AJP’s vision of a fair food system, illustrated for our former website. Credit: Sophia Foster-Dimino, 2023.
AJP’s bottom-up vision is built on a few basic values:
Human rights, including health and well-being, economic democracy and workplace democracy;
Reciprocity & accountability, being responsive to each other’s needs and committing to leveling hierarchies of power; and
Ecological stewardship.
Because the great majority of US agriculture operates in direct conflict with these principles, our vision calls for a radical transformation of farming as we know it. This vision includes these tenets:
Both farmworkers and farmers must receive decent livelihoods, social insurance (Social Security, disability insurance, workers’ compensation, health care, etc.), and working conditions that are safe and sustainable for the duration of their working lives.
Farmworkers must enjoy respect and dignity in their work, and they must have rights of collective bargaining and freedom of association in order to advocate for themselves.
Farm operators must earn prices that cover the cost of responsible production, and they must enjoy protection from exploitation by buyers and freedom to band together with other farmers to earn better trading terms.
Immigrants must have the same protections and rights as all workers, and they must have full legal status to ensure their rights of due process and to protect all workers from downward pressure on wages and working conditions.
We must enact reparations and finally put an end to the degraded status of farm work, passed on from successive agricultural regimes that have relied on super-exploited workers—from enslaved Africans to prisoners, to disaster refugees, to guestworkers and undocumented immigrants. Farm work must take its place as an honored vocation essential to human existence. We must also develop a radically different relationship to land and to the Indigenous peoples whose homelands the United States occupies.1
Our standards strive to translate our values of democracy, fairness, and human rights into workplace and business practices. AJP’s standards differ from many other ethical certifications on a number of counts:2
Rights of freedom of association and collective bargaining, for both workers (with employers) and farmers (with buyers), with no reprisal. Employer neutrality towards union organizing.
Organic production; no amount of worker or farmer exposure to toxic chemicals is tolerated.
Living wages for workers and farmers; if finances don’t allow living wages, employers or buyers must show their finances and demonstrate their inability to pay (in addition to other requirements).
Direct hiring only; no farm labor contractors or recruiters allowed.
Phasing out piece rate (where workers’ pay depends entirely on how much they harvest), instead allowing only performance-based bonuses on top of a baseline living wage.
No ‘employment at-will’; termination of employment (for workers) or purchasing agreements (for farmers) is only allowed with just cause.
Worker oversight in workplace safety.
Moderate working hours (up to 48 hours/week) with overtime being strictly optional.
For us, collective bargaining and due process speak to the linked principles of workplace democracy and economic democracy (for both workers and owner/operators). Living wages, manageable work hours, health and safety, and social insurance speak to the principle of human dignity: we all have a right to live and flourish as people, to not have all of our lives’ energy used up for someone else’s benefit. In addition to these standards, our process of stakeholder leadership and oversight (discussed more below) speaks to principles of democracy and accountability—sometimes phrased as “nothing about us without us”—and an acknowledgment that building grassroots power is the only plausible path to an equitable food system. These are core values across centuries of social movements, which eventually won expression in key documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO), both of which serve as foundations for AJP’s standards.
On the one hand, the AJP standards are practical and concrete, rooted in people’s day-to-day experiences and honed through implementation at actual farms and businesses. In that sense, the standards are far from utopian. Yet our standards also reflect our ‘root cause’ analysis of what makes US agriculture so miserable for so many: first, the structural power of employers over workers; and, second, the power of buyers over farm operators. (Of course, there are important targets beyond those two relationships who are much harder to address with a certification strategy.)3 By addressing at least some of the bases of these power differentials, the AJP standards resemble ‘non-reformist reforms’—that is, incremental changes that are within reach but start to undo the oppressive mechanisms of the status quo, getting us closer to the systemic transformation we seek.4
See the appendix for AJP’s vision statement and more detailed summaries of AJP’s standards. See our AJP Toolkit for the full text of the standards.
See our statement from the 1990s for a fuller articulation of AJP’s vision. ↩︎
For comparisons see Kerstin Lindgren, Justice in the Fields: A Report on the Role of Farmworker Justice Certification and an Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Seven Labels. For a shorter comparison, see “Reference Guide to Fair Trade and Labor Justice Programs.” ↩︎
Other sources of the degraded working and living conditions for farm people include banks and finance, landlords, agribusiness, and the state. It is more of a stretch to use certification as a strategy against these other opponents, which illustrates the shortcomings of market-based strategies. This limitation is especially glaring in the case of immigration: our standards can forbid individual participating employers from weaponizing immigration status, but much more important is federal immigration policy. Given the central role of immigration and border policy in disempowering farmworkers, this gap illustrates a serious weakness of our strategy to date. On the weaknesses of certification see Julie Guthman, “The Polanyian Way?” and Agrarian Dreams; and Sandy Brown & Christy Getz, “Privatizing Farm Worker Justice.” ↩︎
David Cobb & Emily Kawano, “How to Build a Solidarity Economy: The Logic of Non-Reformist Reforms”; Amna Akbar, “Non-Reformist Reforms and Struggles Over Life, Death, and Democracy.” Also closely related is Erik Olin Wright’s concept of “real utopias” (Envisioning Real Utopias). ↩︎