BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — A union that has organized workers at two major Vermont food co-ops joined with other labor and human rights groups Tuesday to announce the formation of a new “Vermont Fair Food Campaign” aimed at ensuring that workers who plant, harvest and process food grown in the state are treated humanely.
“We’re building an organization (whose) aim is to create a food chain in Vermont in which all the workers … are treated with dignity and respect,” said Kimberly Lawson, international representative with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. “Essentially what we want to do is establish a fair food system in the state.”
Speakers at the news conference said that with Vermont becoming a leader nationally in the local food movement, they believe food industries are due to have a spotlight turned on their wages and working conditions.
Lawson said the UE, as the union is known, had been surveying food industry workers about wages and benefits and would release results later this summer. She said preliminary results from interviews 160 workers with about 50 different companies showed that the median wage for food workers in the state is about $12 per hour — more than $2 less than what the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office has called a “living wage” for a single adult living in most areas of Vermont.
Lawson said UE had been distributing leaflets to employees of several food industry companies in Vermont, including ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.
Green Mountain issued a statement saying it respects the right of its employees to unionize if they choose to.
Jim Harrison, president of the Vermont Grocers’ Association, said he sympathized with the call for improvements in pay. “Everybody wants higher wages … But it’s not quite that simple without impacting retail prices that consumers pay.” Profit margins at food retailers are often in the 1 to 1.5 percent range, he said.
UE has represented unionized workers at the City Market, a Burlington cooperative food store, and at the Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier since 2003, union leaders said.
UE officials joined in announcing the campaign with leaders of the Vermont Workers Center, a group that has lobbied at the Statehouse in Montpelier for universal health care and other issues supported by labor, as well as Migrant Justice, a group representing immigrant farm workers who are in the country illegally.
The campaign is similar to the international fair trade movement. “We need a domestic fair trade policy,” Lawson said.
Danilo Lopez, a farm worker from Mexico who has been outspoken about immigration issues and workers’ rights, said a main goal of his group is to get Vermont to pass a law allowing immigrant farm workers — including an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 in the country illegally — to get state driver’s licenses.
“As migrant workers we suffer isolation and a lack of mobility in Vermont,” Lopez said through a translator.
Vermont lawmakers this year set up a special study committee to recommend whether the state should allow illegal immigrants to get drivers’ licenses. The immigrants often are described as providing crucial labor on the state’s dairy farms.
Lopez and others said that along with workers, they want to see the campaign help small farmers, who are under economic strain due to low prices being paid by processors for milk and other products.
Leaders of the UE units at the two co-ops touted the higher wages and better benefits they get versus most of the non-unionized workers in the food industry.
“We have a voice at our bargaining table for fair and improved working conditions,” said Autumn Martinez, a cashier at the Hunger Mountain co-op and steward of the UE local representing its workers. “We have job security and fair representation.”
Asked if the campaign’s goal was to unionize as many of Vermont’s food workers as possible, Lawson said: “We’re still in the early stages. Obviously, if workers end up in a union at the end of the campaign, we’re going to say that’s a good thing.” But she added, “It’s broader than that, because we’re looking at the food chain in general.”
