Erik Loomis - Out of Sight: The Labor Abuses Behind What We Eat
When you think of the globalized economy, you might not think
of food. But capital mobility and the legal framework facilitating it have
tremendously shaped the food system. It has transformed where and how our food
is produced, who grows it, and how it affects the ecosystem.
NAFTA’s agricultural provisions allowed American farmers to
dump their products on the Mexican market while raising animals fed on cheap
American corn. This transformed Mexico. Mexican pig farmers went out of
business because pork prices dropped so low. In 1995 Mexico imported 30,000
tons of pork from the United States, and in 2010 it imported 811,000 tons.
Mexican hog farmers had to leave their farms to make a living. Some migrated
north, becoming undocumented immigrants in the United States. A group of those
people found work in a Smithfield Foods processing plant in North Carolina.
Smithfield used these immigrants to bust a union-organizing campaign in the
plant. When some of those immigrants in turn joined the union, Smithfield
called the Immigration and Naturalization Service to report itself for
immigration violations.
One morning, twenty-one workers were individually called to
their supervisor’s office, arrested, imprisoned for using false social security
cards, and then deported. Hundreds of other workers fled town, fearing they
would be deported next. For Smithfield executives, the fines for hiring
undocumented workers were the price of a union-free workplace. This actually
backfired on Smithfield because the company had to replace those workers with
union-supporting African Americans, and the United Food and Commercial Workers
International Union, the nation’s largest food worker union, won an election
there in 2008. But Smithfield’s strategy often does work. An Iowa
slaughterhouse turned itself in for immigration violations in 2008 in a similar
attempt to disrupt union organizing. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
officials entered the plant and arrested 389 of its 970 workers. This time, the
union drive stalled.
Many of the Mexican workers in North Carolina came from the
state of Veracruz, on the Gulf Coast. Those who stayed behind in Veracruz also
found themselves fighting Smithfield. NAFTA rules facilitating land
privatization allowed American agricultural companies to create U.S.-style
agribusiness operations in Mexico. Smithfield built a pork-processing facility in
Veracruz, and it treated the people who lived around that facility as poorly as
the workers in North Carolina. The company buried dead pigs in unlined pits.
When those pigs decomposed, they contaminated the local water supply. Local
residents organized to stop Smithfield from expanding the new facility and won.
This Smithfield story tells us much about food’s role in the
globalized economy. First, it shows that the food industry outsources
production for the same reasons as other industries—to pollute and to exploit
workers while minimizing resistance from empowered locals with labor and
environmental organizations. The meat industry already locates its facilities
in antiunion states such as North Carolina, and even politicians in more
progressive states, like Maryland governor and Democratic candidate for
president Martin O’Malley, oppose regulations demanded by citizens to keep
their water clean because they fear that the meat industry will move to another
state. If the regulations in all the states become too strict, NAFTA has opened
up Mexico to American agribusiness. States compete with states and nations with
nations in a race to the bottom. Ecosystems and workers suffer.
Corporations do not care about national borders so long as
they can accomplish their objectives. Whether the slaughterhouse is in North
Carolina or Veracruz, most of us never see where our food comes from. When it
makes sense to invest in Mexico, agribusinesses do so. But they can also move
to the vast Great Plains or the South, where environmental regulations are few
and labor unions weak. As Timothy Pachirat writes in his powerful firsthand
account of working in a Nebraska slaughterhouse, “Distance and concealment
operate as mechanisms of power in modern society.”
Hiding food production
protects companies by concealing how the industry treats animals, what it dumps
into the ecosystem, and how it treats workers. Today’s consumers might eat
organic food, but that does not mean the food is produced in a way that
contributes to social justice. It does not mean that the people growing the
food, butchering the meat, or serving you in the restaurant are treated
humanely. Peeling off the food industry’s concealing blindfolds can empower
consumers to again fight for labor and nature.
Public knowledge of working conditions and animal treatment
is the food industry’s worst nightmare. This is the motivation behind a series
of so-called ag-gag bills to criminalize undercover footage of industrial
farming operations. Iowa, Utah, and Missouri have these laws, and Idaho joined
them in February 2014. In Idaho, it is now illegal for anyone not employed by
the farm—and for anyone who misrepresented themselves to get hired—to make
video recordings of what happens on that farm without the express consent of
the owner. Violators could receive a year in prison and a $5,000 fine.
Agribusiness pushed for the law after an undercover video showed workers
beating and sexually abusing cattle at an Idaho dairy operation. Animal rights
groups are challenging on constitutional grounds, but it is a dangerous advance
in the concealment of industrial activity. If laws protect what happens in meat
factories from view, why would they not give all factory owners legal standing
for concealment? Why not make the documentation of violations of workers’ rights
or the dumping of pollution in any industry a crime? Although court challenges
will result, if these laws are held up, they are a very scary legal aid to
corporations concealing their operations.
We once knew more about who raised our meat and how it was processed...
Read more:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/out-of-sight-the-labor-abuses-behind-what-we-eat
