DAILY TRIFECTA: America's Food System Should Make You Sick
What if you really are what you eat?
TITLE: Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands
https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e
EXCERPT: A hidden path to America’s dinner tables begins here, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison.
Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill.
Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.
They are among America’s most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job.
The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.
Many of the companies buying directly from prisons are violating their own policies against the use of such labor. But it’s completely legal, dating back largely to the need for labor to help rebuild the South’s shattered economy after the Civil War. Enshrined in the Constitution by the 13th Amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude are banned – except as punishment for a crime.
That clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year.
Some prisoners work on the same plantation soil where slaves harvested cotton, tobacco and sugarcane more than 150 years ago, with some present-day images looking eerily similar to the past. In Louisiana, which has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates, men working on the “farm line” still stoop over crops stretching far into the distance.
Willie Ingram picked everything from cotton to okra during his 51 years in the state penitentiary, better known as Angola.
During his time in the fields, he was overseen by armed guards on horseback and recalled seeing men, working with little or no water, passing out in triple-digit heat. Some days, he said, workers would throw their tools in the air to protest, despite knowing the potential consequences.
“They’d come, maybe four in the truck, shields over their face, billy clubs, and they’d beat you right there in the field. They beat you, handcuff you and beat you again,” said Ingram, who received a life sentence after pleading guilty to a crime he said he didn’t commit. He was told he would serve 10 ½ years and avoid a possible death penalty, but it wasn’t until 2021 that a sympathetic judge finally released him. He was 73.
The number of people behind bars in the United States started to soar in the 1970s just as Ingram entered the system, disproportionately hitting people of color. Now, with about 2 million people locked up, U.S. prison labor from all sectors has morphed into a multibillion-dollar empire, extending far beyond the classic images of prisoners stamping license plates, working on road crews or battling wildfires.
Though almost every state has some kind of farming program, agriculture represents only a small fraction of the overall prison workforce. Still, an analysis of data amassed by the AP from correctional facilities nationwide traced nearly $200 million worth of sales of farmed goods and livestock to businesses over the past six years – a conservative figure that does not include tens of millions more in sales to state and government entities. Much of the data provided was incomplete, though it was clear that the biggest revenues came from sprawling operations in the South and leasing out prisoners to companies.
TITLE: The price of picking blueberries in rural Maine
https://themainemonitor.org/the-price-of-picking-blueberries/
EXCERPT: Milbridge is pretty quiet for a lot of the year. A handful of businesses dot the downtown, which runs for less than half a mile along Route 1 as the road winds its way toward the Canadian border.
With fewer than 1,400 residents, Milbridge doubles its size in the late summer and then again in the fall — first for blueberry season and then for wreath processing in October. Another key industry is the nearly year-round processing of sea cucumbers, which can help make stocks for stews.
When Juana Rodriguez-Vazquez got here with her family in 1998, she was in elementary school — one of only about 150 kids her age in Milbridge at the time — but she’d already seen much of the U.S. Orange season in Florida, apple harvest in Michigan, blueberry picking in Maine.
The farms around Milbridge are dependent on people like the Rodriguez-Vazquez family because there aren’t enough residents to support the workload.
“When I was a kid, when we were traveling, I remember being out there in the fields with apples and oranges and green beans,” Rodriguez-Vazquez said. “A lot of the housing for employees, their housing is pretty much out in the fields.”
This October, about 1,000 workers arrived in the Millbridge area for the wreath season, just as the state’s Department of Labor (DOL) was hosting hearings and discussions on whether farmworkers should be included in the state’s minimum wage law.
They have long been excluded from the state’s regulations for minimum wage, an issue that lawmakers sought to address by passing a law that would have raised the base pay from the federal rate of $7.25 per hour to $13.80 per hour.
But although the law passed, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills vetoed it earlier this summer, opting instead to write an executive order that would create a committee to make recommendations about how to compromise on the issue by increasing the minimum wage while maintaining industry desires, like a potential youth exception.
It’s the second time Mills has vetoed a bill that would have added minimum wage protections for farmworkers.
But advocates for workers argue the process is flawed from the start, failing to provide legal protections for workers that speak out — favoring employers, who have freedom to speak publicly about their needs and who have the legal ability to fire workers who advocate for higher wages.
As a teenager, Rodriguez-Vazquez worked during each season that came up. Raking blueberries, making wreaths for a company that at the time supplied L.L. Bean, and processing sea cucumbers.
“They’re still getting the same pay that I got when I was 15,” Rodriguez-Vazquez said of the wreath workers working in Washington County.
She doesn’t work in the fields anymore. Since 2012, she’s been working with the Milbridge-based nonprofit Mano en Mano, which provides basic services to the local population of migrant farmworkers — this past year she was named executive director.
In the past few months, she said, the state government has put farmworkers in a position where they can’t speak up.
“I think we all know there are some power dynamics played by employers in terms of their ability to speak up, and if they do, there is retaliation in terms of loss of employment,” Rodriguez-Vazquez said. “Farmworkers haven’t had the ability to do that in a way that would feel good for them.”
The issue of minimum wage exemptions for farmworkers certainly isn’t unique to Maine. At the federal level, farms have to pay the $7.25 per hour minimum wage only if they employ “500 man-days” within a three-month period, and family members are exempt from minimum wage — a major benefit for Maine farmers, given that many are family owned and operated.
According to the National Agricultural Law Center (NALC), 22 U.S. states don’t mandate a minimum wage higher than the federal rate. Seven of those are states that actually have passed higher minimum wage laws for the state in general, but exempt agricultural workers. Massachusetts splits the difference: It generally requires employers to pay workers $14.25 per hour, but farmworkers only get $8.00.
TITLE: A year after Half Moon Bay mass shooting, farmworkers still waiting for better housing
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/half-moon-bay-shooting-anniversary-18621398.php
EXCERPT: In the year since the shooting, San Mateo County officials have worked to obtain funding for farmworker housing while providing those displaced with basic needs with help from local nonprofits. In total, three housing developments in Half Moon Bay are in the planning stages, but it could take another one to four years until they’re move-in ready.
That, according to farmworker advocates, highlights the slow pace of progress in the ongoing fight for farmworker rights and housing, and underscores the deplorable conditions agricultural workers have faced for years. Many farmworkers in California continue to face “horrific mistreatment, abusive working conditions and exploitative employers” despite the national attention on the Half Moon Bay shootings, said Antonio De Loera-Brust, director of communications for the United Farm Workers union.
“It should not take a massacre for California to confront the grim reality faced by the workers who put food on all our tables,” he said.
Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga, founder of Ayudando Latinos A Soñar, a Half Moon Bay nonprofit that provides resources to farmworkers, said it is “sad that it took this tragedy to make change” in the circumstances that advocates have long known about and fought against.
“It’s not just here in Half Moon Bay, it’s in Pescadero, it’s in Watsonville, all up and down California,” Hernandez-Arriaga said. “There needs to be better living conditions, more humane conditions. Why is that in 2024?”