldwide.
As progressive Rhode Island State Rep. David Segal announced on Daily Kos last Thursday, a coalition of progressives are using smart, strategic leverage to stand up for union workers.
Netroots Nation -- the annual conference of online activists and progressive thinkers, formerly known as "Yearly Kos" -- announced that they want to come to Providence, Rhode Island in 2011. That would bring $2 million of economic activity to the area.
But they're attaching one condition: The Westin hotel, where the conference would take place, just slashed worker pay by 20%. Netroots Nation insists that must be reversed.
Rep. David Segal is co-sponsoring the petition with Netroots Nation, RIFuture.org, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Segal will personally deliver the signatures to hotel management this week -- inviting the media to attend.
We're at 1,340 signatures -- can you help us reach 2,000 before the petition delivery? Click here to sign.
The U.S. economy has diverged: Wall Street is living high on the hog, while everyone else is struggling. The Dow Jones Industrial Average eclipsed 10,000 for the first time since last October this week, even as unemployment continues to spiral out of control. And while President Barack Obama has taken some very real steps to help ordinary people, his administration's efforts to save Wall Street have far outstripped their support of workers.
Matthew Rothschild details these disparities for The Progressive. Regulatory reforms are moving through Congress at a snail's pace and the wreckage from the mortgage bubble is increasing. Wage cuts are more widespread today than in any era since the Great Depression, even as bankers capitalize on taxpayer bailouts to score epic profits and outsized bonuses.
"One economy is for the rich and the upper middle class," Rothschild writes. "The other economy is for everybody else."
So how can a few big banks make so much money while the rest of the economy suffers? As Kevin Drum explains for Mother Jones, the kind of banking that helps the economy is a pretty simple business of taking deposits and making loans. But a lot of what we now call "banking" really just consists of making bets on just about anything you can dream up.
"Banks aren't using all this cheap money to increase lending. They're using it to fund bigger and bigger bets in the fixed-income sector - the same sector that brought us junk bonds, credit default swaps, subprime loan securitization, interest rate carries, collateralized debt obligations, and all the rest of Warren Buffett's 'financial weapons of mass destruction.'"
The banks, in other words, are gambling with taxpayer money. A host of big finance companies have reported earnings in the past week, and the numbers are ugly: JPMorgan Chase reaped $3.59 billion in third-quarter profits and Goldman Sachs is planning to payout $23 billion in bonuses from speculative trading, while Bank of America and Citigroup are hemorraging money on mortgages and credit cards. The Wall Street casino is alive and well, but anything that is actually tied to the real economy is a disaster.
According to a new report from the U.S. Treasury, lending among the largest recipients of the Troubled Asset Relief Program fell by 17% from July to August. Small businesses can't cope with the cutoff in financing. A lot of businesses stay profitable over the long-term by borrowing money to meet short-term expenses. A baker can borrow money to buy flour and pay the bank back when she sells her bread. With bank lending on ice and consumers cutting back on spending, many small businesses are failing. Thousands more will be at risk in the next couple of years while unemployment remains elevated.
Writing for Salon, former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich notes that these economic struggles are not reflected in major stock indices. Stock are soaring as big corporations who don't need bank loans score short-term profits from cost-cutting, i.e., mass layoffs. Obviously, this strategy can't work for very long. When millions of Americans are out of work, they can't afford to buy the things companies make.
There's an important lesson in our current economic state-of-affairs, as Katrina vanden Heuvel emphasizes for The Nation. The bailout has not done what Henry Paulson told us it would do. To be sure, it saved the banks-- even the strongest banks would have failed last fall without extraordinary government support. But it has not increased lending and kept the economy from disaster. The Obama administration, which has extended the Bush administration's support for bank balance sheets and bonus checks, is facing a political nightmare if it doesn't show produce some stronger economic results for ordinary citizens.
"Heading into 2010, the Obama administration must put itself back on the side of working people," vanden Heuvel writes.
The administration must address two critical problems in order to restore the nation's economic credibility. Putting the unemployed back to work is at the top of the list. Anything that saves jobs will help, including aid to states to keep teachers and cops on government payrolls and tax credits for companies that hire new full-time workers.
Something must also be done about the foreclosure epidemic. Nothing underscores our economic disparity like continuing housing mess, which has been in full-blown crisis mode since 2006. Despite a multi-trillion-dollar bank bailout, foreclosures are surging to all-time highs. Writing for The American Prospect, Tim Fernholz details the prolonged problems with the Obama administration's current foreclosure relief program.
While millions of troubled borrowers are eligible for the plan, which reduces monthly mortgage payments to affordable levels, foreclosures are still outpacing loan relief efforts by more than two-to-one.
Banks are dragging their feet and the administration has imposed no penalties on lenders who don't live up to the program's standards. Instead, the Treasury Department is offering banks cash incentives to keep people in their homes. Bank of America, which has received $45 billion in direct government bailout funds, plus hundreds of billions in government guarantees and other perks, has modified merely 11% of the mortgages it controls that are eligible for the plan.
Fernholz offers several potential improvements to Obama's foreclosure relief plan, including more aggressive government policing of the current plan and allowing foreclosed homeowners to continue to live in their homes as renters. With up to 12 million foreclosures projected by the end of 2012, just about anything the administration does will help.
The economy is a measure of social well-being, not a stock market index or a corporate earnings statement. Policymakers need to prove they can respond to the very real needs of all their citizens, not just those with financial clout.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
The economy is still getting worse. Foreclosures are surging above last year's epic highs and the unemployment rate marches upwards every month. As the misery grinds on, Wall Street lobbyists and their allies in Congress are pushing hard to distract the public from the real causes of the current global economic crisis. Corporate America is trying to pin the blame for our empty pocketbooks on President Barack Obama and the phantom socialist menace, and cable news pundits are taking the bait.
As David Korten explains in a blog post for Yes!, this surge of distractions is a conscious political strategy designed to sabotage reform. "Wall Street's greatest fear is that the public might demand Congress and the president shut down the casino," Korten writes. "Any issue that shifts attention away from Wall Street and pins the blame for job loss and mortgage foreclosures on President Obama works in its favor."
The banking lobby is kicking and screaming over President Obama's plan to overhaul consumer protection in finance. As a result, the battle over the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) has become the most heated economic controversy in the nation's capital, even though the issue isn't controversial where ordinary citizens are concerned.
The existing hodgepodge of bank regulators completely failed to stand up for consumers as the housing bubble grew and burst. Our current bank regulators are charged not only with consumer protection, but safety and soundness regulation, which basically means making sure that banks don't fail. Preventing bank failures often means protecting bank profits, even when those profits come at the expense of communities. Instead of relying on the same inept and conflicted agencies, consumer regulation of credit cards, mortgages, student loans, payday loans should be funneled into a single, new agency with no other priorities: The CFPA.
As Greg Kaufmann details for The Nation, recent economic history isn't stopping Wall Street's favorite lawmakers from pushing against the CFPA. Kaufmann highlights some of the most outrageous comments from a hearing on the CFPA last week. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) claimed that if the CFPA had existed a few years ago, there would be no ATMs or frequent flyer miles. David John, a researcher from the Heritage Foundation, said that employees of the new agency would spend too much time trying to find their new desks to actually do any regulating. Bank lobbyist Ed Yingling tried to erase the last ten years with his claim that "no real case has been made" for better enforcement of consumer protection in banking.
These are not serious arguments. They are intentional distractions designed to kill an obviously productive policy. Kaufmann's headline says it all: "Do They Take us for Schmucks?"
But loudmouth Republicans like Hensarling aren't the only politicians we need to keep tabs on. Plenty of lawmakers on the Financial Services Committee won't stand up and make crazy speeches about ATMs, but will still go to bat for Wall Street behind the scenes. As I emphasize in a piece for AlterNet, with outsized Democratic majorities in both chambers of commerce, conservative, pro-Wall Street Democrats pose just as great a threat to our economic security as loony Republicans.
If you think that sounds pessimistic, consider Ralph Nader, who Matthew Rothschild profiles in The Progressive. Nader knows corporate America has its hands on nearly every lever in the U.S. political system. Lobbyists don't just hurl money at lawmakers, they spend tremendous sums on misleading advertisements to sway public opinion. Rothschild quotes from a recent speech Nader gave on his current book tour. He argues that progressives don't just need concerned citizens on our side. They need concerned citizens with money to counter the flood of corporate cash in the political system.
"There is a poignance in listening to Ralph Nader these days," Rothschild writes. "Here is a man who, for the last 45 years, has hurled his body at the engine of corporate power. He's dented it more than anyone else in America. But he knows it's still chugging, even more strongly than ever."
Even when lawmakers talk tough about Wall Street, it's not obvious what's really going on. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) recently rolled out an extremely ambitious plan to overhaul the bank regulatory system. It has very little common ground with Obama's plan, and in some respects would be an improvement. Obama's plan is very strong on consumer protection and not much else. But Dodd's plan is so ambitious, it seems like a politically impossible waste of time, one that could easily delay reforms into next year. Dodd wants to consolidate all four bank regulators into a single agency to prevent a race to the bottom and strip the Federal Reserve of all of its regulatory responsibilities. They aren't bad ideas, but they have absolutely no political momentum. Dodd has been holding hearings on the financial crisis since 2007-- he could have started pushing for this plan a long time ago. By introducing it so late in the process, major legislative delays seem inevitable. The longer it takes to pass a regulatory bill, the more time the bank lobby has to water it down. Writing for Mother Jones, Nick Baumann suggests this may be exactly what Dodd intends.
"Maybe getting it done by 2010 isn't the point. Dodd is up for reelection that November. If he manages to win by talking populist while raising money from Wall Street, he'll have plenty of time afterward to figure out what to do next."
For now, the economy is still absolutely horrible. Writing for In These Times, David Moberg translates the statistics from the government's most recent unemployment report and deciphers some recent polling on the economy. Things are bad, and people know it. Many economists believe the recession may have technically already ended. The Gross Domestic Product, a statistical measure of the country's economic output, may no longer be declining. But the unemployment rate keeps going up. It was 9.8% at the end of September.
Moberg notes that if the rate counted the long-term unemployed who have given up looking and people who want full-time jobs but settled for part-time work, the unemployment rate is a staggering 17%. Over one-third of the 15.1 million would-be workers encompassed by the 9.8% unemployment rate have been out of a job for at least six months. Voters overwhelmingly believe that government policies have helped Wall Street, while just 13% think the government has given a lot of help to the average working person.
Economics and politics are inextricably linked. To strengthen our economic foundation, we need policymakers who are willing to stand up to corporate America and corporate media and serve the citizens who elect them.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Low-wage workers are struggling to navigate the current recession. A new study conducted by a team of academics reveals that the majority of workers at the bottom of the economic ladder have been shorted on their paychecks as recently as last week. But the compensation crisis looks very different on Wall Street, where excessive pay tied to risky activities helped set the economy on its crash course. Despite the resulting deep recession, pay for high-level U.S. financiers remains over-the-top, even as low wage workers struggle to navigate the downturn.
The U.S. has made a few gestures toward scaling back executive compensation for banks that it bailed out under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, but the rules have amounted to little more than window-dressing, according to a paper published last week by the Institute for Policy Studies. The paper's authors, Sarah Anderson and Sam Pizzigati, found that ten of the 20 largest bailout banks have reported stock option compensation for 2009, and the top five executives at those companies have scored a full $90 million so far this year. That's just through stock options. The number gets even more obscene if you include bonuses, salary and other payouts.
As Anderson and Pizzigati explain in a companion piece published in AlterNet, bank executives collected huge bonuses based on the profits from subprime loans during the housing bubble. Since subprime mortgages were more expensive than traditional loans, profits were high-until borrowers stopped being able to pay back their predatory, unaffordable debt. Suddenly the banks were all busted, but the executives had already made a killing.
Katrina vanden Huevel emphasizes in The Nation that the U.S. government doesn't even try to tax this kind of income, much less regulate its connection to risk-taking. Billions of dollars in tax revenue are lost each year as financiers hide payouts in offshore tax havens, while on-the-books income from financial activities are taxed at arbitrarily low rates. Capital gains like stock price increases, for instance, are taxed at just 15%, while income from an ordinary paycheck is taxed at 35% for the wealthiest individuals.
While the U.S. dallies on executive pay, key leaders in Europe are moving to rein in risky compensation practices in the financial sector, as detailed in this video report over at The Real News. President Barack Obama will meet with U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicholas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders of the G-20 in Pittsburgh later this month, and financial regulatory reform will be at the top of the agenda.
For ordinary workers, there are few positive signs in the current economy. The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen dissects the latest batch of unemployment numbers from the Labor Department. The good news is that the overall pace of layoffs seems to be abating. The bad news? The U.S. still lost a whopping 216,000 jobs in August. And broader measures of workplace woe are even worse. The unemployment rate does not include discouraged workers who have stopped looking for a job, and it doesn't include those who want to work full-time but have to settle for part-time employment. That statistic actually declined slightly in July, giving some economists cause for optimism. But the metric soared again in August, reaching the highest level on record.
And unemployment is not the only problem workers face. Both Tim Fernholz of The American Prospect and Elizabeth Palmberg of Sojourners highlight a New York Times story by labor reporter Steven Greenhouse, which details how low-wage workers are routinely cheated by their employers. According to a recent study, a full 68% of these workers report having experienced an illegal workplace abuse in the past week, such as being denied overtime pay or being required to work for less than minimum wage. On average, workers lost 15% of their weekly income as a result of this exploitation.
We have good laws to protect workers, but they just aren't being enforced. Companies have successfully intimidated their employees into not reporting blatantly illegal pay practices. The best way to resolve this situation is to expand unionization and give workers a stronger voice in the workplace, making it safe to speak out against abuses. And the best way to expand unionization is to enact the Employee Free Choice Act, which lowers barriers to creating a union. But the legislative process has been delayed by a smear campaign organized by executives and managers claiming that unions, and not corporate elites, are the actual source of workplace coercion.
"It ought to make your blood boil-especially as people decry union thugs 'intimidating' people into joining unions when that doesn't happen and most workers want to join a union," Fernholz writes.
The U.S. needs to get its economic priorities in order. We should be protecting low-wage workers from executive excess, not the other way around. President Obama will have an opportunity to coordinate that effort globally at the G-20 summit later this month. Let's hope he doesn't squander it.
Put down that grande non-fat caramel macchiato or whatever Starbucks concoction you're drinking. Turns out the coffee giant has a nasty history of being anti-barista, anti-union, and thus anti-Employee Free Choice Act as well.
The National Labor Relations Board has repeatedly found Starbucks guilty of illegally terminating, harassing, intimidating, and discriminating against employees attempting to unionize. Late last year, a judge ruled Starbucks had committed over a dozen violations of the National Labor Relations Act at a few New York stores. Starbucks has settled five such labor disputes in the last few years in New York, Minnesota, and Michigan, spending millions on legal fees to avoid exposing their anti-worker ways.
To make matters worse, Starbucks has led the charge on a so-called Employee Free Choice Act "compromise," joining Costco and Whole Foods to form the Committee for Level Playing Field. This Orwellian-sounding group has come up with a "third way" on Employee Free Choice, which would require 70 percent of workers to sign union authorization cards instead of the far more manageable 50 percent initially proposed by this legislation.
There's some great news on the labor front coming out of newly announced labor appointments. There are a whole host of positions to be appointed in both the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board. Progressive appointments here give us a chance to re-shape labor policy through administrative processes and help expand the power of workers in the 21st century.
Follow me over the fold and we'll meet some of these appointees.
Last week the Bush administration announced a renewed push to clamp down on undocumented workers. Specifically, the rule would ask a federal judge to lift an injunction on the "no-match" rule.
The rule protects businesses from failing to respond to so-called "no match" letters sent out by the Social Security Administration stating that the number provided by an employee does not match the information in their database. This may indicate the worker is undocumented but many are the result of clerical errors including, for example, women not updating last names after marriage.
Judge Charles R. Breyer last year warned that the plan would have "staggering" and "sever" effects on workers and businesses. It's reasons such as this that have brought together not just traditional groups working for immigrant rights, such as the ACLU, but also the AFL-CIO, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Particularly amidst the recent sharp economic downturn, business leaders are concerned about the Bush administration's plan. If this effort to lift the injunction against the "no-match" rule is successful, the government would ask up to 140,000 employers to check the social security numbers of 8.7 million workers. Businesses must resolve discrepancies within 90 days or fire the workers.
Angela Amador, the Chamber's director of immigration policy is concerned about the costs of complying with this rule. The Chamber's objections "[have] been about the cost of a badly thought out rule and the cost on legitimate businesses following all the rules and complying with it."
Groups such as the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center are concerned that the plan would lead to racial profiling, discrimination, and the firing of people based on clerical errors. They argue the Bush administration should work instead towards fixing the flawed database.
While everyone was focusing on the fate of the bailout plan this week, the federal government's debt passed the $10 trillion mark with hardly anyone noticing. Of course, the bailout plan insures that this debt will climb even higher as there is specific language in the bailout plan authorizing the federal government to raise the debt limit and borrow up to $840 billion to fund the bailout.
Before you go to sleep, some fairly shocking testimony proving there is no worker shortage and some additional shocking facts on how the US debt is affecting job creation as well as how current research grant awards are inversely affecting R&D!
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Name: Erik Nicholson
