has a policy shift that we made at GFJ felt like more of a battle than the decision not to post any positions that do not pay minimum wage or better.

As we have discussed in numerous recent newsletters, starting back in August 2020 when we made this stance on wages official, it is most certainly a complex and nuanced issue. But today we are going to the heart of it, to the center of the knowing place from which we based our decision. 

What is 'the knowing place' we're referring to? Some call it instinct, some call it spirit, some call it the gut. Others may simply call it the heart. (A couple of weeks ago, I took some time at the end of a long day to listen closely to a series of podcasts that Oprah put out on Super Soul Conversations, and the first episode is a great primer on what someone might mean by 'spirit'.)

Now, the important thing about the heart, or spirit, or instinct, is that each of us has our own connection to it. We bring it up not to claim that our sense of knowing is any better or more 'right' than anyone else's, only that we believe in listening to that sense of knowing as a personal and a professional source of guidance. It may not surprise you that we believe emotion is a foundational element of our work, and that business is personal. 

When we got down to the heart of why we had allowed unpaid or low paid or non-monetary payment (such as food and housing) for so long as part of the definition of GFJ - for what are we if not the jobs that we post and promote? - we realized that the continuation of our original goal in posting as many jobs as possible was lately being driven by fear. Fear that if we did not strike the proper balance, we would be leaving out important jobs, letting down hard working employers, and failing job seekers. 

Interestingly, since we made this switch, we have felt intense swells of joy and inspiration when we approve jobs each day (as at least someone on our three-woman team does every 24 hours) and know that they are all paid positions.

Interestingly, we are actively declining to post jobs that don't meet our policy on an almost daily basis, yet the number of jobs posted on GFJ continues to climb back up from the 50% decline we saw after the first wave of the pandemic in March 2020.  

Yet we are also weary. The amount of pushback we receive about how our policy is misguided, backward, or shallow, is also now part of our daily work. We are not ungrateful for or unwelcoming of the discourse, for it is always an opportunity to learn and connect. But we do spend a lot of energy on these conversations, and a lot of energy offline, thinking and talking and ruminating on why there is such resistance to paying folks a decent wage. 

Why is our shift in policy, as a small, niche company, resulting in such defiance? Is it because change is (insert expletive of choice here) hard? Is it because we used to allow different options, and now we have narrowed them, pulling the picnic blanket, so to say, out from underneath folks? Is it because taking a stance on something for reasons of social justice and antiracism automatically provokes defensiveness in many White folks who feel as if it is a judgment on their personal character? Or is it because we are a team of women who have in the past always been accommodating and ingratiating, and now we are actively choosing to tell people what they do not want to hear? 

Perhaps that last question is also a clue as to why it feels so taxing for us, at times. But the source of strength is in the knowing: that paying people for their work is the human thing to do. That the deprivation of wages has been and continues to be a tool of racism, oppression and dehumanization. And that, in the words of a newsletter reader who shared an unforgettable perspective with us last summer, "Labor creates all wealth and should be compensated."

We are sharing these thoughts today because we believe in transparency, and it's our hope that the process we are going through will help illuminate or inspire others. It will also, undoubtedly, make some folks mad. But we are mad, too, sometimes, and we're really mad about the injustices present in our home country, and we're taking it personally, and we must admit: we hope you do, too. 

As Julia Cameron writes in The Artist's Way, a wonderful testimony to the importance of emotion and knowing in your daily life, "Anger is a map. Anger shows us what our boundaries are. Anger shows us where we want to go. It lets us see where we’ve been and lets us know when we haven’t liked it…Anger is a tool, not a master. Anger is meant to be tapped into and drawn upon."

Next week we look forward to focusing on some of the bigger questions of why wages are so devalued, especially in farm labor, and what some potential solutions may be (even if they seem out of reach at this precise moment).

Yours in food, justice, and food justice,

Tay + Dor

photo by Alexa Romano