Workers’ rights were centred at the Architectural Association last year, at a Symposium organised by Root and Branch Collective, Locating the Agrarian Struggles for Land, as well as in several sessions in this year’s Oxford Real Farming Conference: Workers Rights and Racial Justice in the Justice Strand, and Workers and Farmers United for a Right to Food and Food Sovereignty in the Landworkers’ Alliance Room. 

Here, our Movement Building Coordinator, Christabel, reflects on her participation at these events and how to make workers’ rights a real part of the agroecological transition. 

‍Agroecological land initiatives mimic dominant industrial farming 

Workers’ rights are becoming more of a talking point in the food and land movement. When it comes to access to land for agroecological farming, fair conditions and pay are a foundational part of food sovereignty and the agroecology movement. However, the reality of labour in an extractive capitalist system - and in the alternative systems we are creating - is proving contentious, and airing important questions for us in the movement. 

Agroecology is about farming with a symbiotic and life giving relationship with the land and communities, and breaks with the exploitative practices of monocultured agriculture systems. The movement in the UK has come a long way in making clear demands and building a drive for a revolution in food systems, notably since the creation of the Landworkers’ Alliance (LWA), a member of La Via Campesina, the Global Alliance for Food Sovereignty.  

In the panel at the Symposium, I heard Catherine McAndrew from the LWA, and Claire Ratinon and Nell Benney from Solidarity Across Land Trades (SALT) arguing for taking more notice of labour conditions not just for migrant labourers on industrial farms but also for workers in agroecological initiatives. Research by Solidarity Across Land Trades (SALT) exposes that currently some agroecological initiatives mimic the agricultural mainstream when it comes to workers’ rights.

Catherine talked about industrial farming’s shady employment practices under the Seasonal Worker Scheme: hiring migrant labourers and exploiting them through low wages, wage theft, excessive hours, debt bondage, and abuse by supervisors (see their report Debt, Migration and Exploitation). The Justice is Not Seasonal campaign brings a legal challenge to farms accused amongst other things of human trafficking and modern slavery through the United Voices of the World (UVW) union. The Food in our Hands march in London had a significant block occupied by these Latinx migrant workers and their supporters.

This kind of exploitation is common in enterprises which operate within global agricapitalism; however, it's not unique to large industrial farms. Solidarity Across Land Trades (SALT) is a new union for land workers, forming as a branch of Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU) in 2023. This was in response to landworkers looking to raise issues around pay and conditions, particularly on agroecological farms, where they felt there wasn’t already a channel to address perceived exploitation. Whilst this isn’t the same as migrant labour being exploited seasonally, because of the vulnerability of being subject to border control and discrimination, there are similarities in that workers are not being paid what they are due, often live in poor conditions, and are not aware of their rights. 

SALT have recently released a workers’ inquiry documenting conditions which they describe as exploitative in the agroecology sector and demonstrating the need for recognition of a union. In the union, they are representing all people who labour within other people’s land related businesses: apprentices, trainees, volunteers, employees, self-employed, and unemployed - or yet to be employed. 

In the SALT report, cases of exploitation on agroecological farms showed some workers received no or little pay and poor working conditions in which the worker is dependent on the employer for e.g. housing, food and transport. Many workers do not know that hiring on traineeships is illegal in the agricultural sector, and therefore that payment under minimum wage is also illegal. 

The report acknowledges that overwork and self-exploitation is present amongst farm owners, as well as amongst landworkers. Claire Ratinon in her talk at ORFC describes how this is influenced by the belief in creating a radically new system. Also acknowledged in the report was that survival as an agroecological initiative is difficult when markets - along with depressed wages and alongside high rents - favour cheap imported food (which is the result of the globalised food system built on slavery and perpetuated through cheap labour). 

SALT’s inquiry shows that the role of the worker is being ignored in these agroecological initiatives - they are burned out, stressed and isolated. They haven’t felt heard in the movement and there is a normalisation of poor and unsafe conditions, that Claire argues would not be acceptable in other sectors. The lack of knowledge around workers’ rights shows the need for a union for workers but also for more awareness in the movement and amongst employers.  SALT have been offering Know Your Rights workshops to landworkers, with one aimed specifically as BPOC landworkers coming up. 

‍Narratives in the movement obscure exploitation

Nell Benney argues in her ongoing research that underpaying workers is key to the agroecological sector’s survival. The prevalence of traineeships and other voluntary positions is supported by the idea that agroecological initiatives are innately doing something good and contributing to this shared future. This viewpoint is based on real positives such as the environmental impact and potential of these initiatives to show an alternative to industrial farming if they continue to thrive. 

However, from the talk, there are two pervasive ideas that need challenging within the agroecology movement because they perpetuate the power of landowners over workers: that people should be grateful for the opportunity to be part of the agroecological transition, and “we aren’t paying ourselves, so I don’t need to pay you either”. 

These justifications ignore the problem of the inequality and inaccessibility of owning land. When land is acquired through inheritance or access to capital, most people are excluded. The only way to be part of the agroecological transition is to become landworkers, which means working for someone else. 

Landworkers are in a structurally precarious position, and do not have the power, or often know their rights, to challenge poor labour practices on the farm. In the ORFC session Racial Justice and Workers Rights, participants were challenged to think about how power shows up in their workplace and how to challenge it. The speakers talked about how classism and racism experienced by workers today are intrinsically connected to the plantation - showing deep colonial relations which underpin the dominant food system.

Currently, there is also a lack of class literacy in the movement. According to SALT, the problem with referring to all food producers as ‘landworkers’ is that it conflates two very different economic subjects and interests. Land owners with farm businesses are farmers, but not landworkers, because they are, or have the ability to be, employers. This narrative prevents the movement from turning a critical eye to the key class difference between a land owner and landworker, and between an employer and a land worker. It also alienates landworkers from the movement, if the power holders and decision makers in the movement are land owners.

Claire from SALT talked about an exceptionalism in these initiatives, which is held up by narratives within the movement. If you compare the example of landworkers and their land owning farmer to the factory workers and factory bosses in food processing, if the workers were hired on less than minimum wage, they would organise for their right to be fairly paid. However employment practices are sometimes not activated in agroecological initiatives because landworkers are brought in on short term traineeships, which is something SALT is challenging too. Inspiration can be taken from other workers, for example the Coalition of Immokalee Workers who have organised to change the conditions of their employment. 

‍We need to shift narratives, structures and who is part of this movement

A key question in these discussions is whether, if these farms thrive off the back of exploitation, are they transformative? Should they continue to rely on cheap or unpaid labour in this ‘transition’ to an agroecological future, as the alternative is to risk their survival?  

Currently there is an assumption amongst some farmers and people in the movement that agroecological initiatives can’t survive if landworkers are paid enough to make a livelihood. Arguably, this ignores the power differences and exploitation of workers that are being replicated in initiatives which are claiming to be different. As Claire from SALT explains: “if we ignore workers, we cannot build a just and fair food system on the same dynamics of exploitation that we are supposedly disrupting.” 

So, how do we turn the movement from complicity in labour exploitation to a movement which centres working class interests?

Often the focus on what we do with land overshadows who has access to and decision making power over land. We need to make sure that those most marginalised by the land are centred in the movement and that land redistribution also takes into account reparations. At Shared Assets, we are looking at ways that power relationships can shift in agricultural projects, for example the Land Match project which is developing a service to match existing land owners with landseekers, and equips landowners with information about barriers Black and People and Colour (BPOC) face in becoming landworkers, thanks to the groundwork done by Pathways to Land for BPOC. Changing the immediate conditions for the sector in this transition also requires lobbying for more subsidised support for agroecological initiatives, which the movement is doing - namely in the BI4Farmers campaign. Importantly, we need to ensure that financial support goes to landworkers as well as farmers. 

Making workers’ rights a real part of the agroecological transition requires understanding class dynamics and challenging blindspots whilst acknowledging the limitations and contradictions in setting up alternatives in the capitalist system. This difficult transition to a new way of farming requires us to shift our relationships to land, challenging who has ownership. It also requires that we don’t do this apart from changing other aspects of the economy: including more affordable housing, workers’ rights, and challenging the practices we have inherited from a food system with colonial origins.