High
clouds dim the heat and light this Labor Day morning as I sit down to write, a
good day for reflection. I am
celebrating this holiday by exerting my right to labor, even though it is
unpaid. Writing is what I do.
Many people are celebrating this day
by exerting their right to not labor. On
my brief jaunt between Exeter and Lindsay this morning I saw bicyclists coming
down off Rocky Hill, exhilarated by their exertions. Others will celebrate this right to not work
by going shopping, cashing in on the Labor Day sales, which have wiped out the
right to not work for hundreds of thousands of retail employees who might
rather be up at the lake with their friends or attending backyard barbecues. Thanks to our cultural tendency to celebrate
too much, hundreds of thousands of service employees like nurses, EMT’s,
rangers and police must also clock in.
Some will even get paid extra for it.
On my quick trip this morning I saw
many others exerting their right to work:
a farmer sitting in his pickup while running furrows in an old orange
grove; a farmworker towing a spray rig through rows of citrus; an irrigator on
a Kawasaki checking valves in baby mandarins.
A man I know is out near Ivanhoe installing a Blue-Tooth in a harvesting
rig for a large walnut grower whose family has been working all weekend getting
ready for the shakers. Walnut growers
all over our region are doing the same, their families and employees working
overtime. In farming the days are
determined by the progress of the crops, not the calendar. It’s part of the beauty of farming, if
occasionally also part of the grief.
But mostly my mind is contemplating
the larger issue of the right to labor at all.
I started this weekend being interviewed on KFCF’s radio program “Down
on the Farm” with Tom Willey. Tom is an
organic farmer in Madera who’s been laboring to feed folks decent food for 40
years, as well as generating programs that promote the small farmer and
sustainable agriculture. For the
interview I was joined by Dan O’Connell, a Ph.D. from Cornell who’s worked up farmland
conservation easements for Sequoia Riverlands Trust and American Farmland Trust
for years and helped start Fresno’s Food Commons. Dan has organized a speakers series on
sustainable ag this fall at the Reedley Peace Center, and the speakers include
some of the most important academics and community organizers who have
contributed to questions of social justice and environmental quality in our
food system for the last 80 years. The
interview with these two men tied up many threads and was mind-enhancing.
Then, reading Mark Arax’s phenomenal
essay “Phantoms in the fields” in yesterday’s Fresno Bee, the important link
between land and the right to labor became clear. Mark’s story went beyond journalism,
portraying the portion of the food system we inhabit locally in our
neighborhoods as well as our fields, our politics as well as our plantings.
What I saw in his verbal painting was how the right to labor, to earn a living,
is determined by the ownership of land.
It is a terrible irony that right now, as some celebrate last week’s
legislation increasing the number of hours of overtime pay farm laborers can
now receive, their jobs are being eliminated by farmers’ shifts in crops from
raisins to almonds, which is, essentially, a decision to mechanize. No crop is free of this shift, not even
olives. Both in the fields and the packinghouses, the landowners’ race is on to
replace men and women with machines.
Perhaps if we understood the “flood”
of immigrants from Mexico and points south as being driven by dispossession
from land on which people have labored for centuries, people coming here to
exert their right to labor somehow, some way, we might seek different
solutions. Until then, building a wall
is just an idea for Humpty Trumpty to sit on and make himself feel king-like. Keep watch for the inevitable.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a rural researcher who writes.
Thanks to Perla Soria for her educated interest in these issues. Send your labor rights ideas c/o P.O. Box
1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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