Why Workers’ Rights Are Key to a Sustainable Food System

Fighting for Food Workers’ Rights

Years later, Oliva graduated from high school with aspirations to be an anthropologist examining genocide and studying our species’ tolerance for oppression. But when he realized that as an undocumented immigrant he did not qualify for scholarship money to pay for college, he began working restaurant jobs to pay for class credit. What started as a means to an end soon developed into an end in itself: a career examining the inequities of the American food system, specifically for laborers.

Improving Wages and Working Conditions with the Food Chain Workers Alliance

“The Food Chain Workers Alliance believes in a truly sustainable food system, one that can provide healthy and locally made food, and that has the potential to lift up communities, workers and our shared environment,” says Oliva, about the organization that is now celebrating its tenth anniversary. The organization fights for a democratically controlled food system with cooperatively owned food ventures that would bolster local economies and provide living wages. The goals are aspirational, but he argues that what has been missing in this fight until very recently has been the inclusion of workers in the conversation around sustainable food.

Celebrating Ten Years of the Food Chain Workers Alliance

The Food Chain Workers Alliance is a coalition of over 370,000 workers from multiple levels of the food supply chain who have used this collective power to represent the labor sector of the food system. Using textbook community organizing strategies, they have organized workers to get fair wages, been active in the Fight for $15, and succeeded in getting Good Food Purchasing Policy programs passed in cities across the country to use the power of institutional purchasing to prioritize environmental sustainability, animal welfare, worker conditions, public health and buying locally. FCWA works closely with the Health Environment Agriculture and Labor (HEAL) Food Alliance, which is a multisector organization of environmentalists, agriculturalists, public health advocates and food workers. FCWA represents the labor arm within this member-based organization. Together they are working to build the next generation of leaders to influence food policy changes from the inside.

The Role Food Played in the US Government Sponsored Coup in Guatemala

Oliva comes by his activism honestly. His grandfather fought alongside workers, women’s organizations and students to establish democracy in Guatemala in the 1940s, overthrowing the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. During the next ten years in Guatemala, democratically elected leaders placed policies which introduced right to vote laws, national minimum wages and significant land reform. Yet, government officials in the US – highly influenced by Cold War mentality – defined these policies as communist and organized a coup against the Guatemalan government to overthrow the democratically elected President Árbenz and reinstall a military dictatorship.

“The coup happened at the bequest of the United Fruit Company,” says Oliva, “because a new agrarian program was giving land to landless peasants.” The United Fruit Company, a successful business which benefited greatly from low wages and exploitative conditions in Guatemala to supply their bananas, had aggressively lobbied the government to overthrow the Guatemalan government, no doubt in hopes of returning to systems which placed little value in fair pay. And it didn’t hurt that the top executives of the United Fruit Company, brothers John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles, were also staff members of then-President Eisenhower. Decades of brutal civil war followed, which led to an influx of Guatemalan refugees into the United States, including Oliva and his family.

History and Empowerment

This pattern of industry power in the US to influence government policies, some of which can result in actual generations of civil war in a foreign country, is not lost on Oliva. Believing that he is living, breathing proof that his grandfather’s work is still being fought, he uses his own history in Guatemala as fuel to mobilize members of the food system to recognize power dynamics. Two years ago, Oliva and his co-director Joann Lo received the James Beard Foundation’s Leadership Award for his work empowering food workers.

Today, Oliva continues to dedicate himself to empowering laborers in the food system. Reminiscing about his grandfather, he explains that in Mayan cosmology nothing is linear, and in that way the work of fighting for social justice is inside him and he is meant to continue the work of his ancestors. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a choice,” he says.