The Right to Labor

Published Sept. 7, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     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.

Earth and Heaven

Published Dec. 24, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     For the past month, as the days have marched quietly toward the Solstice and the Manger, I’ve been reading two experts on the relationship between earth and heaven to keep me centered on the realities of this season.


     Eugene Peterson, a Presbyterian pastor and scholar who translated the Bible into contemporary language in The Message, has a book of daily reflections called Living the Message.  The December 15th entry was particularly meaningful for me, because he wrote about the importance to his family of the book by Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It.  He said they loved it because “it gave dignity and a sense of holiness to our place, a place that was home to us....We already knew it was a holy place, but the book confirmed and deepened our reverence.  The book functioned as a shrine, calling attention to this place:  this is holy ground -- worship God here.”


     Walter Brueggemann, also a Presbyterian and theologian who wrote The Land:  Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith in 1977 (reissued in 2002 in an expanded second edition,) has become the grandfather of a growing movement in land theology.  Briefly, he has reinterpreted the Old Testament message from a placeless chronicle of God’s acts in history to one of “storied place” in which the main theme becomes the covenant with God in the land (a state of landed-ness) and the movements to and from land-less-ness when God’s people weren’t holding up their end in covenant.  The refocus of the connection between God and Earth is radical, but heaven-sent.  It’s a window on a new faith relationship with land and place which is long overdue.


     In this season we’re keenly aware of the journey of Joseph and pregnant Mary from their rural home village, Nazareth, to Bethlehem.  And it’s not because they had better hospitals in Bethlehem, but so that they could be counted and taxed for the new cities the Roman Caesar was building in their country with the complicity of the Jewish priests and King Herod.  In effect, Joseph and Mary and the majority of the Jewish people were in exile in their own country, occupied by urban foreigners who extracted the wealth of the land through the fingers of the rural peasants.  The night the star shone bright and the angels came down singing hosannas to this newborn child and scaring the wits out of some innocent shepherds who went away singing - that night was not dark just because it was winter in Israel.  It was a dark time in the history of God’s people, and he was shining a light on that, too.


     And who were God’s people?  In the Christmas story we see that being Jewish did not ensure that status.  Herod was Jewish, but he’d broken his covenant long before the angel Gabriel gave Mary the good news.  The Wise Men were not Jewish, but they listened and followed God’s instructions, tripping Herod and saving the infant Jesus from the king’s murderous scheme.  My reading of Brueggemann suggests that God’s people were those who kept covenant in the land and the poor, those who had been dispossessed of land but still honored their Maker, having faith that sooner or later, God would redeem his people and restore them to land from which to make their living.


     In the Lord’s Prayer we say “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  I pray that message will become bright and clear this Christmas:  that this means here, now.  Watch for the light tonight.
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Trudy Wischemann is a Quaker writer who worships with the Methodists in Lindsay, where there will be a Candlelight service tonight at 6 p.m.  Send her your starlit sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.