That said, there are still things he is uneasy about — for instance, the fact that his farm only provides short windows of seasonal work. As a result, he’s unable to provide year-round employment and health insurance. He can imagine creative solutions, though — like a fund that he and other farmers could pay into to cover worker health care in proportion to the number of labor hours they hire each season, or establishing a “crew-share” system among a group of farmers who together could create year-round employment for workers.
But he’s discovered that these kinds of ideas don’t always fly with other farmers when he brings union labor into the conversation. “The thing is, a lot of farmers see the unions as the enemy,” he explains. “Maybe it’s an ingrained thing — don’t give an inch or you’ll have to give a mile.”
Cheap Labor = Cheap Food
Bronec’s observation about the stereotypical antagonism between farmers and farmworker unions is something that Ramón Ramirez, the head of PCUN, believes is tied directly to the economics of farming. “Growers and farmworkers need to work together. The bottom line is that a lot of farmers can’t make it — the way they’re compensated is totally out of whack. We need to see more money going to growers and trickling down to workers,” he insists. “At the end of the day, there has to be recognition that we’re not paying enough for food.”
The idea that food should be more expensive flies in the face of decades of U.S. farm policy engineered to make America’s food the cheapest in the world, relative to income. Americans spend a smaller percentage of our paycheck on food than any other nation on earth, ever, even with the recent jump in prices for staples like bread, milk, and eggs. In 1900, it was 60% of our income; today that number is closer to 8%, at the same time that the English spend 14%, the Japanese 20%, the Indians and Chinese 50%, and an even greater fraction in developing nations. And of every dollar that is spent on food in Oregon, only about 20 cents makes it back into the farmer’s pocket to then trickle down to farmworkers, berry by berry, row by row. Cheap food rests on the back of cheap labor.
