Workers' rights Archives - Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

Fair Food is about Fair Work by Emma Kerin, National Union of Workers

June 13, 2016 by Food Sovereignty

The Fair Food campaign is being run and led by workers in the fresh food supply chain who are members of the National Union of Workers (NUW).

Thousands of workers in warehouses that supply to the major supermarkets are long-time members of the NUW. As a result, it is common practice that workers in this section of the supply chain have access to safe workplaces, living wages and decent conditions.

Unfortunately this is not what we are seeing at large numbers of workplaces where workers are producing the fruit and vegetables that are transported through the supply chain to Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and IGA Metcash.

The NUW is frequently confronted with small contractors who underpay, intimidate and steal from produce workers. At other very large facilities workers remain on the minimum wage without any chance to have a say about their pay and conditions, while the corporations they work directly for turn over millions every year and have a massive share in the market.

Workers are standing up and declaring things need to change. Workers in regional communities should have the right to decent jobs. From the glasshouse and packing shed, to the warehouses and cold stores and into the supermarkets, workers are organising for secure jobs to support their families and participate in their communities.

Up against the might and economic power of the two major supermarkets, many workers and producers understand that cooperation and support must underpin a new conversation about what is sustainable and what is fair.

Find out more about the Fair Food campaign for workers at http://www.fairfoodaustralia.org

April 17, a Day to Remember the Life and Death Struggle for Land

April 16, 2016 by Food Sovereignty

April 17, a Day to Remember the Life and Death Struggle for Land

A day that brings millions of farmers and agricultural workers together in solidarity against corporate greed gains even starker relevance this week with the murders of rural workers Vilmar Bordim and Leomar Bhorbak in the state of Quedas do Iguaçu in the state of Paraná in southern Brazil.

Bordim and Bhorbak, members of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), were living with their wives, children and 1,500 other families in an encampment on the Rio Dos Cobras estate on lands allocated, by law, to agrarian reform. Security guards of the Araupel logging company, previously exposed for falsifying land titles, ambushed the men, who were shot while retreating.

This follows the March assassination of human rights defender and environmental activist Berta Cáceres in Honduras. Cáceres was gunned down in her home despite being given ‘special protection’ by local authorities after receiving death threats for leading protests against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric scheme.

Unfortunately these names will join those of hundreds killed in resistance against corporate land and resource grabbing in this century alone.

For the international farmers’ movement La Via Campesina April 17 is an occasion to recognise those who have died in these very struggles. On this day, in 1996, 19 other members of MST were killed in Eldorado do Carajas, Brazil, while fighting for land and justice.

Violence against protesters and human rights defenders is familiar to Brazilians and the MST is at the forefront of these conflicts. Between 1985 and 2006 nearly 1,500 land reform activists and peasant farmers, including children, were killed in rural conflicts. Only 8 per cent of cases have ever been brought to trial.

In a country of unrivalled inequality, those who live in the countryside are the most affected. One per cent of landowners control 45 per cent of farmland, a legacy of the large land grants or sesmarias to privileged Portugese families and the institutions of slavery in the colonial era.

In the mid-1990s MST started targeting large global corporations to protest their growing influence in the countryside. Recognising a new set of obstacles to land reform, particularly the green deserts of monoculture, the movement gained some powerful enemies with transnational reach and influence.

In drawing attention to the negative impacts of the industrialised food system on small-scale agriculture April 17 becomes more than a day to remember those who have died fighting for their right to land.

La Via Campesina’s central message is the importance of food sovereignty – the right of nations to decide their own agricultural production regimes, with priority to local production and consumption.

Their argument is that food is not a commodity that should be traded lightly and without regard for the livelihoods of those who produce it.

They attribute the crippling hunger of close to 1 billion people to the domination of the global food system by corporate agri-business and an unjust international trade regime that makes small-scale agriculture unprofitable and unsustainable.

AFSA Statement on International Day of Peasant and Farmer Struggle

As members of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), we recognise that the global industrial food system is rooted in structural injustice. We recognise the urgency and responsibility to confront the widespread influence of corporate agribusiness and transnational corporations, many of which are strongly supported by our governments. We reject this dominance by corporations that often comes with political support for repressive and anti-democratic regimes. Within Australia, we denounce the devastating policies that have led to the dispossession of land of the Indigenous people and the violation of the right to healthy and affordable food for the 1.2 million Australians who are food insecure. We work to build solidarity with these communities, and those who feed them through ethical and ecologically sound farming, in Australia and across the world.

Action needed now to stop farm labour exploitation

June 29, 2015 by Russ Grayson

Story and photos by Russ Grayson, June 2015

IN HER ARTICLE on the website of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, following the ABC TV 4 Corners revelations of 417 visa holders being exploited by unscrupulous labour hire companies and farmers, Tammi Jonas, herself a farmer, calls for a reform of the foodchain to end the degrading conditions that the working visa holders are exploited under.

This is exactly what is needed. And as Tammi writes, Australia’s supermarket duopoly is implicated as guilty parties in this unAustralian exploitation of labour.

The Buckminster Fuller quote Tammi cites — about building a new system to replace the existing rather than just merely opposing it — is what fair food farmers, innovative food distributors like Brisbane Food Connect and Sydney’s Ooooby, and urban eaters enacting their free choice of food product are doing.

All of the systems reform Tammi calls for is clearly necessary — as is a government inquiry of some sort. But because these take time, exploitation could well continue in the meantime. Logically and morally it must be stopped and doing that calls for immediate and assertive action.

Disrupt, then replace

As Bucky said all those decades ago, when you want to change a system you need to invent a new model that will replace it. Often, the genes of the new are present in the body of the old — they are the ideas, the social movements, the fair food networks that start life on the innovative edge, the social fringe, and move towards the middle where they give expression to the new systems that grows out of the old.

The program shone its bright, glaring light into the rotting, dark corners of labour market brokers and exploitative farmers. Disruption is under way but it needs to build impetus to continue and to push towards a better system, and supporting that is a fitting role for the fair food movement…

When we are dealing with something like the exploitation of visa labour by unethical labour hire companies and the farmers they serve, those farmers aware of the labour companies’ methods, change can be stimulated by disturbing the equilibrium of the system you wish to replace. You make its life uncomfortable, you shine a bright light into its darkest, hidden corners. You disrupt it.

The 4 Corners program started this and has demonstrated the great value of investigative journalism to a democracy. The program shone its bright, glaring light into the rotting, dark corners of labour market brokers and exploitative farmers. Disruption is under way but it needs to build impetus to continue and to push towards a better system, and supporting that is a fitting role for the fair food movement. Just as we clear a garden to disrupt it in readiness for the next crop, so we can disrupt corrupt farm labour market practices to trigger the process of change that leads to a better model, a model that is new and fair.

That disruption is an effective tactic for reform was demonstrated in the weeks after the 4 Corners program when online grocery delivery service, Aussie Farmers Direct, dumped one of its chicken suppliers although, according to the Weekly Times, it is retaining another chicken supplier implicated in the labour market scandal. The National Farmers Federation made a public statement saying that mistreating workers has no place on Australian farms. The Federation said that unscrupulour labour hire companies need to be tracked and scrutinised.

This disruption works best when it is immediate and continuous, and would ideally include forcing the exploitative labour hire companies and complicit farmers either into reform and transparency or out of business, and prosecuting them where guilty. This would disturb and disrupt the business and that, to my thinking, would be a good thing. It would create opportunity for those engaging in ethical labor relations and restore a good reputation to their industry.

Were it to be applied, pressure from fair food advocates would further destabilise a system that is based on what 4 Corners described as slave-like conditions. Doing this would seed the growth of a fairer system, just as vacant niches in an ecosystem are soon claimed by new, fitter species.

Smith said that government intervention is sometimes necessary: "especially when the object is to reduce poverty… When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable…"

Betraying the fair food market

Family farmers, small and especially innovative food distributors and the nation’s eaters are best served not by the quasi-monopoly of a grocery market controlled by the supermarket duopoly and its unscrupulous fellow travellers that engage in the alleged slave-like farm labour practices, but by a freed market. An open market, that is, freed from monopoly domination and unnecessary elements of government regulation, a market system open to all, a market where prices are set through the marketplace negotiation between producers and consumers — a relationship in which neither is the price setter.

Open markets were something championed by economic philosopher, Adam Smith. Despite being co-opted and misrepresented by apologists for the corporate market system, Smith said that government intervention is sometimes necessary: "especially when the object is to reduce poverty… When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters."

Smith’s words are relevant in the case of the 417 visa exploitation scandal.

I don’t know how we heed Smith to create a system where markets, working conditions and human opportunity coexist without a degrading exploitation, however I do know that forcing people to work in slave-like conditions is unAustralian and degrades the nation’s reputation. It betrays a fair market system and human rights. The time to disrupt and replace it is now.

[button_link url="https://afsa.org.au/blog/2015/05/08/system-change-needed/" target="" style="blue" title="" class="" id="" onclick="”]Read Tammi Jonas’ article[/button_link]

System change needed

May 8, 2015 by Nick Rose

Story by Tammi Jonas, President of AFSA, May 2015

Fair labour requires a fair food system

Most farmers work hard to grow food in a way that they believe is fair. They’re usually surprised and even hurt when someone suggests they’re exploiting natural resources, animals, or their workers.

Even with a bit of practice under my belt, my heart rate still increases when the vegan abolitionists call me unethical, a murderer and a profiteer. But then I breathe deeply and carry on solidly in the belief that what Stuart and I are doing at Jonai Farms & Meatsmiths is right.

Tammi with her 'Meat Grrls' at the Jonai Farms on-farm butchery and boning room

But what if the allegations can’t be dismissed as simply a contrary ethical position? It’s hard to acknowledge that your food might be unfair, but that’s the realisation farmers who are using unscrupulous labour-hire contractors are facing after last Monday’s expose on Four Corners.

If you haven’t seen the episode, it’s a grim look at what’s behind the Down Down and Cheap Cheap campaigns of the duopoly (Coles & Woolworths). Brutally long working hours, systemic underpayment and pay delays, and stories of verbal and sexual abuse abound amongst those interviewed. Young men and women on the 417 working visa weep at times as they tell their stories and share the hopelessness they feel at ever escaping systemic exploitation on Australian farms.

Labour-hire contractors are held up squarely to blame, with many farmers professing not to really know what the conditions are for the workers the contractors bring them. While there are a couple of farmers accused of being repeat offenders themselves, the picture we get is that most of these farmers have outsourced their human resources needs to independent contractors, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, this has led to a culture of exploitation by those keen to make an easy buck off the labour of others.

But while we may point fingers at labour-hire contractors, farmers, or the duopoly – all of which must bear some responsibility for the part they play – we should ask what are the structural issues here? It’s systems that create opportunities for such exploitation, and people then exploit systems.

We must question the orthodoxy of productivism and 'growth'

In a system that values growth and profit over people, animals, and soil, exploitation is a given. The reality is that multinationals are mining the land for a short-term gain, people are confining pigs and poultry in the ammonia of their own excrement in the name of efficiency, and others are exploiting vulnerable migrant workers to ensure there’s enough chicken on the Coles rotisserie to feed the insatiable hunger of our convenience culture.

There have been calls for a task force or a Royal Commission into the exploitation of migrant labour. Many (including me) encourage us to boycott the duopoly. These are worthy ideas, but where is the call to question the contemporary orthodoxy of growth? The industrial orthodoxy of productivism – grow more for less… if you can’t, you must not be efficient enough (if you can, what are you paying your workers, how is your soil, are your animals in sheds, and are you one of the majority of Australian farmers with off-farm income?). The government tells us we must export more, that the nation’s well being depends on growing markets overseas… but are we even feeding our own sufficiently?

As long as our governments are beholden to the coffers of miners, the major supermarkets, and growing our exports, we cannot systematically address the problems of exploitation – not of labourers, not of animals, and not of our precious soil.

We farmers need to be vigilant for fairness in our system at all times. When it comes to labour, that can be challenging, especially in more knowledge- & labour-intensive agroecological systems like those proliferating in the fair food farming movement.

Help us build the connected, fair food system

Buckminster Fuller famously said that “You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

The fair food movement is trying to do just this. We’re trying to grow food that is fair to soil, water, air, plants, animals, and people, and we’re doing it through connectedness. The old food system is killing us with its invisible ingredients, obscured animal welfare practices, and hidden social costs. The new system values transparency and connection, wholeness and wellness.

So while individually we can boycott some of the major culprits, we can’t fix the unfairness of our food system alone. Collectively we can work to protect the rights of workers on farms and elsewhere in the food system, and to improve the welfare of animals in agriculture, and to ensure our soils and water are nourished and regenerated. We can vote with our wallets every day, with our farming and hiring practices, and we can effect systemic change by joining the food sovereignty conversation to work together for a fair food future for Australia.