by Abby Crum | Oct 30, 2015 | Economic Justice
This post was written by Hannah Hafter, Senior Associate for Service-Learning Programs at the UU College of Social Justice (UUCSJ).
Did you know that over 30 million people in the U.S. alone are employed in the food chain, making it one of the largest sectors for employment in the country? Yet food chain workers are among the lowest paid and most highly exploited groups—from farm workers who are excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act to servers at restaurants who legally earn a minimum wage of only $2.13 an hour plus tips. We are all participants in this food chain as consumers, whether we eat out or at home, and as consumers, we have power to stand with those exploited in the workplace.
For these reasons, the UU College of Social Justice (UUCSJ) collaborated with the Food Chain Workers Alliance in September to host the first Justice in the Food Chain training. This Chicago event brought together members of three mid-west Workers Centers (working in agriculture, slaughterhouses, and warehouses), Unitarian Universalists, and other faith-based allies to learn about the root causes of problems in the food chain and to collaborate on campaigns to improve them.
Together, food chain workers and faith-based allies shared stories, built community, and learned concrete organizing skills for analyzing power and running effective campaigns. The training’s goal was to empower participants to work towards “Good Food Purchasing Policies” (GFPP) in their cities, school systems, and other institutions. Good Food Purchasing Policies like the one already implemented in Los Angeles create standards for millions of dollars of food purchases addressing the four areas of: Heath; Environment; Access; and Labor (HEAL). Good Food Purchasing Policy campaigns also create collaborations across sectors, bringing together groups working on making healthy food more accessible with people working to improve labor standards in the food chain.
Our 25 participants went home with plans for how to build campaigns in their mid-west communities. Keep an eye out for future Justice in the Food Chain trainings taking place locally in your region. To learn more about Worker Justice Centers and find out what is happening where you live, go to this list of Food Chain Workers Alliance Member Organizations.
Thank you to the Food Chain Workers Alliance, Labor Notes, the Northwest Arkansas Worker Justice Center, the Rural Community Workers Alliance, and the Cincinnati Interfaith Workers Center for collaborating with us! And thank you to all of our participants, and particularly to the Unitarian Church of Evanston which had the largest contingent.
by Heather Vickery | Sep 23, 2013 | Economic Justice
The following post was written by Evan Seitz, Senior Associate for Service-Learning Programs at the UU College of Social Justice (UUCSJ).
How did you honor workers this Labor Day? For seven UUs, the answer was to attend a rally with labor leaders at the historic Pullman Factory in Pullman, Illinois. That’s not all the group did. They visited the site of the Hay Market Affair, which inspired May Day celebrations worldwide; met with labor organizers working in the restaurant industry and warehouse industry; and strategized on ways the UU community could more effectively ally with the labor movement. The activities were part of the inaugural “Food for Thought Program,” an economic justice training program offered by the UU College of Social Justice and UU Service Committee partner the Restaurant Opportunity Center (ROC).
The training offered a chance to really listen to the people working to change entire industries. We heard from Felipe Tendick-Matezans, an organizer for ROC-Chicago who for many years worked in the restaurant industry. According to Felipe, it isn’t unusual for a worker to toil for years in the same position, with no opportunities to advance. ROC has changed that by offering certificate programs in bartending and other skills. The real work of ROC though is in organizing workers to participate in campaigns. Wage theft, paid sick days, better working conditions – all of these are tackled by ROC, which is structured as a series of local city chapters known as affiliates or smaller “ROC-Star” groups.
ROC and UUSC have collaborated on the Choose Compassionate Consumption campaign, which seeks to mobilize UUs as consumers to advocate for workers’ rights. As part of the training, our group dined at “High Road” restaurants – restaurants whose owners have pledged to pay their workers a fair wage and work to improve benefit packages and opportunities for advancement. Not only did we thank the staff for their service, we thanked the management and let them know we were eating there because of their fair labor policies.
I came away from the Food for Thought training having a much better understanding of how I could support this movement for fair wages and working conditions in the industry. If you care about the workers who prepare your food and want to gain the skills and knowledge to be a leader on this issue, consider coming to our next training on April 29 – May 3 in Chicago.
by Abby Crum | May 29, 2013 | Economic Justice
The following post was written by Ariel Jacobson, senior associate for UUSC’s Economic Justice Program and program leader for the upcoming UUCSJ Justice in the Food Chain program.
Some say Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle changed the world. Sinclair’s depiction of Chicago in 1906 was of a city teeming with exploitation of low-wage, primarily immigrant workers barely eking out a living. These workers — the backbone of the meatpacking industry and the engine of Chicago’s industrial growth — faced dirty, unsafe working conditions, poor housing, and no recourse for their grievances.
Sinclair describes the struggling workers:
They were beaten; they had lost the game, they were swept aside. It was not less tragic because it was so sordid, because that it had to do with wages and grocery bills and rents. They had dreamed of freedom; of a chance to look about them and learn something; to be decent and clean, to see their child grow up to be strong. And now it was all gone — it would never be! They had played the game and they had lost.
But history ended up telling a different story — ultimately, the workers didn’t lose. The groups that had been calling for just working conditions since before Chicago’s Haymarket massacre in 1886 continued to organize to amplify their collective voice. As a result of their efforts, and spurred into action by the first woman U.S. cabinet member Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. It was a landmark piece of legislation that established the federal minimum wage, created the 40-hour work week, and put an end to child labor. Over the course of the 20th century, workers’ rights made significant advances and a middle class was created, in large part because of the industrial labor union movement and wage-growth policies like increases to the minimum wage. Chicago was always at the center of these struggles.
However, when Sinclair’s book was published the immediate public reaction took a slightly different turn. Consumers responded more to the revelations about food safety, rather than to the moral implications of a hardworking underclass of immigrant workers whose dreams would never be realized. While food safety in mass processing plants undoubtedly had to be fixed, the rights of the workers were never fully addressed. It took many years to improve standards for migrant and farm workers, an ongoing struggle that continues today, and many restaurant workers have earned a disgracefully low $2.13 per hour since 1991.
Although labor organizing improved through, many of the underlying patterns exposed by The Jungle have persisted as industrial unionism has been severely eroded. Wealth and income inequality are now off the charts, and we face a food system that is unsustainable due to corporatization and industrialization. Thus, the food-justice movement has sought to challenge the safety of pesticides and genetically modified produce; reduce the environmental damage from food production; ensure access to local, fresh food for low-income communities; and promote animal rights through veganism or more humane treatment of livestock. And workers, employers, and consumers are now seeking to advance the human rights of all the people who harvest, process, pack, sell, and serve our food.
While we have not yet built a fully mobilized consumer movement dedicated to demanding labor rights for all the immigrant workers who are the backbone of today’s U.S. food system, UUSC’s Choose Compassionate Consumption initiative seeks to do just that. In partnership with groups like the Food Chain Workers Alliance and the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, UUSC is making progress on changing the conversation about food justice to include the deplorable conditions faced by food workers.
This is where you come in! UUCSJ and I believe that we can catalyze increased activism on food-worker rights through transformational service-learning experiences. During Justice in the Food Chain: An Exploration of Eating and Worker Organizing, you will learn about the historical struggles of immigrant workers in Chicago, new challenges to worker organizing, and ways that workers are meeting those challenges through organizations like the Restaurant Opportunities Center Chicago, the Center for New Community, and Warehouse Worker Justice. You will be invited into face-to-face conversation with workers in restaurants, warehouses, and meatpacking, and learn tools to engage as a faith-based consumer in the new food-justice movement. And since eating is a deeply human endeavor, it will be not only a historical and sociopolitical exploration, but also a personal and spiritual one.
In a 1906 issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine, Upton Sinclair was quoted as lamenting, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” We hope that the time you spend in Chicago for the Justice in the Food Chain program will touch your mind, your heart, your stomach — whatever it takes to join together to improve wages and working conditions for the 20 million workers in the U.S. food system.
Did you know that over 30 million people in the U.S. alone are employed in the food chain, making it one of the largest sectors for employment in the country? Yet food chain workers are among the lowest paid and most highly exploited groups—from farm workers who are excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act to servers at restaurants who legally earn a minimum wage of only $2.13 an hour plus tips. We are all participants in this food chain as consumers, whether we eat out or at home, and as consumers, we have power to stand with those exploited in the workplace.