Currently browsing posts about: Labor

I’m indebted to Errol Schweizer, Grocery Nerd, for pointing out in response to my post on we need more vegetables, that if we want more vegetables, somebody has to pick them.  Raids by ICE on farmworkers are not helping this situation; they are wrong, morally and legally, and must stop.

Schweizer writes:  RFK Betrays/ICE Terrorizes Food Workers.

The Border Patrol and Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) division continue to kidnap, persecute and traffic hard working, law-abiding essential food supply chain workers for no just cause.

Now is the time for the grocery industry, including retail and CPG executives, essential workers, brand founders and Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) advocates to stand up against these flagrant violations of human rights, due process, civil liberties and just plain decency.

From the New York Times: Wilted Lettuce. Rotten Strawberries. Here’s What Happens When You Round Up Farmworkers. 

Bottom line, it isn’t easy for farmers and ranchers to replace farmworkers if they’re deported or don’t show up. These positions require experience, endurance and specialized knowledge; as anyone who has worked on a farm will tell you, farm work is not unskilled labor.

From FoodPrint: How the current immigration crackdown is impacting food and farmworkers

Around 40 percent of farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented. The numbers are similar in many other parts of the food system, especially meatpacking, where undocumented immigrants fill an estimated 23 percent of jobs. ..For the most part, farmers supported the Trump administration in the election, with many believing the president’s claims that he would spare farmworkers from promised mass deportations, focusing instead on “dangerous criminals”….[But] ICE agents began aggressively targeting worksites, visiting farms and packing sites in California and a meatpacking plant in Nebraska on June 10. Those raids generated an immediate flurry of complaints from farmers and the food industry.

From Civil Eats: ICE Raids Target Workers on Farms and in Food Production: A Running List

Immigration enforcement actions at workplaces are likely to increase as the agencies attempt to meet new White House goals of 3,000 arrests per day. We are keeping a record of those actions here.

Here is Civil Eats’ list for August, with contact information for Lisa Held, who is keeping track of all this.

August 7, 2025 – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – ICE detains 16 workers during raids of two Mexican restaurants

August 8, 2025 – Woodburn, Oregon – ICE detains four immigrant farmworkers on their way to work at a blueberry farm

August 11, 2025 – Anchorage, Alaska – ICE officials arrest an asylum seeker outside sushi restaurant

August 14, 2025 – Kent, New York – ICE raids Lynn-Ette Farms—where United Farm Workers have been organizing— and detains seven workers

Want to send us a tip about immigration enforcement in your community? Email tracker@civileats.com or securely contact Lisa Held on Signal at @lisaelaineh.47. (Link to this post.)

Enjoy the Labor Day holiday, but then do what you can to make this stop.

At a glance across the country: Meatpacking plants closed at an unprecedented rate this year, accelerated by a number of factors such as rising livestock costs, workforce shortages, food safety violations and foodborne illnesses, and ongoing industry consolidation.

Here are some examples: of these and others:

• Tyson closes 3 meat plants, lays off 1K workers The food giant plans to shutter its 328,000-square-foot facility in Emporia, Kansas, as well as two cheesesteak factories in Philadelphia.
• Cargill cuts 5% of global workforce after profits decline The move, which will affect approximately 8,000 jobs, comes as the world’s largest private company plans to streamline operations in the face of lower crop prices and challenges in beef.
• Deere lays off more workers at Iowa tractor plant The cuts add to the thousands of jobs eliminated this year as the equipment maker reigns in production to offset a slowdown in demand.
• Butterball to shutter Arkansas turkey plant, lay off 180 workers: The closure adds to a wave of layoffs in the agriculture industry as weaker sales continue to hurt profits across the sector.

The last couple of years have seen lots of these.  It will be interesting to see what happens this year, especially with immigration “reform” looming on the horizon.  Pretty certain: food prices will rise. A lot.

A reader, Lynn Ripley, sent me a link to this article from the New York Times: What a Crackdown on Immigration Could Mean for Cheap Milk

What Peter does know, however, is that without foreign-born workers, his dairy could not stay afloat. Americans are understandably reluctant to perform dirty, dangerous and demanding work — what economists call 3-D jobs — as long as they have better alternatives. Unemployment in southern Idaho has averaged 3.4 percent for a decade; wages for entry-level workers on Peter’s farm are competitive with those for cashiers at fast-food franchises. He can’t pay much more, he insists, and still break even.

The issue for dairy farms is that the system is structured so the cost of production exceeds the price dairy farmers can get for their milk.

The problem, as Peter sees it, is that the price of everything in America has gone up except the price of milk. In the 1980s, a tractor cost him roughly $60,000, the federal minimum wage was $3.35 and his first hundred pounds of Class III milk — the kind used in making yogurt and cheese — sold to a processing plant for $12.24. Since then, many of his expenses have doubled or tripled. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Peter says, his costs soared, and they still haven’t come down. Fuel-tank fittings that cost him about $2,000 in 2014 now run $13,000. Mechanics who once charged $60 an hour now charge $95.

And one other problem: monopsony (market control by a single buyer).

So Peter, like almost every dairyman in the country, sells his milk through a co-op. Twice a day an insulated truck drains about 75,000 pounds of freshly pumped milk from his holding tanks. A couple of weeks later, Peter finds out what he will be paid in return.  “We’re not price makers,” Peter said. “We’re price takers.”

This system is not sustainable now, and it will be even less sustainable if the threatened roundup of immigrants takes place.

Dairy is not the only industry likely to be affected.  Think: farm work, meat packing plants, slaughter houses, back-of-the-house restaurant and foodservice work, house cleaning, childcare, eldercare, and all the other menial, low-wage jobs nobody else wants to do.

This system is not sustainable either.

Maybe Make America Healthy Again can take this on?

Gleissner P, Kashdan HE, eds.  Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis.  Rutgers University Press, 2023.   

I enjoyed reading this book and did a blurb for it:

Resilient Kitchens collects the deeply personal accounts of immigrant chefs, writers, and scholars of how their experience as “other” informed their use of food and cooking to stay centered during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Their stories are vastly different but all bear on why food matters to much to personal identity.

Rutgers University Press describes it this way:

Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis is a stimulating collection of essays about the lives of immigrants in the United States before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, told through the lens of food. It includes a vibrant mix of perspectives from professional food writers, restaurateurs, scholars, and activists, whose stories range from emotional reflections on hardship, loss, and resilience to journalistic investigations of racism in the American food system. Each contribution is accompanied by a recipe of special importance to the author, giving readers a taste of cuisines from around the world. Every essay is accompanied by gorgeous food photography, the authors’ snapshots of pandemic life, and hand-drawn illustrations by Filipino American artist Angelo Dolojan.

Contributions by Reem Kassis, Stephanie Jolly, Krishnendu Ray, Tien Nguyen, Bonnie Frumkin Morales, Mayukh Sen, Geetika Agrawal, Fernay McPherson, Antonio Tahhan, Sangeeta Lakhani, Keenan Dava, Tim Flores, Angelo Dolojan, Guillermina Gina Núñez-Mchiri, Harry Eli Kashdan, Philip Gleissner

TODAY on Zoom: 11:00 a.m.  Register here.

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I’m always fascinated by the food industry’s rationale for massive layoffs.

PepsiCo, for example.

It is planning to lay off hundreds of workers (see Washington Post announcement, and Food Navigator discussion).

The Wall Street Journal report’s Pepsi’s rationale:
PepsiCo Inc. PEP -0.37% is laying off workers at the headquarters of its North American snacks and beverages divisions, a signal that corporate belt-tightening is extending beyond tech and media, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal…In a memo sent to staff that was viewed by the Journal, PepsiCo told employees that the layoffs were intended “to simplify the organization so we can operate more efficiently.”

PepsiCo reported a 12% increase in revenues last year.

Its global revenues came close to $80 billion in 2021.

PepsiCo Beverages North America’s operating profit has recently decreased by 10%,

primarily reflecting certain operating cost increases, including incremental transportation costs, a 37-percentage-point impact of higher commodity costs and higher advertising and marketing expenses. These impacts were partially offset by net revenue growth and productivity savings.

It paid its CEO $25,506,607 in 2021.  This is 500 times more than the median employee salary of $52,000.

That’s how the system works.

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For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

Here’s a report worth reading:

For reasons of history—and, alas, racism—laws requiring minimum wages do not apply to restaurant workers, farm workers, and home employment workers, all mostly people of color.

This report focuses on restaurant workers who depend on tips:

Unique among pay inequities, the subminimum wage for tipped workers was an original pay gap created intentionally to deny Black women any wage at all, forcing them to live on tips. This original and intentional pay inequity has been compounded over the last 160 years since Emancipation by ongoing inequities in hiring by employers and tipping and harassment by customers — resulting in an unlivable situation for Black women. The fact that Black women persist in the restaurant industry is a testament to many of these workers’ pride in their work as hospitality professionals who deserve to be remunerated as such.

The report offers three key findings:

• Black women in the industry continue to earn less than white men.
• Black women are more likely to not earn enough tips to bring them to the minimum wage, and more likely to experience customer harassment.
• Black women are leaving the industry, but are more resilient than others.

It presents data arguing for having minimum wage laws apply to all workers.  Seven states have passed such laws; the rest need to.

The Immigrant Council has issued this report.  It’s a useful introduction to the role of immigrants in animal agriculture and issues related to the entire system.

The Key Findings:

• Even before the pandemic, the meat and dairy industries struggled to hire enough workers: The current national labor shortage has worsened the problem, and it’s causing meat and dairy prices to rise between 4.5 and 7.0 percent.
• These price increases are due in part to higher wages employers must offer to attract workers: From 2019 to 2022, the median wage for meat and dairy industry workers* increased 33.7 percent. from $14.95 to $20.00 per hour. This far outpaces U.S. median wage which increased from $20.11 to $21.51 per hour, or 7.4 percent during the same period.
• Transportation plays a vital role in the production and pricing of meat and dairy products: Since the start of the pandemic, advertised wages for meat and dairy truck drivers have increased nearly 40 percent due to high demand3. Already, one in four of the industries’ truck drivers are immigrants.
• Foreign-born workers are essential to America’s food supply: As many workers —both U.S.- and foreign-born —reach retirement age and leave the workforce, the meat and dairy industries will be increasingly hard-pressed to find enough workers. While meat and dairy employers rely on the H-2A and H-2B visa programs to fill jobs with temporary foreign workers, these visa programs are seasonal and do not meet the needs of what are non-seasonal industries.

The report is full of nicely illustrated facts and figures.

Lots of interesting material here.  It’s worth a look.

Benjamin Lorr.  The Secret Life of Groceries: the Dark Miracle of the American supermarket.  Avery/Penguin Random House, 2020.

I don’t know how I missed this one when it came out in mid-2020, but I did.*

I saw a reference to it and thought I ought to take a look, largely because I am gearing up to update my book, What to Eat, in a second edition for Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux.

My book, which first appeared in 2006, is about food issues, using supermarkets as an organizing device.

Lorr’s book, which I expected to be a superficial expose of supermarkets, is anything but.

It is a deep, detailed, personal, and utterly powerful indictment of the human rights violations perpetrated on workers in grocery supply chains: truckers, grocery store clerks, Thai workers on shrimp-catching boats.

The personal comes in because Lorr is an experiential immersion journalist.  He embedded himself with a trucker, the fish section of a Whole Foods market, and a Thai fishing boat, as well as spending several years doing interviews.  Using the personal stories, he has plenty to say about truly shameless exploitation of low-wage workers in order to keep food costs low.

If you want to understand what low-wage work—or the Great Resignation—is about, here’s an excellent place to start.

This is an important book about food labor issues, but also about how more general systems of exploitation are maintained.

The “more general” leads me to pick one bone with Lorr’s analysis.

For those of us, he says:

Who want to shake the world aware to the fact that we are literally sustaining ourselves on misery, who want to reform, I very much don’t want to dissuade you so much as I want you to consider that any solution with come from outside our food system, so far outside it that thinking about food is only a distraction from the real work to be done.

His book, I’d say, proves just the opposite.  Food is his entry point into this topic and would not be there without it.

*I shouldn’t have missed it.  It was reviewed in the New York Times.  And Charles Platkin, whose work I follow closely, interviewed Lorr when the book first came out.