When you hear about poverty wages and extreme anti-union tactics practiced by the largest company of its kind in the world, it’s natural to think of Walmart. But California-based Taylor Farms is giving the retail giant a run for its money when it comes to low-road labor practices, while offering another example of why it’s time for the U.S. to clamp down on the use of temp agencies by huge companies trying to evade responsibility for unconscionable working conditions.
Taylor Farms is the world’s largest producer of fresh-cut vegetables, and supplies some of the nation’s biggest fast food and grocery chains including McDonald’s, Subway, Pizza Hut, Safeway, Ralphs and Kroger. They operate in nine states as well as Mexico, and earned revenues of $1.8 billion in 2012.
A visit to the company website offers a bucolic image of a multigenerational family-run business with the highest ethical standards.
This afternoon the California State Assembly passed Assembly Bill 1897, which would hold companies accountable for violations of workers’ rights committed by their labor suppliers. The bill, sponsored by Assemblymember Roger Hernandez (D-West Covina), passed 45-20.
Gary Cohn recently wrote about AB 1897 for Capital & Main, noting that passage could have national implications for temporary workers and income inequality. Capital & Main’s Bill Raden and Cohn previously investigated such worker abuses taking place at agribusiness giant Taylor Farms. Labor advocates supported the bill, noting that major corporations have used staffing companies to dodge responsibility for sub-standard working conditions. Meanwhile, more than 50 business groups opposed the bill.
» Read more about: Breaking: Assembly Passes Bill to Hold Companies Accountable for Abuse of Temps »
California wage earners received encouraging news Wednesday when Assembly Bill 2416 (Wage Theft Recovery Act) cleared a major hurdle by passing 44 to 27 on an Assembly floor vote — three votes more than needed to move to the Senate.
The measure, introduced in February by Mark Stone (D-Scotts Valley), is modeled after a successful Wisconsin wage lien law. It is designed to tie off loopholes in California that currently allow unscrupulous businesses to evade paying monetary judgments to thousands of shortchanged, mostly low-wage workers by simply transferring ownership or even by declaring bankruptcy.
According to a 2013 study by the National Employment Law Project and the UCLA Labor Center, of the 18,683 workers who filed claims for unpaid wages with the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) between 2008 to 2011, only 3,084, or 17 percent, recovered any money at all.
In 60 percent of those rulings,
» Read more about: Proposed Wage Theft Law Passes Major Hurdle »
Last April, when Federico Lopez and his sanitation team were ordered to clean a Taylor Farms storage area, the 23-year-old didn’t like what he saw.
“I went into the hallway that they expected me to clean,” Lopez remembers. “There was pigeon feces, dead pigeons, dead bats and black mold. I’m certified for that, but the rest of my coworkers weren’t.” The crew had only been given dust masks for the job by the temporary labor contractor who employed them.
When Lopez raised concerns about the cleanup, he says Taylor Farms, which is the world’s largest producer of cut vegetables and salads, assured him everything was fine and not to bother with the mess. He says that later that evening, an equally unequipped and untrained night crew cleaned the room. Shortly after, Lopez was given his notice after only three weeks on the job.
This month Assemblyman Roger Hernandez (D-West Covina) heard Lopez’s and other stories in the Central Valley town of Tracy from about 200 mostly Latino Tracy Farms workers and family members.
Unlike the Kelly Girls of years past, today’s temp workers are just as likely to be hired to fill blue collar jobs as office positions, with one major caveat: the new “temporary” hires who pick crops, pack vegetables or clean hotel rooms can work at those jobs for years at the same company — and with little or no advancement. And, according to recent research, that’s exactly the way some of America’s largest companies like it.
The practice has become so pervasive that California Assemblymember Roger Hernandez (D-West Covina) is pushing forward a bill, modeled on similar laws passed in Illinois and Massachusetts, intended to hold companies accountable for serious violations of workers’ rights committed by their own labor suppliers.
See feature story on temp-labor contracting at Taylor Farms
“As new jobs are added to the economy, employers are utilizing the subcontracted model known as ‘perma-temps’ to avoid accountability in the workplace,” Hernandez said last week.
» Read more about: Who’s the Boss? Proposed California Law Would Rein in Abuse of Temp Workers »
In the most recent Coen brothers film, Inside Llewyn Davis, the protagonist — a struggling Greenwich Village folksinger in 1961 — is based, very loosely, on Dave Van Ronk, a little-known (outside folk music circles) but influential folk-singer who helped define the folk music revival of the late fifties, and mentored the young Bob Dylan and others during the early 1960s when what Van Ronk called the “great folk scare” took off. To understand the atmosphere of that music scene, the Coens relied on Van Ronk’s memoir (coauthored with Elijah Wald), The Mayor of McDougall Street. Van Ronk recounts his serious involvement with various left-wing factions of the period.
Little of Inside Llewyn Davis refers to the political atmosphere that permeated the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s. The film is filled with despair and loneliness, but the folk music world of that period was filled with hope and engagement.
» Read more about: Protest Music Is Always Blowin’ in the Wind »
For those with Internet access, free online classes from Ivy League universities, taught by some of the world’s top professors, are just a click away. But to a grassroots coalition of organizations representing hundreds of thousands of college and university educators, there’s a reason this promise seems too good to be true.
The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (CFHE), comprised of the California Faculty Association (a financial supporter of Capital & Main), the National Education Association, the California Community College Association and the American Federation of Teachers, along with dozens of other education and labor groups, is urging the public to not believe the hype. The CFHE is also asking the top three promoters of massive open online courses, commonly known as MOOCs, to tone down their claims and come clean about their main goal – to make a profit.
Online courses have been available since the1990s,
Under the deceptively bland headline, “House GOP Releases Ag Budget,” the center-right Politico website on Monday examined a proposed House Republican budget for agriculture and food safety programs. After noting that the bill would give a measly $3 million increase to efforts to regulate the derivatives market ($62 million less than the Commodity Futures Trading Commission requested), writer David Rogers reported that the GOP measure would make it easier for schools to adopt lower nutritional standards for their meal programs — and for starch bombs like white potatoes to be included as vegetables that are covered by a Women, Infants and Children supplemental feeding program.
Only way down, in the story’s fourth paragraph, did Rogers mention that, “in a surprising twist,” the House Republicans required that a pilot program to feed school children from low-income families during summer vacation be restricted to kids living in rural Appalachia. In other words,
» Read more about: House Conservatives Block Food to Needy City Kids »
The release of former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s new book, Stress Test — his self-serving account of the Obama administration’s effort to address the nation’s economic crisis and mortgage meltdown — has triggered a great deal of controversy and debate. Was the Obama economic team too cozy with, or too sympathetic, to Wall Street? Was the stimulus package large enough? Did Geithner, Larry Summers and Ben Bernanke stifle the views of dissidents within the administration — especially Council of Economic Advisors chair Christina Romer and FDIC chair Sheila Bair (perhaps not surprisingly, both women) — who urged bolder approaches?
But on at least one issue, there is a growing consensus: The Obama administration did too little, too late, to help troubled homeowners, who faced plummeting home prices and the risk of foreclosure.
Obama’s closest advisors wrongly assumed that as the economy improved, Americans would be better able to buy homes and pay the mortgage on existing homes.