Why have the agri-food industry and lawmakers turned to kids to solve a systemic labor shortage?
The food industry has a wage problem. Neither kids nor apprenticeships are the answer.
Lewis Hine, photographer credited with eventual child labor regulation, captured this image in 1911 and described it as, "Manuel, the young shrimp-picker, five years old, and a mountain of child-labor oyster shells behind him. He worked last year. Understands not a word of English. Dunbar, Lopez, Dukate Company. Location: Biloxi, Mississippi."
Source: Library of Congress
At Grow Well, our vision for the future is a food system that meets communities’ needs, respects critical planetary boundaries, and is resilient to climatic and market disruptions. We recognize the climate, social, and economic changes underway pose significant challenges to achieving this vision.
Lately, several of our ongoing or pending projects have us reflecting on some of the more glaring gaps between the current state of our agri-food system, particularly with respect to labor, and what a more equitable and resilient state that actually met communities’ needs would look like. We still have a lot of questions about what that future state could be and how we get there as a society, but one thing we’re sure of is that more kids in the workforce is not it.
The agri-food sector depends on, but can’t find enough labor due to its own low wages, record low unemployment, and a broken immigration system. Industry leaders are clamoring for solutions. Some such solutions, like outsourcing to labor contractors, are backfiring as regulators find children working – and dying – on farms and in food plants across America.
Other “solutions” that leaders have received federal funding to explore further, like creating dairy apprenticeship programs, may be less morally egregious, but still fail to address the true systemic roots of the problem. Still others, like voluntary standards and frameworks feel increasingly like not just an insufficient band aid, but like yet one more contributor to yawning inequalities in our society. So, why aren’t these real solutions and what are some opportunities to solve this labor shortage?
We’re not seeing meaningful action on anything that addresses the true root of this issue: income inequality or consolidation in an unhealthy market structure. The food system cannot function when the food budget of 66 million Americans is only ~$4.27 per person per day.
This unhealthy market structure (both with too much consolidation on the supply side and insufficient resources to effectively signal healthy demand on the consumer side) results in wages too low to attract or retain workers. To try to fill gaps, the industry has created structures to evade responsibility for labor necessary to manufacture their products. These structures allowed for migrant children to be employed in hazardous jobs (see here, here, and here).
Kids are not the answer
Since 1938, Americans have generally agreed that child labor is immoral. But cracks have emerged in that consensus. This year, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed into law a bill repealing restrictions on work for 14- and 15-year-olds. And she’s not alone. In the last 2 years, 10 states have rolled back child labor restrictions. Even in states where laws have not changed, kids, especially unaccompanied immigrant minors, are working dangerous jobs, including in food production facilities and on dairy farms.
Americans recognized workplaces, especially agri-food settings, were unsafe for children a hundred years ago. That is still the case today.There have been cases where immigrant workers, including children, have been exploited, forced to work long hours, and even maimed on dairy farms. The injury rate in dairy production is twice the national average of all industries, according to the New York Times. A 14-year old child working 12-hour days endured his hand being crushed in an industrial milking machine on a farm in Middlebury, VT. Another migrant child was recently killed in an accident on a Wisconsin dairy farm. Even if lawmakers change laws to make child labor legally acceptable, the practice will remain ethically fraught, and impossible to justify from the vantage of the best interests of childrens’ health and safety.
A 13-year old who works on an egg farm, 12-hour shifts, 6 days a week.
At the bottom: Raising food and farm worker wages can help
According to the Economic Research Service, the wage gap between farm and nonfarm wages remains substantial, though it has been slowly shrinking over the last 30 years. “In 1990, the average real farm wage for nonsupervisory crop and livestock workers was just over half the average real wage in the nonfarm economy for private-sector nonsupervisory occupations ($10.20 versus $20.19). By 2020, the farm wage ($14.62) was equal to 59 percent of the nonfarm wage ($24.68). In other words, the gap between farm and nonfarm wages is slowly shrinking, but still substantial.”
A big reason for this gap is that the labor law, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) has several exemptions around both minimum wage and overtime pay for the agriculture industry. As cities and states raise their minimum wages, the federal government needs to bring these benefits to the ag sector by ending exceptionalism granted to the ag sector.
At the top: Executives take too much of the pie and checkoff programs need reform
In 2019, a nonprofit organization called Dairy Management Inc. was criticized for paying its executives millions of dollars while struggling dairy farmers were funding the organization’s spending spree through federally-mandated payments. Just two years prior, 1,600 dairy farms nationwide went belly-up as the top ten executives at the organization were paid over $8 million.
DMI, which was funded through a mandatory checkoff program, was responsible for promoting the consumption of milk and other dairy products, known mostly to the American public through its hugely popular “Got Milk?” campaign. However, farmers expressed their concerns about the organization’s spending habits and lack of transparency. DMI's CEO reportedly earned over $1.5 million annually, while other top executives also received high salaries. Critics argued that DMI should prioritize supporting struggling farmers instead of bloated salaries for its leadership.
With its focus on public consumption, DMI forged partnerships with large corporations that produced dairy items. Consequently, farmers financially contributed to the same organization whose tactics drove many of them out of business.
A future that meets communities’ needs
Communities need sufficient, reliable access to healthy food. To achieve this, there is work for policymakers and industry actors to do. The agri-food sector needs to fairly compensate their employees and workers at all levels. For policy makers, this definitely means taking action to make sure standard FLSA worker protections like overtime and minimum wage laws apply to the industry.
It’s also a great moment to reconsider whether the $4.25 per hour youth minimum wage from 1996 or the piece rate exemptions should be scrapped. Industry actors may need to reconsider salaries at the top, focusing more on increases at the bottom end of their pay scale for a few years. All of these changes will be more attainable in a market where there is a healthier level of competition, a diversity critical to the health and resilience of the food system for reasons far beyond wages and labor.
