Suffolk Closeup: Harvest of Shame redux

Locally grown food from small farms, an alternative to food from “factory farms,” has become, thankfully, popular across the United States and here in Suffolk County.

But there’s an issue not being addressed, charges a Long Island professor: the lives and working conditions of those who labor to bring locally grown food to our tables.

“Food movement advocates and consumers, driven to forge alternatives to industrial agribusinesses, have neglected the labor economy that underpins ‘local’ food production,” writes Margaret Gray, a professor of political science at Adelphi University  in “Labor and the Locavore,” her just-published book from the University of California Press.

Thus, the call “to ‘buy local” promotes public health at the expense of protecting the well-being of the farmworkers who grow and harvest the much-coveted produce on regional farms.

When it comes to factory farms, the public has recognized the exploitation of workers. But the role of hired labor on small operations has been overlooked.

“Small farms,” she writes, “like their factory farm counterparts, are largely staffed by noncitizens, immigrant workers.” But the prevailing mentality within the alternative food movement has not absorbed that reality.

Food advocates display a tendency, Ms. Gray maintains, to conflate buzz words such as “local,” “alternative” and “sustainable” as virtues missing from the factory farm, and they correctly demonize large agri-businesses. But by doing so, she writes, it obscures close scrutiny of what’s going on at so-called “family farms.”

The situation for farmworkers has long been a scandal in the United States. The great journalist, Edward R. Murrow, did one of his most important TV documentaries, “Harvest of Shame,” about the plight of migrant farmworkers. Pointedly broadcast on Thanksgiving Day, 1961, it exposed the conditions for, as Murrow said, the “humans who harvest the food for the best-fed people in the world.”

Paid outrageously small sums, exploited by crew leaders who recruited them, housed in awful dwellings, they worked in conditions similar to sweat shops. Murrow stressed that laws that protected other workers specifically excluded farmworkers.

Suffolk County had a prominent place in “Harvest of Shame” with a migrant camp in Cutchogue, now closed, featured along with a section of Riverhead where, the documentary related, migrant farmworkers who escaped the migrant stream settled.

Back then, most of the farmworkers in Suffolk and elsewhere on the East Coast were black. “From World War II through the early 1970s, the vast majority of migrant [farm]workers in New York were African Americans from the South,” writes Ms. Gray. Then in the 1980s, Latinos became the dominant force in the agricultural labor market.

The farming picture in Suffolk has changed dramatically as the county, although staying the state’s top agricultural county, has shifted to growing wine grapes at vineyards and nursery stock, especially ornamentals, plus fruits and vegetables.

Yet farmworkers here, as well as statewide and nationally, remain largely unprotected by law. Long Island Jobs with Justice, a Hauppauge-based organization, noted that farmworkers are excluded from basic labor law protections, including minimum wage requirements, overtime and the right to organize.

A “Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act” has been considered by the New York State Legislature. It would establish an eight-hour workday for farmworkers, allow them overtime pay after eight hours, provide one day a week of rest, require they be paid the minimum wage, have the right to organize and bargain collectively, ensure their housing meets sanitary code standards, provide them with unemployment pay if laid off or fired and allow them to receive disability benefits.

Ms. Gray believes that communities should support local farms, while at the same time building “a food movement that incorporates workers.”