The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how an economic system dependent on low-wage labor creates as many issues as it purports to solve. When profit determines every outcome of social and economic life, working people lose. This reality is on full display in our food system. The novel coronavirus and our food economy are bound together in every regard. As a result, the social and economic aftermath of the virus will have grave implications for our food system—particularly for the workers who keep it in operation. However, as made increasingly evident by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is labor that keeps our food system going. CEOs may keep their salaries and self-isolate in their homes, but it is workers from grocery stores to farm fields who have been revealed to be truly essential. By leveraging their power in a time where the entire country is looking to them for survival, food workers can build the movements that will improve their working conditions well into the future. These changes are not only necessary; they benefit us all.
Free market Food Systems and Exploited Labor
Our capitalist model of food production promotes the low wages that characterize the US labor market, and render American wage workers exceptionally vulnerable to the economic and social effects of pandemics. Since the late 1970s, unmitigated deference to the interests of the market on the part of politicians and policymakers have created the conditions for the disastrous fallout currently on display. Before the virus came roaring onto the scene, 78% of American workers were already in crisis, living paycheck to paycheck, and around 12% were already food insecure. Rev. William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, recently pointed out that “The underlying disease… is poverty, which was killing nearly 700 of us every day in the world’s wealthiest country, long before anyone had heard of COVID-19.”
The free market, profit-driven structure of our global food system depends on keeping labor costs low, resulting in companies continuously exploiting workers and denying them basic rights and protections. In these conditions, the production of lucrative commodities will always come before ecological and human health, enriching the privileged elite at the expense of the rest of us. As long as we allow the “free market” (code for corporations, shareholders, and billionaires) to dictate what is and is not tenable for our food system’s workers, the exploitation of human labor will persevere.
The conditions for such exploitation did not emerge naturally. They were created through market-driven policy. When the Federal Reserve introduced draconian monetary policy in 1979, dramatically increasing interest rates (known as the Volcker Shock) to bring down inflation, it greatly weakened labor’s power in the process. The fallout intensified the recession of the 1970s, shuttered industries, and essentially put a halt to the labor militancy that marked the previous decades, as many workers viscerally feared job losses. The subsequent free trade policies and deregulation of industries that marked the next 30 years rapidly drove down union participation. The US food system would end up mirroring the rest of the economy. Processing, warehousing, and retail in the food sector would be transformed by these new economic policies, depressing wages and conditions. New, non-union corporations came to dominate the food system landscape, effectively undermining unionized labor forces. Low wages, debt, and few benefits became commonplace for many working people. Inequality skyrocketed, shifting enormous amounts of power from the working class towards the top, eroding infrastructure and weakening democracy…. https://foodfirst.org/
Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement 