NYT Op-Ed Columnist - State of Shame - Mistreatment of Farm Workers
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Transcript of NYT Op-Ed Columnist - State of Shame - Mistreatment of Farm Workers
June 9, 2009
OPED COLUMNIST
State of ShameBy BOB HERBERT
Ferndale, N.Y.
The building housing the ducks in this lush region of the Catskills in upstate Sullivan County was huge, across between a gigantic Quonset hut and an airplane hangar. The ducks, tens of thousands of them readyto be slaughtered for foie gras, were stuffed and listless in their pens. It was a very weird scene. Geneticallyunable to quack, the ducks moved very little and made hardly any noise.
Animalrights advocates have made a big deal about the way the ducks are forcefed to produce theenormously swollen livers from which the foie gras is made. But I’ve been looking at the plight of theunderpaid, overworked and often gruesomely exploited farmworkers who feed and otherwise care for theducks. Their lives are hard.
Each feeder, for example, is responsible for feeding 200 to 300 (or more) ducks — individually — threetimes a day. The feeder holds a duck between his or her knees, inserts a tube down the duck’s throat, anduses a motorized funnel to force the feed into the bird. Then on to the next duck, hour after hour, day afterday, week after week.
The routine is brutal and not very sanitary. Each feeding takes about four hours and once the birds areassigned a feeder, no one else can be substituted during the 22day forcefeeding period that leads up to theslaughter. Substituting a feeder would upset the ducks, according to the owners of Hudson Valley FoieGras, which operates the farm.
Not only do the feeders get no days off during that long stretch, and no overtime for any of the long hours,but they get very little time even to sleep each day. The feeding schedule for the ducks must be rigidlyobserved.
When I asked one of the owners, Izzy Yanay, about the lack of a day of rest, he said of the workers: “Thisnotion that they need to rest is completely futile. They don’t like to rest. They want to work seven days.”
Covering this story has been like stepping back in time. Farmworkers in New York do not have the samelegal rights and protections that other workers have, and the state’s multibilliondollar agriculture industryhas taken full advantage of that. The workers have no right to a day off or overtime pay. They don’t get anypaid vacation or sick days. When I asked one worker if he knew of anyone who had a retirement plan, helaughed and laughed.
To understand how it’s possible to treat farmworkers in New York this way you have to look back to the1930s when President Franklin Roosevelt was trying to get Congress to pass the Fair Labor Standards Actto provide basic wage and hour protections for workers. Among the opponents were segregationist
congressmen and senators who were outraged that the protections would apply to blacks as well as whites.
Most agricultural and domestic workers were black, and the legislation was not passed until those twocategories of workers were excluded. New York State lawmakers, under heavy and sustained pressure fromthe agriculture lobby, have similarly exempted farmworkers (the vast majority of whom are now Latino)from most state labor law protections.
There was a good chance — right up until Monday, when the State Senate went through a sudden andcataclysmic change from Democratic to Republican control — that something might be done about thislegislatively. On Monday evening, the Assembly passed (and Gov. David Paterson has promised to sign) abill extending muchneeded labor protections to farmworkers, including the right to at least one day of restper week and, more important, the right to bargain collectively.
Republican senators were split on the bill, however, and the New York Farm Bureau, the lead lobbyingagency for the agriculture industry, is furiously opposed to passage. With the upheaval in the Senate, thefate of the bill, called the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act, is unknown.
A major supporter of the bill, the Rev. Richard Witt, executive director of the Rural and Migrant Ministry ofNew York, said the Senate shift would have no effect on the campaign for passage of the bill. Anothersupporter, Kerry Kennedy, founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, alsosaid she will continue to push hard for passage.
“It’s shocking that these conditions could exist in New York State,” Ms. Kennedy said. “We talked to aworker who had not had a day off in 10 years.”
That is not an argument that carries much weight with the Farm Bureau. Sounding like an echo of Mr.Yanay, the bureau’s spokesman, Peter Gregg said, “They don’t want days off. The farmworkers want towork. They came here to make money.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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