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| ISSUE NO. 595 |
| This week's newsletter is the second in a series of essays from the Not Our Farm project in solidarity with Good Food Jobs and the raise to $15 per hour minimum wage for workers in our job listings. You can read the first essay in this series here. FOR JUST SHY OF TEN YEARS . . . I have considered myself part of a community of small scale, organic vegetable farmers. Always as a worker, never a farm owner. I have worked on farms in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Montana, California, and my home state of Pennsylvania, starting as an intern and working my way up to management. I loved nearly everything about farming: being outside, seeing my hard work come to real fruition, feeling a strong sense of accomplishment in my work, meeting new people, experiencing different communities and cultures, building important working relationships and lasting friendships, learning new methodology, new soil types, new geology. It was fascinating and exciting to me. What I didn’t love, it turned out, was the exploitation I faced on all but one of the farms I worked for. The longer I stayed in the game, the more unwilling I became to put my body on the line for people paying me minimum wage or worse. Working for farmers intentionally hiring the smallest possible staff they could, and then attempting to manipulate and coerce the crew they did hire into working longer and longer hours (with no overtime pay) to get the work done. Listening to other farm owners joking when they saw the herb garden I had in front of my house, that “if they have time enough to have a garden you’re not working them hard enough.” Working for farmers who screamed at and belittled their crew, who ignored basic safety measures, who provided no bathroom and scant lunch breaks, who vacationed in Baja every winter while paying us $9/hour. This isn’t even mentioning the rampant and often violent transphobia and sexual harassment I faced on several farms. Eventually I started to push back - to set boundaries with my employers, and refuse to do things that were unsafe, or that compromised my quality of life and mental health. This made me very unpopular with farm owners, who labeled me as someone who was “not a team player”. It didn’t help when I pointed out that we were not, in fact, a team - that I was an employee and they were an employer and that we did not share the same vested interest in the farm's success. At the end of the day, I was making less than a living wage, no benefits, and living in company owned housing which often didn’t even include running water or electricity. I was miserable and it felt like all the joy I experienced when I first started farming had been sucked out of it and replaced with just a grinding, never ending labor where I had no dignity, no respect, and no upward motion. There was no way I’d ever make enough money to have the capital to start my own farm. I stayed hopeful though. I wrote out a long list of interview questions to vet farmers, I requested references from prospective employers, convinced that I just needed to find the right farmer, that there had to be other people who were treating their workers with respect. I took a job on a worker owned cooperative farm and was paid a stipend and given “housing” (an old job trailer with no running water, electricity, or a working door) and told that at the end of the season, all the workers would receive an equal pay out of everything we had made for the year. Things were going pretty good until late July, when I fell out of the back of a parked pickup truck and was severely injured. The cooperative members then lied to me about having workers' compensation (which they were legally required to have) and attempted to get me to commit insurance fraud. On top of this they refused to pay me for any of the work I had done since arriving. This experience was devastating, not just because of the injury, but because I felt I had finally found a place where I would be respected, and paid fairly for my labor, and it felt as though that hope was finally, completely crushed. I stopped farming, and for three years now I haven’t taken a farm job. I can’t afford to - financially, emotionally or physically. The exploitation and mistreatment I experienced in almost a decade of farming turned the greatest joy of my life - something I thought I’d do forever - into something that made me miserable. My story is not isolated, I’m just one of many who happens to be lucky enough to have a platform to speak about these things. I know a lot of farm workers, some who have become farm owners now, and not one of them has gotten through unscathed. The way that I’ve been cared for by my fellow farm workers and the ways I’ve been able to care for them is the only thing that kept me farming as long as I did. I think Good Food Jobs raising their pay requirement to $15 an hour is an excellent start towards a more just food system. I also think it’s only one piece of a much larger puzzle. Danni Simonik |
tidbits...resources on anti-racism, environmentalism and food culture AKA stuff we're reading / listening to / watching / noticing / thinking about / captivated by this Tuesday . . . |
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