New Panel Published About Public Employee Unions!

Mt. Olive Pickle Boycott

Panel Introduction

Many people associate union workers and the labor movement with cities, the factory floor, and heavy industry. As a result, the history of organized labor in agriculture is often overlooked and forgotten. This reflects an unfortunate reality; the unionization rate for agriculture workers is just 1%, far lower than the national average. The agricultural industry is therefore rife with low wages, deplorable living and working conditions, and other abuses. Part of this is because agricultural work is very precarious, which makes it difficult to organize unions. Additionally, the politics at the heart of the American labor movement have limited the organization of the industry.

Organized workplaces were most common in the United States in the middle of the 20^th Century. This was the result of New Deal policies, primarily the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which provided protections to many industrial workers that made it far easier for them to join unions. However, Congress did not extend the protections of the NLRA to agricultural workers. Roosevelt needed to court conservative Southern Democrats to enact his New Deal legislation, and in order to appease them, he cut out agricultural workers and other professions from many programs. This was a deliberate move that disproportionately affected POC workers and allowed rich landholders to keep their stranglehold on political and economic power.

To counter such an historic injustice, unions like the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) began organizing campaigns on farms across the country. In the late 90s, FLOC began a union effort in North Carolina that would improve the lives of thousands of workers to this day. While their work greatly helped agricultural workers nationwide, the industry is still rife with exploitation. Agricultural work is still far less regulated than other industries, and the inherent precarity of seasonal labor makes unionization difficult. Such difficulties are compounded by the fact that many of these seasonal workers are immigrants who travel vast distances for work on visas that can be withdrawn by their employer. Employer-friendly conditions make it easy for them to underpay and overwork laborers absent the protections of collective bargaining agreements with unions like FLOC, which provide an essential tool for righting these wrongs.