labor and environment

By Nicole Fabricant and Steve Zeltser - Labor Video Project, March 30, 2024

By Steve Zeltser, et. al. - Labor Video Project, March 28, 2024

By Angela Hilmi and Emile Frison - Green European Journal, March 25, 2024

While farming and nature are inextricably bound together, political bargaining often sets the two in opposition. Recent protests across Europe and worldwide show growing frustration among farmers. The European Commission is responding with row-backs on environmental standards. Could farmers be brought back onside with a Common Agricultural Policy U-turn on trade?

Imagine a job where you never get a day off. Where your work, providing an essential public service, requires you to take on hundreds of thousands of euros in debt over decades. Where you never know how much you’ll get for what you sell. Where mainstream media either ignores or vilifies you. Where your health is at risk from prevailing practices. Where you don’t earn enough to retire with a pension. Where, once you do retire, no new generation is willing to take up the reins because the quality of life is considered low. Welcome to today’s farming in Europe. And not just in Europe but worldwide. 

It’s not hard to see why recent weeks have witnessed waves of European farmers’ protests from Brussels to Madrid and Warsaw. Headlines have been filled with images of tractors blocking motorways and city centres, slurry dumped at supermarkets, police being sprayed with manure and pelted with eggs. Farmers are vociferously raising their voices demanding dignity, support for their livelihoods, viability of small farms, a future: “No farmers, no food!”

In Brussels, many of those on the streets have been demonstrating against the free trade agreements that undercut their prices and livelihoods. In Poland, Germany, and Romania, farmers are rejecting the influx of cheap Ukrainian grain and its impact on their livelihoods. In India, farmers are once again out on the streets, resisting the latest attempts to dismantle commodity price support policies, without which their already-strained livelihoods will be even further devalued.

These protests are not isolated incidents but rather a global expression of frustration and disillusionment with a system that prioritises profit and global competition over people. They are stirring up important debates about regulation, fair prices, trade agreements, and the future of our food. In Europe, the negotiations for a deal with the Mercosur trade bloc loom large, threatening to undercut local producers and exacerbate the challenges they face. 

Yet, as these protests unfold, panic-stricken politicians – in the heat of a “mega” election year – seem more inclined to throw environmental protection under the bus than address the legitimate grievances of those who feed us. The European Commission has already unscrupulously junked plans to cut pesticide use, scrapped a strategy on sustainable food systems, and loosened environmental and labour requirements that farmers must respect to access farming subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

By Steve Mellon - Pittsburg Union Progress, March 24, 2024

Laurie Harmon stepped from the crowd gathered in a community hall at the East Palestine Country Club around 2:30 on Saturday afternoon and told her story to a hushed crowd of about 80 people. Many had traveled from as far as California and Texas to hear stories like hers, and to offer their support.

Laurie, 48, a retired registered nurse, lives three blocks from the site of the Feb. 3, 2023, toxic train derailment that many residents believe poisoned the town.

“On the 12th, I started getting rashes,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact. “On May 1st, about the time they started digging up a pit and cleaning up, I started getting second-, third- and fourth-degree chemical burns. I had burns over 80% of my body. They burrow deep down in. It’s horrible. I was going to doctors, trying to get it figured out. Nobody knows; no one can tell me. I was diagnosed with systemic contact dermatitis due to chemical exposure. I have now lesions on my spine, cysts on my kidneys; I have kidney stones. On March 4, I had a heart attack. …”

She’s scheduled for heart surgery at Cleveland Clinic. She’s seeing seven doctors. Her medical bills total $500,000. She’s on Medicare and says she’ll have to pay 20% of that. To avoid the rashes, she quit going outside in September.

“I’m losing everything. I’m losing my home; I lost my relationship; I’m a foster parent. I lost my kids. This is more than one person can take. I just don’t even know what to say. I want to thank you guys for coming here. I wasn’t even going to come, because sometimes I feel I’m defeated, but I can’t feel that way, because if I don’t talk no one’s going to know. No one is going to know.”

Laurie’s story, and the stories of other East Palestine residents in attendance, moved the crowd, which included organizers and members from a number of unions, as well as several environmental activists, academics and some people who simply wanted to offer help to a community in crisis. Hours later, after a number of panel discussions and the performance of a song written about the East Palestine disaster by musician Mike Stout, they voted to take action.

By Steve Mellon - Pittsburg Union Progress, March 19, 2024

Here’s the story of two men. One is a Trump-supporting blue-collar conservative from a small town in rural Ohio; the other is the son of a Mexican immigrant and describes himself as a socialist and a “lefty nut job.” They’ll be getting together later this week, and of course they’ll soon come to blows, right? Or at least hurl insults at each other?

That’s the narrative we’ve all come to expect. You see it on cable news shows, on social media. Division is hot these days.

But in the real world, the one in which trains fly off their tracks and spill toxic loads in America’s backyards, Chris Albright and Maximilian Alvarez recognize they have more in common than that which separates them.

That bond will be on display Saturday, during an event in East Palestine, Ohio, involving local residents, unionists, community activists and environmentalists from around the country. They’re getting together to demand the federal government step in and make certain those affected by the derailment are provided with health care.

The get-together will feature music and a lineup of speakers that includes residents of East Palestine and other communities affected by toxic contamination as well as union organizers and journalists. Initiated by the newly formed coalition Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers, the event runs from noon to 5 p.m. at East Palestine Country Club, 50834 Carmel Anchor Road, Negley, OH 44441 (moved from the First Church of Christ).

By Norman Rogers - Jacobin, March 18, 2024

This article is adapted from Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement, edited by Jeff Ordower and Lindsay Zafir (The New Press, 2024).

I have a dream. I have a nightmare.

The dream is that working people find careers with good pay, good benefits, and a platform for addressing grievances with their employers. In other words, I dream that everyone gets what I got over twenty-plus years as a unionized worker in the oil industry.

The nightmare is that people who had jobs with good pay and power in the workplace watch those gains erode as the oil industry follows the lead of steel, auto, and coal mining to close plants and lay off workers. It is a nightmare rooted in witnessing the cruelties suffered by our siblings in these industries — all of whom had good-paying jobs with benefits and the apparatus to process grievances when their jobs went away.

Workers, their families, and their communities were destroyed when the manufacturing plants and coal mines shut down, with effects that linger to this day. Without worker input, I fear that communities dependent on the fossil fuel industry face a similar fate.

This nightmare is becoming a reality as refineries in Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana, California, and New Mexico have closed or have announced pending closures. Some facilities are doing the environmentally conscious thing and moving to renewable fuels. Laudable as that transition is, a much smaller workforce is needed for these processes. For many oil workers, the choice is to keep working, emissions be damned, or to save the planet and starve.

United Steelworkers (USW) Local 675 — a four-thousand-member local in Southern California, of which I am the second vice president — is helping to chart a different course, one in which our rank-and-file membership embraces a just transition and in which we take the urgent steps needed to protect both workers and the planet. Along with other California USW locals, we are fighting to ensure that the dream — not the nightmare — is the future for fossil fuel workers as we transition to renewable energy.

By staff - Global News, March 1, 2024

By Morgan Ody and Vincent Delobel - La Via Campesina, March 1, 2024

Below is an excerpt from an opinion piece by Morgan Ody and Vincent Delobel of La Via Campesina, which was published on Al Jazeera on February 25th.

These are people who produce Europe’s food – whether conventionally or organically, on a small or a medium scale. They stand united by a shared reality: They are fed up with spending their lives working incessantly without ever getting a decent income.

We have reached this point after decades of neoliberal agricultural policies and free trade agreements. Production costs have risen steadily in recent years, while prices paid to farmers have stagnated or even fallen.

Faced with this situation, farmers have pursued various economic strategies. Some have tried to increase production to compensate for the fall in prices: They have bought more land, invested in machinery, taken on a lot of debt and seen their workload increase significantly. The stress and declining incomes have created a great deal of frustration.

Other farmers have sought better prices for their produce by turning to organic farming and short distribution channels. But for many, these markets collapsed after the COVID-19 pandemic.

All the while, through mergers and speculation, large agroindustrial groups have gotten bigger and stronger, putting increased pressure on prices and practices for farmers.

ECVC has actively taken part in the mobilisations of farmers in Europe. Our members have also been hit hard by dwindling incomes, the stress linked to high levels of debt, and the excessive workload. We clearly see that the European Union’s embrace of WTO-promoted policies of deregulation of agricultural markets in favour of big agribusiness and the destructive international competition are directly responsible for our plight.

Since the 1980s, various regulations that ensured fair prices for European farmers have been dismantled. The EU put all its faith in free trade agreements, which placed all the world’s farmers in competition with each other, encouraging them to produce at the lowest possible price at the cost of their own incomes and growing debt.

In recent years, however, the EU has announced its intention to move towards a more sustainable agricultural model, notably with the Farm to Fork Strategy, which is the agricultural component of the Green Deal.

Farmers’ organisations welcomed this ambition, but we also stressed that the sustainability of European agriculture could not be improved without breaking away from the logic of international competitiveness. Producing ecologically has huge benefits for the health and the planet, but it costs more for the farmers, and so to achieve the agroecological transition, agricultural markets need to be protected. Unfortunately, we were not heard.

By Morgan Ody, Andoni Garcia Arriola, Vitor Rodrigues - EuroVia, February 26, 2024

ECVC demands an obligation at the EU level to ensure prices paid to farmers cover the costs of production, including a decent income for the work of farmers and agricultural workers and their social security contributions.

In recent months farmers protests have blocked cities all over Europe. ECVC firmly believes that the Spanish translation of the EU Unfair Trade Practice (UTP) directive is a good way forward to reply to the demand unifying most of the protests: fair prices for farmers’ products. While some other national translation may be interesting, it is only in Spain that this law has been effective and actually made a difference in the price of the farmers: it actually obliges each link of the food chain to cover its production costs, starting with producers. Some key features are developed here, which should be taken up at the EU level of the directive in order to strengthen it.

Through the law, producers have the right to anonymously report anyone who purchases their produce at a price below their production costs, which they self-determine for their products on a case-by-case basis. Thus, purchase of produce at a loss can be punished with a fine of €3,000 to €100,000. It is important to have truly dissuasive fines. Repeat offenders can be fined at a higher rate, from €100,000 to €1 million euros. During the first quarter of 2023, the Spanish government announced that 55 companies had been sanctioned[1] .

An instrument, created by COAG – one of the Spanish member organisations of ECVC and La Via Campesina - in 2008, together with two consumer associations, has been very important in giving transparency to the market:

- The Origin-Destination Price Index (Indice de precios origen-destino - IPOD) publishes an index every month to denounce the abuse of power and the imposition of prices below production costs by industry and distribution. This index started off back in 2008 as an initiative of farmers and consumer organisations, and it illustrated the difference between prices paid to farmers and by consumers. This amounted to more than 500%, indicating that the greatest beneficiaries of market deregulation have been the strongest operators (generally large-scale distribution) and the most disadvantaged were farmers and consumers, for whom prices at source are very low and yet consumers pay a much higher price than they would have to in a regulated market situation.

The core of the law are the two following functional instruments:

- First, the Food Information and Control Agency (FICA) which is the legal body of control, dedicated to collecting anonymously complaints and sanction from farmers, farming organisations, cooperatives and other entities in the chain. It also has its own capacity to carry out ex officio inspections of compliance and execution of contracts, on price abuses, lack of agricultural contracts, failure to meet payment deadlines and other abusive practices. It publishes the sanctions when they are final.

- The Chain Observatory, which is responsible for carrying out price and cost studies along the value chain of each agricultural and animal production. These studies are important as they are part of the possible references for farmers when they negotiate contracts. It also has to publish studies of costs, evolution of consumption and evolution of food prices.

Another key element is that in Spain, contracts – which are obligatory - must be deposited in an official register so that no changes can be made once complaints have been articulated.

The EU should include this high level of public control and price transparency. It should also pay attention to the following elements:
- Prices by law must cover production costs in each link of the chain, starting with the farmer and the cost must include a decent income for farmers and all agricultural workers.
- Selling at a loss is prohibited.
- Farmers must be paid in a maximum of 30 days when they sell a perishable product and 60 days if products are processed.
- Sanctions must be significant if the above points are not complied with.
- Price observatories at national and European levels must provide net margin levels by brand and manufacturer.
- There must be transparency on commercial negotiation conditions.

Finally, this law will not be completely effective without addressing international trade, removing the WTO from agriculture and stopping free trade agreements. A new trade framework based on food sovereignty should be implemented to enable the relocation of agricultural production and prevent national production from competing with imports that maintain low prices. Furthermore these free trade agreements deepen the climate and biodiversity crises and damage food systems in Europe and the rest of the world.

The European Union adopted it last revision of the Directive on Unfair Trading Practices (UTP) in the agricultural and food supply chain in April 2019[2]. The Directive bans certain „Unfair Trading Practices“ imposed unilaterally by one trading partner on another at the EU level in the agricultural and food supply chain. However, even though the directive is a step in the right direction, it does not go so far as to legally cover production costs. As seen in the farmers protest the national implementations did so far not improve the barging power of farmers. Hence ECVC is calling the EU commission to strengthen the directive at EU level and a national implementation based on the chain law in Spain.

By Lois Ross - Rabble, February 16, 2024

It has not been making the mainstream news in Canada, but across Europe farmers are gathering in major cities with their tractors, blocking roads and encircling major cities, protesting a host of national and international issues.

It is complicated, because these protests are not based on a single issue, but rather an entire host of agricultural and trade policies, coupled in some cases with the impact of war, new and pending trade deals, cheaper imported foods, climate change regulations, inflation, and increased costs of production topped by increasingly diminishing returns for farmers.

Across the European Union – from the Netherlands, through Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and into Poland and Romania, farmers are visibly confronting a food system that they feel has turned on them.

Issues cited by farmers are cheap food imports, in others rising production costs and decreasing margins for the farm. Drought, along with policies that would increase farm concentration and escalate the loss of farm livelihoods, also have been cited.

In many ways it is a perfect storm — and one that has been a long-time in the making. Some of the same issues leading European Union farmers to protest are bubbling to the surface here in Canada.

It is hard to find detailed information on the tensions surfacing in each country, but the general malaise has been described in a recent article by The Guardian:

“Farmers have said they face falling sale prices, rising costs, heavy regulation, powerful and domineering retailers, debt, climate change and cheap foreign imports, all within an EU agricultural system based on the premise that ‘bigger is better’.”