Agricultural Exceptionalism: A Call To End Slavery (Again)

Imagine how much an apple would cost if it weren’t subsidized by slave labor.

Thanks to agricultural exceptionalism, you don’t have to.

The labor movement of the early 19th century ushered in a new era of federal protections for workers across the United States. With the most prominent piece of legislation, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) 1938 that established many pro-worker provisions such as minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor laws. While the FLSA was guaranteeing the rights of industrial workers, southern agricultural interests and systemic racism were working hand and hand to prevent black sharecroppers from the benefits of the New Deal and thus the foundations of agricultural exceptionalism were cemented into the backbone of the American agricultural industry. 

The lack of federal-level protections for agricultural workers has alienated them into one of the most vulnerable social and economic groups throughout history. When left in the care of the states to provide adequate labor laws such as minimum wage, overtime, rest periods and meals periods, not all are ensured these rights. States such as Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina have no standards for any of the aforementioned labor protections. Furthermore, there are exemptions related to “man days” (a “man day” is defined as any day where an employee works an hour or more), relatives working on the farm, those principally engaged in the production of livestock, and others. With this number of exemptions for agriculture, not only are these workers performing difficult and potentially dangerous jobs, but they are also getting paid under the legal wage to do so. Perhaps the most insidious aspect of this all is that these workers are also exempt from the National Labor Relations Act 1935, which meant they had no protections for unionizing.

Not only have states failed to protect adult agriculture workers, it has also opened up the use of exploitative child labor. Per the FLSA, children as young as 12 years old can legally work on large farms for unlimited hours while there is no age limit for a child to work on smaller operations. At the age of 16, children can perform jobs deemed to be particularly hazardous. These hazardous conditions have contributed a total of 4,700 injuries to children working in the agricultural sector a year between 2012 to 2014 and is the direct cause of 237 of 452 work-related deaths of children from 2003 to 2016. A clear indication that the sweeping reform must be made to protect workers in this industry as agricultural workers only constitutes 5.5% of all children working.

With such glaring holes in our protections of the workers providing us with sustenance for our survival, why has there been such little movement in the efforts to secure more rights for these workers? Simply put, agricultural exceptionalism targets the most marginalized groups of the time period. Birthed from the desire to preserve the status quo of Southern plantation life in a post-slavery America that disenfranchised black sharecroppers until the 1960s, agricultural exceptionalism takes advantage of the misconceptions about a particular group held by society. Another instance is the exploitation of the Chinese immigrants on the West Coast who eventually accounted for 75% of California’s agriculture workforce until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred further Chinese Immigration. When the employers were no longer able to exploit the Chinese for the labor, the Japanese were encouraged to come to America. Eventually they entered the same role as their Chinese predecessors until workers organized and demanded higher wages. Employers had no objections to the informal agreement between the United States and Japan to cease immigration. 

To this day, agricultural exceptionalism continues its assault on marginalized groups of people. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), implemented in 1994, helped to create a new sector of marginalized workers primarily from Mexico and Central America. NAFTA required Mexico to allow subsidized food from the United States while simultaneously eliminating Mexican farmers’ subsidies. When cheap corn from Canada and the United States was introduced to the Mexican markets, local farmers could not compete and many lost their land. At the same time, a rise in low-wage industrialized jobs on par with those found in Southeast Asia and China, made finding agricultural work in Mexico like finding water in a famine and forcing many of these workers to illegally migrate to America and a new, cheap, and easily exploitable workforce was created.

For those who can look at the lack of protections within the agricultural industry as well as it’s targeted exploitation of marginalized groups and call it modern-day slavery would be absolutely correct. Many sectors of work can be called slavery, but agricultural work specifically is more subject to this seemingly exaggerated claim due to both the number people who depend on agriculture and the demographic who it exploits the most: undocumented immigrants. Undocumented immigrants oftentimes find themselves trapped in a system that incentivizes their literal enslavement. As aforementioned, the labor laws related to agriculture are horrendous, allowing for an economic environment in which natural born citizens may not wish to venture. The work is hard, and the pay is low. Immigrants are taken advantage of because they may not see a better life in their home countries and understand that reporting their employers’ wrongdoings could result in them returning there. This is knowledge these agricultural companies exploit, and this allows them to take advantage of immigrants through various types of assault, including verbal, physical, and sexual.

This is not a matter of making one guilty about their consumption but an effort to illuminate the truth about the agricultural industry and who suffers the most from it. Being an ally to undocumented immigrants is merely performative if one does not care about ending these atrocities. One can not be naive in this so-called age of information to not see how their food choices directly correlate to the suffering of others. Denouncing the ethics of vegans for instance because their diet solely constitutes the consumption of plants is a myth to comfort you and prevents you from confronting the consequence of your own choices. In reality, the responsibility of securing better conditions for these workers rests on all our shoulders. We often find ourselves in the throes of defending a particular way of eating because of its less exploitative nature yet we must be aware that agriculture is essential for all of us to survive and we need to support, ensure the safety and stand in solidarity with these workers through boycotts, reform, or even revolution.