The key idea of the permaculture workers cooperative is that those that work in the green-collar jobs are unionised and also own their place of work, having control over decision-making. The South Bronx worker-cooperative incubator GreenWorker.coop seeks to address that head-on and so does the this permaculture cooperative project.
On Doug Henwood’s Behind The News Radio show, in an interviews with NYU academic Andrew Ross and unionist Michael Yates (High MP3) we are reminded that unions are important, even in the new so called Green Collar Economy as most green jobs have poor conditions and pay, and are rarely unionised.
April 30, 2009
Andrew Ross, author of Nice Work If You Can Get It, on life and labor in precarious times
Michael Yates, author of Why Unions Matter, just out in a second edition, on just that topic
As Andrew Ross says “green collar jobs are ususally pretty crappy jobs” and there is some evidence for that below.
A recent article by Sarah Newman of Alernet called The Ugly Truth Behind Organic Farms outlines some of the considerable problems with the organic industry.
Food writer and activist Eric Schlosser, speaking at the Slow Food Nation
conference in San Francisco last fall, said that he would rather eat a
conventional tomato picked by well-treated workers than a local heirloom
variety harvested by oppressed workers.
In 1998, Swanton Berry's owner, Jim Cochran, deviated from the status quo
and approached the United Farm Workers to negotiate a contract. Cochran
was committed to a farm that was sustainable, not just organic. He
particularly wanted to offer his workers a health plan, but couldn't afford it
For anyone who has worked in WWOOF’ing knows
The pioneers of organic farming in the 1960s were as eclectic as a bag
of mixed greens. For some hippie farmers, embracing organic farming was
part of their broader vision and commitment to sustainable agriculture.
And, that meant not just treating the land well, but also the workers
and animals on that land.
The connection between environmental conservation through organic-farming
practices and labor rights, has been largely lost in much of today's organics
movement.
Kerry Trueman at The Huffington Post in Let’s Ask Marion Nestle: Are The USDA’s Organic Standards A Sham?
Kat: The Sacramento Bee reported on Sunday
that a supposedly organic fertilizer used by nearly a third of
California’s organic farmers was in fact spiked with the synthetic
fertilizer ammonium sulfate. In 2004, a whistleblower told California’s
Department of Food and Agriculture that this deception had been going
on for five years.
This sort of incident perpetuates the notion that higher priced organic
foods are some kind of scam, and vindicates the many small-scale
sustainable farmers who've chosen to go "beyond organic" and opt out of
the organic certification process altogether.
A New York TImes article talks of the massive drop in the industry’s sales: Budgets Squeezed, Some Families Bypass Organics
The sales volume of organic products, which had been growing at 20
percent a year in recent years, slowed to a much lower growth rate in
the last few months, according to the Nielsen Company, a market
research firm.
For the four-week period that ended Oct. 4, the volume of organic
products sold rose just 4 percent compared with the same period a year
earlier.
“Organics continue to grow and outpace many
categories,” the Nielsen Company concluded in an October report.
“However, recent weeks are showing slower growths, possibly a start of
an organics growth plateau.”
The response to this is a return to the true definition of sustainability: economic, social AND environmental sustainability - The Beyond Organic movement, perhaps first termed by Michael Abelman, his film Beyond Organic. Also Beyond Organic: Whats Really At Stake
BEYOND ORGANIC tells the story of this amazing farm and its
long battle to survive in the face of rapid
suburban development. It explores the efforts of Ableman
nd his staff to diversify the farm, open it to educational
tours for thousands of people -- especially schoolchildren
-- and defend it against angry neighbors, hostile public
officials and developers eager to re-zone the land
for condominiums. It draws a sharp contrast between
community supported agriculture and conventional chemical
farming, and it calls on organic farmers to remember
basic principles, including fair labor practices, as
their farms grow in size and power.
From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_organic
Beyond organic is a concept aligned with the idea of creating
sustainable and ecological systems of food production capable of
transcending the standards currently affixed to foods and processes now
categorized by the term “organic”. Since the organic food movement has
been increasingly industrialized and often forced to undergo processes
similar to those of conventional agriculture (such as monocultural
plantings on massive scales)due to market pressures, many members of
the what was originally the organic food movement are demanding that
new standards be established for sustainable organic foods. Many ardent
supporters of organic foods are frustrated that the integrity of what
constitutes “organic” foods and farming methods have been compromised
by FDA legislation that allows for synthetics to be introduced into
organic processed foods and other unsustainable industrial attributes
associated with “organic” foods.[1]References
^ Pollan, Micheal. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Penguin Books, London. 2006
