Get Involved|July: Food is Power
Migrant workers employed by Sakuma Bros. Farms organize outside of worker housing in Skagit Valley, Wash. (July 24, 2013, Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times).
“We cannot free ourselves until we feed ourselves.”
– Ericka Huggins, Black Panther leader and former political prisoner
This story is part of The Meaning of Food, Northwest Harvest’s yearlong exploration of food’s meaning in our lives and communities.
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It’s 3:00am when you wake up. You live in a boarding house with dozens of other migrant farmworkers. The sky is dark – it’s not yet dawn. You get dressed quickly and have a modest breakfast before catching a ride to the fields to work. You arrive on site around 5:00 or 6:00am. You begin to work. The sun is hot, nearly 87 degrees today. You wear a long-sleeved shirt and pants to protect yourself from the sun. You wear a bandana tied over your face to keep the swirls of dust out of your mouth.
It’s June – strawberry season. In April you pruned grape vines. In May you picked cherries. June is the time for berries. Harvesting strawberries is especially backbreaking work because you must double over to reach the sweet red fruits.
You’re paid for your labor by the box, not by the hour. You push to fill as many boxes as your body allows. You stop for a short while at 1:00 to eat your lunch and get some water from the cooler on the truck. You return to work. Your back aches as you bend down to collect the berries. You’re dehydrated. Your hands and feet are swollen.
By the end of your day, you’ve been working for ten hours and have picked six flats of strawberries per hour. Your employer pays you a piece rate of up to $2.20 per flat. Your entire day’s labor earns you approximately $132. You return home, feed yourself, your children, your ailing mother, and get ready to sleep. Tomorrow will be more of the same.
The food that graces our tables at home–fresh vegetables, vibrant fruits, hearty grains, and animal proteins–require a long line of human labor. Farmworkers are the backbone of the United States food system. Without them, the foods Americans are used to enjoying year-round would not be available and some of our favorite foods at the grocery store would disappear until they were in season again.
Yet the very people who make our food system possible—farm and agricultural workers—often struggle to feed themselves and their families.
Farmworkers and other food systems laborers face incredibly difficult, and sometimes dangerous, working conditions. They experience disproportionately high rates of food insecurity and often work without basic labor protections. Employers often harass or exploit laborers, knowing that many migrant communities are fearful of legal prosecution. For laborers who power the multi-billion-dollar agricultural sector in the United States, fair treatment is not guaranteed by law.
Migrant farmworkers experience higher rates of hunger due to low wages and a fear of applying for government programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as “food stamps”) or other public benefits, even though most migrants pay taxes to contribute to those benefits for others to use.
In 2022 America’s 10.9 million undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in taxes. That , included $19.5 billion in federal income taxes and $32.3 billion in federal payroll taxes. On a state and local level, undocumented immigrants contribute $37.3 billion in taxes, and in 40 of 50 states, they pay a higher effective state/local tax rate than the top 1% of households. The top 1% of highest-income households paid an average effective state/local tax of 7.2% in 2023, while the average undocumented immigrant paid a 10.1% effective tax rate to state/local governments.
While accurate numbers are hard to collect, some studies suggest that 47% – 82% of the nation’s farmworkers are food insecure. This rate is almost five to eight times higher than food insecurity in the general population. It is also three to five times higher than food insecurity among Hispanic households overall. Based on the estimated number of farmworkers, between 1.1 million and 1.9 million farmworkers and their family members, including children, do not know where their next meal will come from.
Farmworkers are disproportionately impacted by poverty: farmworkers are some of the lowest-paid workers in the United States, with average family incomes between $25,000 and $29,999 in 2020.
“We the Farm Workers of America, have tilled the soil, sown the seeds and harvested the crops. We have provided food in abundance for the people in the cities, and the nation and world but have not had sufficient food to feed our own children.”
— Preamble to the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) constitution
In response to decades of unfair economic, political, and social practices, farmworkers began to mobilize for their rights. In 1962, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), a predecessor of the United Farm Workers (UFW), was founded in Delano, California. Cesar Chávez, along with Dolores Huerta and other Chicano activists, defended the rights of farmworkers by employing nonviolent organizing tactics rooted in Catholic social teaching, Chicano identity, and civil rights rhetoric.
Through marches, national consumer boycotts, and fasts, the United Farm Workers union attracted national headlines, gained labor contracts with higher wages and improved working conditions, galvanizing the Chicano movement.
On September 8, 1965, over 800 Filipino farmworkers affiliated with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) struck ten grape vineyards around Delano, CA. Their demands? A raise both in their hourly wages, from $1.25 to $1.40, and in the piece rate (the pay a worker earned for each box of grapes packed). The strikers wanted the piece rate to go up from ten cents a box to twenty-five cents.
Larry Itliong and Ben Gines, two organizers with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, called for workers to strike – and strike they did. Inspired by the leadership of these workers, eight days after the Delano grape pickers declared a strike, the National Farm Workers Association followed suit.
September 16, 1965, Mexican Independence Day, the NFWA membership met to hold a strike vote. The NFWA membership voted overwhelmingly in favor of the strike, and within a few days, NFWA was picketing ten additional vineyards, in addition to the sites already targeted by AWOC.
The ongoing Black Freedom Struggle also provided both inspiration and allies to the farm workers. During the strike, organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), along with student activists from the Bay Area, arrived in Delano to offer support, drawing parallels between the Jim Crow South and rural California in the fight for racial justice.
From 1966 to 1970, the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC) carried out a successful international consumer boycott on Delano grapes by picketing outside of grocery stores across the U.S. and Canada, and spreading awareness about the movement in Europe. Subsequent boycotts and strikes against lettuce and strawberry growers occurred during the following years.
Strikes often led to law enforcement intervention, where farmworkers were beaten, jailed, or replaced by non-citizen laborers. Despite the violence they faced from the state and from their employers, farmworkers and organizers made significant strides in negotiating labor contracts providing improved wages and working conditions.
As Chávez and Huerta would say: “¡Viva la Causa!”
The fight for farmworker justice continues today, reminding us that true food security requires dignity and fair treatment for every person in our food system.
When we support farmworker rights, we acknowledge a fundamental truth: those who feed us deserve to be fed, and those who nourish our communities deserve to be nourished in return.
Asian Counseling and Referral Service [Seattle, WA]: Founded in 1973, Asian Counseling and Referral Service (ACRS) is a nonprofit organization advancing social justice and providing a broad array of programs for Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and other underserved communities in King County and beyond. ACRS serves immigrants, refugees, and American-born community members through programs including aging and adult services, mental health and chemical dependency treatment, citizenship and civic engagement, domestic violence survivor support, employment and job training, legal assistance, and emergency food and meal services. For over 50 years, ACRS has been dedicated to fostering safety, belonging, and opportunity for all. Each year, ACRS distributes around one million pounds of food to approximately 5,000 individuals and families in King County, providing culturally familiar and nutritious staples such as rice, tofu, soy milk, noodles, canned proteins, and produce.
El Centro de la Raza [Seattle, WA]: El Centro de la Raza (The Center for People of All Races), founded in 1972, is a social justice community-based organization that serves as a voice and a hub for the Latino/a community in Seattle and King County. El Centro provides short-term and long-term assistance to families, veterans, youth, and seniors. Services include an on-site food bank, senior programs, eviction prevention, and veteran services. They also have a community garden that helps provide food for their food bank, and gardening activities for their programs.
Grounded in community, El Centro de la Raza seeks to provide nutritious, culturally familiar foods to those who need them with dignity and respect. But, like many food justice organizations, they are seeing an increase in a demand for their services, just as resources and funding are eroding. Staff from El Centro say:
As we face significant challenges on two fronts (rising numbers of visitors to the food bank and the loss of federal support through the TEFAP program), the team at El Centro de la Raza is actively pursuing other sources of food to help meet the rising level of need in the community. Staff are applying for every grant opportunity we come across as well as building up a community-wide food drive program. Unfortunately, these challenges come at the same time as the walk-in cooler needing repairs, for which there is currently no room in the budget. While staff remain confident that we are moving in the right direction, it may become necessary to take a step back before we can take two steps forward. In May, we had the most visitors at our food bank in a single month: 3,223 (the previous high was 2,805). As cuts to food bank funding and SNAP benefits go into effect, we expect that number to continue to rise.
El Centro de la Raza has sought to serve and empower all who they reach to learn from each other and join forces in the movement for social change. Building the Beloved Community (“Beloved Community,” a term popularized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., describes the vision for a society based on justice, equal opportunity, and love of one’s fellow human beings), dismantling systemic racism, and ending poverty are at the core of El Centro de la Raza’s mission. They believe that it is not the individual’s fault that they live in poverty and need assistance, but rather that systemic oppression denies marginalized people the basic resources we ALL need to thrive.
We agree – hunger isn’t an absence of food, it’s an absence of justice.
World Relief Spokane [Spokane, WA]: World Relief Spokane, a global faith-based humanitarian organization, provides services to assist newly arrived immigrant and refugee families in the United States. In the last 30 years, World Relief Spokane has resettled over 11,000 refugees. They are a proud member of a national network through which over 500,000 immigrants and refugees have been welcomed to the United States. World Relief Spokane’s programs help migrant families secure housing, access basic necessities, get their children enrolled in school, apply for jobs, receive ongoing career counseling, and get support with case management. Many of the staff are immigrants themselves and center the unique needs and solutions of migrant communities through community-driven leadership. World Relief Spokane believes refugees and other immigrants are vital to the flourishing of our country and community. They believe in the transformation of the whole person – mind, body, and spirit – which is why they focus on addressing the root causes of poverty, vulnerability, and injustice. To provide a truly welcoming community, immigrants must be empowered and supported in reestablishing their lives and honoring their right to self-determination.
Farmworkers and other food systems laborers face incredibly difficult, and sometimes dangerous, working conditions so that we can have food on our table. What’s a food you’re grateful for, and how do you honor the people who brought it to your table?
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More on the history of farmworker resistance:
