Abe Lincoln said “labor creates all wealth,” but farm workers get precious little of it. Twenty-five years ago, at the height of the influence of the United Farm Workers, union contracts guaranteed almost twice the minimum wage of the time. Today, the hourly wage in almost every farm job is the minimum wage — $6.75 an hour in 2007 in California. And taking inflation into account, the minimum is lower today than it was then. Farm workers are worse off than they’ve been for over two decades, while the supermarket price of fruit has more than doubled.

US agriculture is addicted to a vast reservoir of cheap labor. Outside of the brief years of the Dust Bowl in the mid-1930s, farm work has been the labor of people of color. African Americans made up the rural labor force of the south for centuries, first as slaves, then as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, and finally wage laborers at the bottom of the scale. In the highly developed, corporate agriculture of the west and southwest, immigrant workers from Mexico, Latin America and Asia constitute the rural labor force. Their wages are also at the bottom. In fact, everywhere in the world, rural standards of living are far below those in cities.

(Source: azspot)