| If you work in an office, pesticides probably aren't your biggest health concern when going to work. In fact, you're probably far more harmed by spending a significant chunk of your week sitting on your tush in an office than you are by workplace pesticide exposure. But that is not true for our nation's farmworkers. And the more I think about it, the more fired up I get.
I just finished writing a piece on immigrant women in the food industry for Alternet, which will hopefully be up within the week. And, of course, pesticides are not the only hazard farmworkers face. Women are routinely sexually harassed and even assaulted, workers frequently receive paychecks that reflect less work than they've actually done (and less money than they've earned), and often the workers aren't even given the dignity of a bathroom. In my own state, California, workers have died of heat exhaustion after working in triple digit heat for hours without so much as a water break. And in addition to the illegal acts committed against farmworkers, there are the unfair laws that fail to give farmworkers the same protections that workers in every other industry receive. (For example, overtime pay or child labor laws.) |
| However, when we hear about these other issues, we know at once who the victims are. If you are signing a petition or attending a protest about unfair labor laws or the lack of bathrooms or drinking water in the fields, you're taking action because you care about the workers. But most of the time, when people take action against pesticides, they do so because of pesticide exposure to the eater or because of the environmental harm caused by pesticides. When we think about pesticides, we think about Silent Spring and about birds dying, or we think about buying organic food to ensure that we are not personally exposed to pesticides.
I share in the outrage for pesticide use that kills our wildlife and contaminates our natural resources, and I too buy organic to reduce my own pesticide exposure. Wildlife and eaters are victims of pesticide exposure too. But - as important as Bald Eagles and California Condors are - how can you compare them to the humans who are forced to work among pesticides daily? And, as important as it is to eat food free of pesticides, non-organic produce contains a mere fraction of the toxins farmworkers are exposed to on the job.
You might choose to buy the foods on the "Dirty Dozen" list organic, and maybe your budget gives you no choice but to buy non-organic versions of the "Clean Fifteen" - but just because a food itself does not contain pesticides does not mean that the worker who grew and harvested the fruit or vegetables was not exposed.
Case in point are bananas, which narrowly missed being in the Clean 15 by ranking 20th out of 49 fruits and vegetables tested for pesticides. Bananas are grown with lots of pesticides, in countries that often have less stringent pesticide regulations than the United States. There are well-documented cases of banana workers getting sick from the pesticides, in fact. But the banana's peel keeps most of the chemicals out of the banana itself, protecting the eater if not the workers.
As much as I would love to see the majority of Americans suddenly embrace agroecology and, in doing so, see the problems with industrial ag and all that goes with it, I know that isn't happening any time soon. But I find it much more troubling that people are not protesting (peacefully) in the streets against the dangerous working conditions forced upon the people who grow and harvest our food. We don't all have the scientific background to understand complex ecological issues, but we're all human, and we all know that it's wrong to force a human to work among toxic pesticides, suffering acute symptoms like headaches each day, and more long term chronic illnesses like cancer or giving birth to deformed babies as a result. I would like to think that, even with the current anti-immigrant climate, Americans would not dismiss this because the majority of those hurt by pesticides are Latinos.
Americans are entitled to safe and healthy workplaces, by U.S. law. In my state, California, a waiter's right to a safe and healthy workplace trumps a smokers right to smoke in a restaurant. If the restaurant owner wished to make some extra profit off of diners who like to smoke while they eat (or drink), that's too bad. Their right to profit is also trumped by their employees' rights to a safe and healthy workplace. Why doesn't the same law protect farmworkers as well?
This is an issue that I'd like to follow up on, but I fear that my own reporting on it cannot do it justice. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has a policy of letting the farmworkers speak for themselves instead of having others in the organization speak for them. And that's truly what's needed. We need the farmworkers themselves to be empowered to speak in front of Congress, to speak on TV, to tell the American people exactly where their food comes from and how the people who produce it pay in misery and suffering so that the rest of us can pay very little in cash. |
