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October 28th, 2017 
Awake Goy 
Above Photo: Flickr/USDA
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Two recent news stories with an Institute for Local Self Reliance insight into “The Public Good.”
Free School Meals for Everyone
In 2010, Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act, a law championed by first lady Michelle Obama. Among other provisions, the law offers universal federally subsidized lunch and breakfasts for schools with a significant proportion of low-income students.
Eligible schools must have at least 40 percent of the student body automatically qualify for free lunch because they’re homeless, or in foster care, enrolled in Head Start, or live in households which receive food stamps.
About 21.5 million students in the U.S. receive free or reduced-price school lunch on any given school day. About 12.1 million receive free or reduced-price school breakfasts.
The new program was created to overcome a significant shortcoming in the existing means-tested program. Many students don’t take advantage of the program because of the social stigma attached.
In New York City, for example, 75 percent of public school students are eligible for free or reduced prices but one in three skips lunch.
In 2016, Brooklyn high school senior Aminata Abdouramane explained why in Chalkbeat,
“The free and reduced-price lunch program creates a social class system that is reinforced daily by the school lunch line. Some students get lunch for free, some get it for a reduced price, and some pay the whole cost. Imagine you’re on the lunch line and another student sees you getting free lunch and takes advantage of this.
I’ve seen name-calling, put downs, bullying, labeling. I’ve witnessed a boy getting bullied over getting in line for “free-free.” The bully was yelling over the entire cafeteria, “You got free-free, yo!” Once this happens, you’re immediately an outcast. Everyone knows who you are — and in a very bad way.”
The 2010 law phased in over 4 years. In year 1, three states were eligible to participate: Illinois, Kentucky and Michigan. In Year 2, DC, NY, Ohio and West Virginia were added. Across the first 7 states, 2,312 schools participated. In year 3 Florida, Georgia, Maryland and Massachusetts were added. In year 4 (school year 2014-2015) the program became available nationwide. By that time 14,000 schools were participating. Today the number is over 20,000.
Once schools adopt universal school breakfasts and lunches the social stigma disappears and participation increases. Since Detroit adopted the program daily participation has increased by 22 percent across the district.
Universal school lunches saves parents the time and worry about filling out forms and submitting applications, and it saves the school district money because it no longer has to review individual parental applications. Detroit estimates the administrative savings at close to $200,000 a year.
A 2014 USDA evaluation of the impact of the universal school meal program in the 7 states that adopted the program during its first two pilot years found lunch participation 5.2 percent higher and breakfast participation 9.4 percent higher than when the programs were means-tested.
Another evaluation by the Food Research and Action Center of the early adopters found that lunch participation increased by 13 percent, and that breakfast participation increased by 25 percent.
When Ms. Abdouramane wrote her open letter to New York City school officials they had already brought the universal free school lunch program to New York’s middle schools in 2014. Principals in those middle schools reported that it led to more students eating lunch, and eating more nutritious food, at school and to positive social interactions among students. More kids eating lunch translates into more kids who are better able to concentrate in the classroom.
Nevertheless, it took a multi-year campaign, Lunch 4 Learning, led by students, as well as advocacy by a New York non-profit Community Food Advocate, to ultimately persuade the city.
On September 6th, the day before the start of the new school year, New York City’s school Chancellor Carmen Fariña announced that every child enrolled in NYC public schools—1.1 million children, from pre-K through 12th grade—will be able to eat lunch at school for no cost.
Just as the program was empirically proving its value, House Republicans tried to shrink the number of participants. In 2016, the House passed a bill that would have raised the minimum for eligibility from 40 percent of students in poverty to 60 percent. An analysis of the House bill by the Center on Budget and Policy found that upwards of 18,000 schools currently community eligible would become ineligible under the proposed 60 percent standard.
The 2016 Senate bill did not contain this provision. To date the two chambers have yet to agree. The proposal is still on the table.
Farmworkers of the World: Unite
Florida produces 90 percent of our winter tomatoes. The Immokalee region in southwestern Florida grows one-third of all U.S. tomatoes.
The plight of farmworkers in the Immokalee area has been known widely known, although very little had been done to alleviate that plight. The region was featured in Edward R. Murrow’s searing and widely watched 1960 TV show, Harvest of Shame. In the 1980s, says Janice Fine, an associate professor of labor relations at Rutgers University told Tracie McMillan of Modern Farmer, “it was the closest thing possible to hell on earth.”
Eve Turow Paul, writing in the Huffington Post in early 2015, brought the story into the 21st century, “More than 1,200 people have been freed from agricultural slavery rings in Florida during the last 10 to 15 years. Workers tell stories of brutal beatings, being shackled in chains at night, no regular pay for work, housing where 20 pickers share one mobile home and are each charged upwards of $200 per month in rent. Yes, per person. No shade in the fields, no breaks for meals, 10 to 12 hour workdays, seven days a week.”
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) was founded in 1993. Its first target was the tomato growers. After years of marches and strikes the farm workers realized the growers were not going to raise wages or improve working conditions unless their buyers would help cover the cost. The CIW began to target the buyers of tomatoes: grocery stores, restaurants, institutional food service companies.
The workers demand was easy to communicate to the general public: an additional penny a pound for the tomatoes they picked. At the time they were earning about 1.5 cents per pound, not much more than they had collected 25 years before. We pay $1 to $4 per pound in the grocery store for those tomatoes. An extra penny a pound would cost the average tomato-buying family a minimal 40 cents a year but as McMillan observes, “If corporate buyers agreed to pay that tiny premium, and the premium went toward wages, workers would, in effect, receive a nearly 80 percent raise.”
The Campaign for Fair Food’s first target was Taco Bell. Student-customers aided the campaign immensely. At more than 300 college campuses and 50 high schools they urged people to “Boot the Bell” until the chain responded to the workers demands. At one point 22 colleges banned Taco Bell from operating.
In 2005, after 4 years of picketing, organizing, and demonstrating, the workers convinced Taco Bell and its parent company, Yum! Brands, to agree to their a-penny-more demand. Two years later, McDonald’s signed up. In 2008, Burger King, Subway, and Whole Foods Market followed suit. In 2010, the campaign added Aramark and Sodexo, two of the country’s largest institutional food service companies, to its list of partners. In 2012 Chipotle and Trader Joes agreed. In 2014 and 2015 Walmart and Ahold, respectively, agreed to work on behalf of the 30,000 workers in their combined supply chains.
The buyers’ agreement was a necessary, but not yet sufficient condition for worker success. They still had to win the active partnership of the growers for their demands for dignity and better working conditions.. In 2010, the various campaigns, abundant adverse publicity and the increasing numbers of buyers who signed up. persuaded Florida’s tomato growers to sign on to the Fair Food Program (FFP) and with that agreement, the scheme went into effect.
Companies that comply with the Fair Food Program are committed to buy tomatoes only from growers who agree with the CIW Code of Conduct, a code that ensures:
- Workers must be hired directly instead of through contractors.
- Growers must pay pickers for time spent waiting for work to begin, and provide clean drinking water and shaded areas.
- Zero tolerance for forced labor, child labor and sexual assault;
- Worker-to-worker education sessions conducted by the CIW on the farms and on company time
- Health and safety committees on every farm to give workers a structured voice in the shape of their work environment;
- the provision of shade in the fields, and the use of time clocks to record and count all compensable hours accurately; and
- Ongoing auditing of the farms by the Fair Food Standards Council to insure compliance with each element of the program.
- A 24/7 complaint hotline, where the Fair Food Standards Council will investigate complaints within 2 days, initiate corrective action plans, and, if necessary, suspend a farm’s Participating Grower status, and thus its ability to sell to Participating Buyers; the FFSC can require growers to fire abusive supervisors. Workers cannot be fired for complaining about conditions
In late 2014 a Fair Food label was introduced to inform shoppers at the time of purchase whether their tomatoes have been picked under fair conditions.
The Fair Food Program now has 14 buyer/partners and the Code of Conduct now covers 90 percent of the tomatoes grown in Florida. There are still holdouts. Wendy’s initial response to the workers successes was to shift its purchase of tomatoes from Florida to Mexico where prize-winning Los Angeles Times reporting had documented unbridled farmworker abuse. In 2016 the Campaign for Fair Food called for a boycott of Wendy’s. In early 2017 Wendy’s responded by announcing its own “enhanced” supplier code of conduct. Wendy’s refused to pay a penny a pound more or embrace CIW’s worker-supervised code of conduct.
“The Wendy’s code falls squarely within the tradition of corporate social responsibility,” Susan L. Marquis of the RAND corporation observes, “its reasonable set of standards has little chance of being effective since it relies on occasional third-party audits without active monitoring by those in the fields or factories. Also missing are strong penalties for suppliers who do not comply.”
Meanwhile the Fair Food Program spread to cover tomato growers in North Carolina, New Jersey, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland, as well as bell pepper and strawberry pickers in Florida.
In 2017 the campaign broke through into another region and another industry: New England dairy farms.
There are about 1,500 workers in Vermont’s dairy industry. A 2014 survey of 170 Vermont dairy workers by Migrant Justice, a non profit organization based in Burlington that provided assistance to dairy workers, found that 40 percent received less than the Vermont minimum wage, 40 percent don’t have a day off, many don’t have access to a bathroom or clean water and their schedules frequently kept them from sleeping more than a few hours at a time. The workers tend to be undocumented, making it difficult for them to speak out.
In late 2014 Migrant Justice launched its Milk with Dignity campaign, using the CIW’s playbook.
In June 2015 the group’s effort received a boost when Ben & Jerry’s formally agreed in principle to support the Milk With Dignity program. But negotiating the details of the agreement, which affects nearly 90 farms that typically employ up to 10 workers apiece, dragged on for years.
Migrant Justice took several actions, including protests and marches, to put pressure on Ben & Jerry’s. Finally, on October Jostein Solheim the CEO of Ben and Jerry’s, now a subsidiary of Unilever, formally signed the agreement.
“This is the first expansion that we’ve seen from the model of worker-driven social responsibility that was pioneered by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in the Florida tomato fields,” Enrique Balcazar of Migrant Justice told NPR.
Workers at dairy farms that supply Ben & Jerry’s will have the right to one day off a week as well as paid sick days and will earn at least the state minimum wage, currently $10 an hour. Workers will also be guaranteed at least eight consecutive hours of rest between shifts and housing accommodations that include a bed and access to electricity and clean running water.
Compliance will be monitored by the Milk with Dignity Standards Council by a former staff lawyer at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project, which will conduct audits. Ben & Jerry’s will effectively finance the benefits by paying an undisclosed premium on the milk it buys, based on volume.
The key to the effectiveness of these agreements is whether the workers are informed about their rights and have a vehicle to defend them. This agreement, like those with the tomato pickers, includes those elements. It’s an agreement that puts the worker in charge of workers’ rights,” Solheim told the New York Times.
The program will be adopted in stages, with some standards, like prohibitions on sexual assault, forced labor and violence toward workers, taking effect immediately. Others, like raising pay to the minimum wage, will come more gradually. Farms must first go through an orientation, and workers must complete education sessions before Ben & Jerry’s begins making the larger payments that will finance some of the benefits.
Source Article from https://popularresistance.org/free-school-meals-for-everyone/
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