Excerpt from interview with Richard Mandelbaum, former organizer at CATA and co-founder of AJP.

Richard Mandelbaum: I think it was the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture at that point that was more active, and at a certain point Nelson was on that board and at some point passed that to me, CATA’s seat on the board. And that’s what got me into the world of organic and sustainable ag as a representative of a farmworkers organization. And that’s where I started to interact with the folks who we eventually went on together to develop AJP, Marty [Mesh] and Michael [Sligh] and Liz [Henderson] and other folks. It grew out of those discussions of the lip service—sometimes tokenism, sometimes not even that—the [superficial] attention being paid to labor issues. The presumption that, ‘oh, we’re the good guys,’ and not enough self-reflection into what ways [organic farming] is actually still falling short of an ethical path.

And of course that world was and still is full of individuals with really strong values who on their own are doing things really deeply and thoughtfully, but there’s a lot where that’s not the case at all. And the kind of “good guy” image and sweeping things under the rug… Meaningful conversations about labor, hard conversations, not just the easy, ‘oh, yeah, sure, we all agree, we all think there shouldn’t be violation of labor rights.’ Well, what does that mean? That tension existed within those circles and [we were] identifying allies who were willing and wanting to go deeper in a more meaningful way. 

Early on there were some tense conversations until understanding developed and trust developed a little bit more, too, because Nelson was not one to mince words. I’m usually not either. One of the things I sometimes say is people talk about there being a community—there’s a ‘sustainable ag community’ or an ‘organic ag community’—and I don’t think that there is. There really isn’t. It’s a construct. And when you dig into a lot of issues like immigration, labor rights, things that are off the map of the narrow consensus, then you realize, oh, no, we don’t actually all share the same values at all.

Jon Magee (AJP): When I have brought AJP’s framework and resources into a workshop for farmers, I try to be really clear about what it means and how you do it and all of that, and rarely do people respond positively to all the details. They like the idea, but the details are not easy.

RM: I don’t necessarily think it’s farmer-specific. I think in any sector of our economy you would meet the same kind of resistance. There are certainly areas of the country or certain aspects of agriculture where there is a very strong conservative streak. But I think it would be the same if we were talking about any other economic sector. It’s just people are de facto capitalist without ever having reflected on that or decided to be. It’s just in the air.

JM: And they’re small business owners, small employers, which raises your question of ‘is it a community?’ in a different way. People identify as being good people or having strong values and that kind of thing. I think in small businesses, especially, owners’ egos and sense of personal values are often wrapped up in their business in ways that are not reflective of the class nature of their relationship with their employees. That relationship is structured by the law, it’s structured by customs and expectations of how employers treat employees, by what’s acceptable based on social hierarchies.

RM: I agree. There’s also a romanticization that takes place, where the romantic notion of the small business owner and the small farmer—which are both things I am a believer in, I think we should have an economy based on smaller scale businesses! That said, [those figures] get romanticized often to the point where the blind spots are overlooked or forgiven without challenging anyone to do better. And I think that’s a big part of the challenge, for sure. When I was doing my field organizing work with CATA and visiting many farms, mostly in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and different scales—some very big farms, some small farms—it was interesting because some of the most abusive workplaces I saw were really small ones, because they could fall off the radar much more easily. You get to a size where you have a few hundred workers, then you can hire a lawyer and find all the loopholes to exploit certainly, but you can’t get away with as many flagrant violations sometimes as somebody who’s kind of tucked in a corner and under the radar of inspectors. Some of the absolute best examples I saw were the really small operations too, though.

But again, that romantic idea—that just because something is small scale it then represents our values—is nonsense. Actually that’s not true in many cases and the best, most impressive farms I saw—I remember some of the farms with AJP that we visited out in the Midwest. I remember there was one in particular where the housing was like, Oh, I’d want to live here. It was just truly decent, not just no violations. Good, decent housing that someone would want to live in. And they had no idea that they were even going above and beyond what they needed to do. They were just doing what was right. 

So there’s all those sides to it, but I think that’s a big piece of the tension is, you’d have people in these big coalitions like the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture who were acting as if they were in community together when they actually weren’t at all. And if you deviated outside of the narrow consensus that existed, you’d quickly see that. And labor is one of the flashpoints where that happens very quickly and very clearly.

The kind of comments we were bringing to the table had very little support actually within the organic movement. One flashpoint for sure was on immigration law and the H-2 [guestworker] visas. Trying to identify people who were even willing to have that conversation to recognize the downsides, the exploitative nature of those programs—that was very difficult. You’d get a lot of simplistic comments like, ‘Well, but the workers want to be here. They’re happy, they’re glad to be here, and they’re making more money than they could at home.’ That can all be true along with it being highly exploitative. And so that more nuanced conversation became clear like, Oh, it’s only a minority who want to go there and explore that.