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Victory to the farmworkers! Coalition of Immokalee Workers announces that Subway has signed on to the penny-per-pound pass-through agreement

Fellow workers,

The Blockheads of the world may insist that unions survive only through violence, and win only through either the intervention of the State or vigilantism against non-unionized fellow workers. Yet somehow, today, I find this message from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers — and a similar e-mail from their allies in the Student/Farmworker Alliance — a southern Florida farmworker’s union that uses nonviolent protest, secondary boycotts, and other creative pressure campaigns on behalf of Florida tomato pickers, and which (because it is a farmworkers’ union) has no access at all to the government labor relations bureaucracy. Somehow, they have survived. Somehow, they have won — again.

From: Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Date: 11:29 AM
To: announce@lists.ciw-online.org
Subject: [CIW News] SUBWAY SIGNS!

Subway, the third largest fast-food chain in the world and the biggest fast-food buyer of Florida tomatoes, reached an agreement this morning with the CIW to help improve wages and working conditions for the workers who pick their tomatoes!

Be sure to visit http://www.ciw-online.org for a photo of the signing and check back soon for more details about this exciting development in the Campaign for Fair Food.

If you are planning a protest as part of the Northeast tour, we ask you to stand down. The tour will still be hitting the road to visit Northeast with news of this newest victory and information on where the Campaign for Fair Food will head next. An updated schedule of events will be posted on the website soon.

Thanks,

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers

For those keeping track at home, here’s the timeline of C.I.W. victories in the penny-per-pound campaign:

  • April 2001: C.I.W. launches the Boycott the Bell campaign against Taco Bell, the first campaign to pressure a fast food restaurant into joining the penny-per-pound pass-through program to improve the piece rate for Florida tomato pickers.

  • March 2005 — 4 years later: The C.I.W. announces victory in the Taco Bell campaign after four years of negotiations, boycotts, protests, and, finally, a hardball campaign to enlist sympathetic student groups to Boot the Bell by pressuring their colleges and high schools to cancel or call off food-service contracts with Taco Bell. Taco Bell now becomes the first fast food provider to voluntarily pass through money to increase farmworkers’ wages. The C.I.W. announces that it will now turn its attention to getting similar agreements from other large fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Burger King.

  • April 2007 — 2 years after that: The C.I.W. announces victory with a penny-per-pound agreement from McDonald’s. It takes two years of negotiations and a low-intensity pressure campaign; just after the C.I.W. announces it is about to escalate with another Taco Bell-style boycott and Truth Tour, McDonald’s signs on for the agreement. The C.I.W. announces that it will organize its next campaign, focusing on Burger King.

  • May 2008 — 1 year after that: The C.I.W. announces victory with a penny-per-pound agreement from Burger King after a year of negotiations, some very dirty dealing by Burger King (most of which came back to haunt them when it was exposed), public protests by the C.I.W. and its allies, and national press attention from journalists who supported the C.I.W. and opposed Burger King’s union busting tactics. 13 months after the C.I.W. began its Burger King campaign, Burger King announces that it will sign on for the penny-per-pound agreement. The C.I.W. announces that it will organize campaigns to get new agreements from fast-food restaurants and grocery stores like Whole Foods, Subway, and Chipotle, which sell themselves as healthy, sustainable businesses.

  • September 2008 — 4 months after that: The C.I.W. announces victory with a penny-per-pound agreement from Whole Foods. The C.I.W. announces that it will turn its attention to escalating their campaigns to win similar agreements from Subway and Chipotle.

  • December 2008 — 3 months after that: After seven months of negotiations, and three months of a low-intensity pressure campaign (focusing on getting supporters to send postcards to Subway’s CEO), the C.I.W. announces plans to launch a multi-city protest Truth Tour in the northeast. Just before the tour begins, Subway agrees to sign on to the penny-per-pound agreement.

If the accelerating trend continues, we can expect the next C.I.W. victory to be announced some time around late January or February. (Except for Whole Foods being two months early, the time it takes for each new victory has consistently followed a geometric decay curve. That can’t last forever, but here’s hoping it holds for a while yet.) In any case, this is a big win, and it's hardly the end. The C.I.W. is still fighting to get an agreement from Chipotle, and is preparing to organize pressure campaigns for other supermarkets and food service outfits. There's a lot more yet to come.

Fellow workers, the C.I.W.’s ongoing series of inspiring victories for Florida farmworkers are both an inspiration and a reminder. We should never forget the power of creative extremism and wildcat unionism — a power that needs no government, no ballot boxes, no political bosses, no Officially Recognized labor bureaucrats, no lawyers, and no Changeling political parties. It’s the power that fellow worker Joe Ettor reminded us all of, as he and his fellow workers struggled to a hard-won victory in the great Bread and Roses textile strike of 1912, when he said:

If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. As long as the workers keep their hands in their pockets, the capitalists cannot put theirs there. With passive resistance, with the workers absolutely refusing to move, lying absolutely silent, they are more powerful than all the weapons and instruments that the other side has for attack.

Yes, we can do it–ourselves. And we will.

¡La lucha sigue–victory to the farmworkers!

See also:

Even better than I thought: victory for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers against the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, too

On Friday I mentioned that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers had just announced victory in the Burger King penny-a-pound pass-through campaign. It turns out that the news is even better than I thought. The news reports that have come out since the announcement reveal that not only did Burger King agree to join the penny-a-pound, but the Florida Tomato Growers’ Exchange (the cartel and legislative lobby which represents 90% of Florida tomato farm owners) has also substantially caved in the face of pressure from the CIW and its supporters. Although they are still saying that member farms should not participate, they’ve given up on the hardball tactics they were trying to use to enforce cartel discipline.

Whether workers actually get the increase hinges on tomato growers’ participation.

McDonald’s and Yum! Brands, the world’s biggest fast-food chain and restaurant company, respectively, already have agreed to the raise; Yum!, parent company of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and more, signed on in 2005; McDonald’s in 2007.

Workers got the extra money for two seasons, then the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange threatened $100,000 fines to any grower member who participated, which stalled the payouts. They’ve since been collecting in escrow. About 90 percent of the state’s tomato growers belong to the exchange.

But the exchange announced Thursday it would no longer threaten members with those fines, said executive vice-president Reggie Brown, in response to inordinate and inappropriate focus on the (fines) by the media.

— Amy Bennett Williams, Ft. Myers News-Press (2008-05-24): Tomato pickers celebrate deal with Burger King

Brown is still muttering baseless and murky threats about federal antitrust laws and how participating in the pass-through program could somehow subject growers to lawsuits. (Subjected to lawsuits by whom? Is that supposed to be a prediction or a threat?) So there is still a danger of some very dirty pool and government union-busting here. But the FTGE looks like it’s on the ropes, and their retracting the threat of fines makes it much more likely that individual farm owners will begin participating in the pass-through program again, if nothing else as an incentive for attracting workers away from non-participating farms — an incentive which it costs the farm owners nothing to offer.

In the meantime, the fast-food participants have announced that they will continue to honor the penny-per-pound agreement and pay into the escrow account in case growers change their minds:

McDonald’s and Yum Brands, the world’s biggest fast-food chain and restaurant company, respectively, have agreed to the raise …. Yum, parent company of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and more, signed on in 2005; McDonald’s in 2007.

Workers received the extra money for two seasons, but then the threatened fines from the exchange stalled payouts. Both companies have been honoring the agreement with the raise amount collecting in escrow.

They say they will continue to honor the agreement.

It’s the right thing to do, and we encourage others to follow our lead, said Taco Bell spokesman Rob Poetsch. While we continue to set aside monies for the affected workers, we’re disappointed that the intended recipients are being penalized.

Now that the threat of fines is gone, members and supporters of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are wondering what it might mean.

If the (threats of fines) are in fact being lifted, that would be good news, said coalition co-founder Lucas Benitez. We hope our agreements with Yum and McDonald’s will be allowed to again function as they had in the past and workers received a fairer wage.

— Amy Bennett Williams, Ft. Myers News-Press (2008-05-23): Tomato growers' group relents on imposing fine for giving pickers raise

Eric Schlosser, who has been doing some very good work in reporting on the C.I.W.’s struggle, offers an analysis that combines some incredibly muddled history with some admirably clear-sighted analysis of the current position of the C.I.W. within the farmworkers’ struggle:

This may be the most important victory for American farmworkers since passage of California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975. That bill heralded a golden age for farm workers. But the state government apparatus it created, the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, got taken over by the growers in the 1980s and watered down the reforms. In Florida, the Coalition has chosen a different path, avoiding government and putting pressure on the corporations at the top of nation’s food chain. The strategy clearly works and can be emulated by other workers in other states. In the absence of a government that cares about the people at the bottom, here’s a way to achieve change.

–Eric Schlosser, quoted by Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation (2008-05-23): Sweet Victory: Coalition for Immokalee Workers Wins

The muddle, of course, has to do with the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board and the mythical golden age for farmworkers. Actually the ALRB is exactly what strangled the dynamism of the once-vibrant United Farm Workers, by pulling California farmworkers’ unions into the smothering embrace of bureaucratic patronage, which had strangled the dynamism of the rest of the labor movement for decades under the Wagner/Taft-Hartley system — thus capturing a once revolutionary movement and converting it into just another arm of the State-domesticated labor establishment. It should be no surprise that within a decade the ALRB had been completely captured by the farm bosses; government boards are always captured by the most powerful and best-connected players. Any look at history or at the basics of political economy should quickly demonstrate that Schlosser’s in the absence of is really a statement of universal truth, not a remark on the sad state of affairs today: there will never be a government that cares about the people on the bottom. It’s the State that largely puts them on the bottom in the first place and then keeps them there. Any scraps that it may throw down from the master’s table are intended to keep the rest of us just barely fed enough to keep begging, instead of giving up and taking matters into our own hands.

What Schlosser is right about is that the C.I.W.’s strategy works, and deserves emulation. What I’d want to add, and stress, is that it works not despite the fact that they have avoided entangling themselves in the government labor bureaucracy; it works because they have. The C.I.W. has won all these struggles precisely because they have used creative fight-to-win tactics (especially secondary boycotts) that would be completely illegal if they were subject to the bureaucratic discipline of the NLRB. It’s precisely the freedom that they enjoy as a wildcat union, ineligible for NLRB recognition, which has allowed them to disregard the usual modesty in demands and politeness in means that the Taft-Hartley rules demand.

These victories with the FTGE and Burger King are not the end. The C.I.W. has announced that it will now challenge grocery stores and other fast food restaurants to join Yum Brands, McDonald’s, and Burger King in the pass-through agreement. Every victory in this campaign has made the next victory come quicker: the Taco Bell boycott took four years for victory (from 2001 to 2005); the C.I.W. won an agreement from McDonald’s after two years of active campaigning (from March 2005 to April 2007); and these victories in campaigns against Burger King and the FTGE took just over one year (from April 2007 to May 2008). Lucas Benitez has indicated that the C.I.W. will most likely target Chipotle and Whole Foods next — that is, major tomato buyers who each have a significant stake in maintaining a brand image of corporate social responsibility. There’s good reason to hope that the trend will continue and these campaigns will lead to a speedy victory.

Fellow workers, this past week’s victories for creative extremism and wildcat unionism are both an inspiration and a reminder. We should never forget that the workers have more power standing with our hands in our pockets than all the wealth and weapons of the plutocrats and politicians. Yes, we can do it–ourselves. And we will.

See also:

Coalition of Immokalee Workers marches in Miami

Fellow workers:

Right now, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are marching in the streets of Miami, as part of their campaign to win wage increases for tomato pickers whose tomatoes are bought by Burger King. Here’s why.

Today, farmworkers from Immokalee, Florida and their religious, labor, and student allies are marching 9 miles through the streets of Miami to the world headquarters of Burger King.

Today we march because there is a human rights crisis in the fields of Florida. Tomato pickers who harvest tomatoes for the fast-food industry face sweatshop conditions every day, including sub-poverty, stagnant wages (pickers earn about $10,000/year on average and a per-bucket piece rate that has not changed significantly since 1978) and the denial of basic labor rights.

Today we march because to earn minimum wage for a 10-hour day, a tomato picker in Florida must harvest over TWO AND A HALF TONS of tomatoes.

Today we are marching because, in the most extreme cases, farmworkers face conditions of modern-day slavery. We have seen five slavery operations in the fields brought to the federal courts since 1997, helping to liberate over 1,000 workers and sending 10 employers to prison.

Today we march because Burger King contributes directly to farmworkers' poverty through its high-volume purchasing practices, for decades demanding the cheapest tomatoes possible but never demanding fair treatment or just wages for the people who harvest those tomatoes.

Today we are marching because we have hope. In the past years farmworkers and consumers have united to bring Yum Brands (the world’s largest restaurant corporation) and McDonald’s to the table to help improve tomato pickers’ wages and working conditions.

Today we march because, in the wake of these changes, we stand on the threshold of a more modern, more humane agricultural industry in Florida. Yet, facing this historic opportunity, Burger King has responded with lies and excuses to not take responsibility.

Today we are marching to say ENOUGH.

Today we are marching for the dignity of workers, consumers, and our communities alike.

JOIN US as we demand justice. Rally at Burger King headquarters this afternoon, 3:30 to 6:00, at Blue Lagoon Drive and NW 57 Ave.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers (2007-11-30): Why We March

Migrant farmworkers in southern Florida spend every workday picking tomatoes by hand for 10 to 12 hours at a stretch, at a piece rate of $0.40–$0.45 for every 32 pound bucket that they fill (or about 1¼ to 1½ pennies per pound of tomatoes picked). Since that piece rate hasn’t changed since 1978, farmworker’s real wages have actually fallen by more than two thirds over the past three decades, thanks to the combination of the farm bosses’ efforts to stonewall wage increases and the Federal Reserve’s efforts to keep the market safe for finance capital by eating up the value of other people’s wages.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a farmworkers’ union founded in 1993 and organized along community workers’ council lines, has been working to change all that. They are mostly immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean; many of them have no legal immigration papers; they are pretty near all mestizo, Indian, or Black; they have to speak at least four different languages amongst themselves; they are often heavily in debt to coyotes or labor sharks for the cost of their travel to the U.S.; they get no benefits and no overtime; they have no fixed place of employment and get work from day to day only at the pleasure of the growers; they work at many different sites spread out anywhere from 10–100 miles from their homes; they often have to move to follow work over the course of the year; and they are extremely poor (most tomato pickers live on about $7,500–$10,000 per year, and spend months with little or no work when the harvesting season ends). But in the face of all that, and across lines of race, culture, nationality, and language, the C.I.W. have organized themselves anyway, through efforts that are nothing short of heroic, and they have done it as a wildcat union with no recognition from the federal labor bureaucracy and little outside help from the organized labor establishment. By using creative nonviolent tactics that would be completely illegal if they were subject to the bureaucratic discipline of the Taft-Hartley Act, the C.I.W. has won major victories on wages and conditions over the past two years. They have bypassed the approved channels of collective bargaining between select union reps and the boss, and gone up the supply chain to pressure the tomato buyers, because they realized that they can exercise a lot more leverage against highly visible corporations with brands to protect than they can in dealing with a cartel of government-subsidized vegetable growers that most people outside of southern Florida wouldn’t know from Adam.

The C.I.W.’s creative use of moral suasion and secondary boycott tactics have already won them agreements with Taco Bell (in 2005) and then McDonald’s (this past spring), which almost doubled the effective piece rate for tomatoes picked for these restaurants. They established a system for pass-through payments, under which participating restaurants agreed to pay a bonus of an additional penny per pound of tomatoes bought, which an independent accountant distributed to the pickers at the farm that the restaurant bought from. Each individual agreement makes a significant but relatively small increase in the worker’s effective wages — about $100 more per worker per year in the case of the Taco Bell agreement — but each victory won means a concrete increase in wages, and an easier road to getting the pass-through system adopted industry-wide, which would in the end nearly double tomato-pickers’ annual income.

Since the victory in the McDonald’s campaign, the C.I.W. have turned their attention from the Clown to the Crown, and Burger King Inc. has mostly followed the same path as Yum! Brands and McDonald’s did. First they ignored them. Then they stonewalled them. Then they tried to make up some excuses, and had a P.R. flack make an ill-considered little funny about how distressed farmworkers should apply for a job at their stores. (If I recall correctly, that same exact joke was recycled from Taco Bell.) Unfortunately, before moving on to the inevitable last step — in which they cave, the C.I.W. wins, the farm workers get a bonus, and the fast food chain gets to issue a press release patting themselves on the back for their humanitarian buying standards — Burger King has decided to make a detour through some dirty anti-labor joint maneuvers with the Florida tomato growers’ cartel.

The Florida Tomato Growers’ Exchange is a cartel and legislative lobby which represents more than 90% of Florida’s tomato growers. It has recently set out to destroy the pass-through system. Since the bonuses are paid by the buyers, the system costs the farm bosses nothing to implement, and I’m not entirely clear what their interest is here (although, if I had to guess, they are probably worried that widespread success for the system would raise workers’ expectations about pay and conditions). Burger King and the cartel recently teamed up on a joint P.R. campaign intended to convince the eating public that farm workers are actually richer than most minimum-wage workers, and besides which the farm bosses pay for charity houses and scholarships for their poor kids. (The basis for their argument is a comparison of estimated hourly wages. Of course, the reliability of those hours, or the total annual income, is never mentioned.)

Meanwhile, the F.T.G.E. and Burger King have endorsed the cartel’s yellow-dog auditing agency, S.A.F.E. Reps from Burger King and the tomato cartel have also teamed up with a Republican state congressman to discredit the C.I.W., by claiming that the set-up looks fishy, denouncing nonviolent protest and consumer boycotts as extortion, and then insinuating that the pass-through system is little more than a channel for graft, and that C.I.W. is pocketing a skim. Since they have no empirical evidence for this claim, they have relied on innuendo and unsubstantiated soundbites, and they have refused to give any backing for their claims, while steadfastly ignoring the offers of participating restaurants, who dismiss the claim, to explain how the system works.

Meanwhile, Reggie Brown, the tomato cartel’s professional spokesdick, has invoked the spectre of federal prosecution, claiming that the C.I.W.’s voluntary pass-through system somehow violates federal antitrust and racketeering laws. Brown has also denounced the freely bargained agreements as un-American, apparently because they organized bosses’ divine right to control the terms of wage negotiations with no input from workers organizations or, for that matter, their customers. The cartel has publicly warned its members not to participate, and, behind the scenes, they have apparently threatened any member who participates in the penny-per-pound pass-through system with a $100,000 fine. As a result, while Taco Bell and McDonald’s are still willing to participate in the bonus system, all of the growers have, as of now, announced that they will not participate next year.

Well, fine. If they want to play hardball, let them play hardball. Workers are more than capable of hitting that hardball right back. The main danger, at this point, is that, with spokesdick Brown’s muttered fulminations about federal prosecution and the bosses’ enlistment of state government creeps on their side, this fight may get kicked from creative, nonviolent industrial action, over into the stifling atmosphere of legal and regulatory action. As long as the C.I.W., and the workers and consumers acting in solidarity with them, keep away from political action, we have all the resources we need to beat them. The Taco Bell boycott was won, after years of stonewalling, through fight-to-win tactics like working with sympathetic students to get Taco Bell franchises booted out of campus dining halls. This fight can be won through more of the same, and better. Never forget that the workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the weapons and property that the plutocrats have to attack us. As Robin Blumner writes in the St. Petersburg Times:

The coalition initially tried to convince the growers to pay the added penny but they wouldn’t budge, so the group sought to enlist fast-food giants instead. Go to the major buyers who have reputations to uphold and have them pay the penny. It was a brilliant stroke.

Consumers tend to respond well to a company they think is socially responsible, and the converse is true.

… According to [C.I.W. rep Julia] Perkins, there are growers willing to help their workers secure this additional wage but the exchange is standing in the way.

Both Yum Brands and McDonald’s say they are committed to their agreement with the coalition. It appears that for now, however, things are on hold until the coalition and these companies can figure out a way around the intransigence of the exchange.

This is how it often is in labor fights: Employers dig in so hard that even an extra penny – one that they’re not even paying – is too much to ask. No wonder they can’t find Americans to do this work.

In the meantime, the coalition is trying to convince Burger King Corp. to come aboard, and is planning a demonstration at its headquarters in Miami on Friday. Keva Silversmith, a Burger King representative, says that the Florida growers have a right to run their business how they see fit.

I guess expending the $250,000 it would cost Burger King is simply too much for a company that is paying its CEO $2.35-million a year.

Okay consumers, sic ’em.

— Robin Blumner, St. Petersburg Times (2007-11-25): At a penny per pound, a little adds up to a lot

Further reading:

Anarquistas por La Causa

Today, 31 March 2005, is César Chávez Day–the 78th anniversary of Chávez’s birth near Yuma, Arizona, and a state holiday (I’m told it’s officially celebrated in California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Michigan) commemorating his lifelong work as an union organizer, agitator, and Chicano activist in the Southwestern United States. Chávez, together with Dolores Huerta, co-founded the ground-breaking United Farm Workers, and organized and inspired a generation of organized labor and Chicano community activists. Hugo Schwyzer has some more thoughts on Chávez’s legacy today; and of course you can find plenty to read from the United Farm Workers’ website.

As far as commemorating Chávez goes, they’ve said it better than I could. I’ll be commemorating the day by talking some more about libertarianism, organized labor, and the struggle of farmworkers in southern Florida–the workers organized by Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Taco Bell Boycott they launched and, just a few days ago, won–a campaign that was directly inspired by the UFW grape boycott that Chávez helped craft and win, and a campaign that was thrilled to receive the UFW’s endorsement in August 2001.

A few days ago, I prodded Daniel D’Amico in this space and in commentary on his blog over his criticisms of the Taco Bell boycott. He’s since come back with a reply to my prodding and to some similar concerns raised by other commentators. And since we have a nice convergence between the date and a question that might be of some interest–that is, libertarianism and labor, and the compatibility of principled anti-statism and a fighting labor movement–I figured that now is as good a time as any to offer a response to the response.

Before we begin, though, let’s hop onto a long tangent about terminology. Daniel leads off his argument by saying:

The Austrian school and libertarianism alike are against government control of market transactions, but the CIW appears to be refraining from such tactics, so what’s my problem anyway? Simply put I believe, there are more ways to be anti-capitalist than just using government. Mainly promoting ideas that capitalism is evil or claiming it resorts to rampant market failure are, in my view, anti-capitalist.

Some of Daniel’s other commentators had asked him what he thought made the boycott anti-capitalist, but I didn’t and I’m not going to. I don’t have any strong opinions on whether or not the Taco Bell boycott is anti-capitalist because I haven’t got any strong opinions about what capitalism (or, a fortiori, anti-capitalism) means. It seems to me that has been used to describe at least three different things, two of which are mutually exclusive and one of which is independent of those two. These are:

  1. The free market: capitalism has been used, mostly (but not exclusively) by its defenders to just mean a free market, i.e., an economic order that emerges from voluntary exchanges of property and labor without government intervention (or any other form of systemic coercion).

  2. The corporate State: capitalism has also been used, sometimes by its opponents and sometimes by the beneficiaries of the system, to mean a corporate State–that is, active government support for big businesses through instruments such as subsidies, central banking, tax-funded infrastructure, development grants and loans, special tax exemptions, funding plants, acquiring land through eminent domain, government union-busting, and so on down the line. Since government intervention is always, by nature, either services funded by expropriated tax dollars or regulations enforced from the barrel of a gun, it’s worth noting that being capitalist in the sense of a free marketeer requires being anti-capitalist in the sense of opposing the corporate State, and vice versa. The fact that state socialists and the anti-communist Right have spent the past century systematically running these two distinct senses of capitalism together (in order to make it seem that you had to swallow the corporate State if you believed in the free market–which the Marxists used for a modus tollens and the Rightists used for a modus ponens) doesn’t make these two any less distinct, or any less antagonistic.

  3. Boss-directed labor: third, capitalism has been used (by for example, Marxians and socialists who are careful about their use of language) to refer to a specific form of labor market–that is, one where the dominant form of economic activity is the production of goods in workplaces that are strictly divided by class. Under capitalism in the third sense, most workers are working for a boss, in return for a wage; they are renting out their labor to someone else, in order to survive, and it is the boss and not the workers who holds the title to the business, the shop, and the tools and facilities that make the business run. (Or, as the Marxists would have it, the means of production.) It’s worth noting that capitalism in this third sense is a category independent of capitalism in either of the first two senses: there are lots of different ways that a free labor market could turn out (it could be organized in traditional employer-employee relationships, or into worker co-ops, or into community workers’ councils, or into a diffuse network of shopkeeps and independent contractors) and someone who is an unflinching free marketeer might plump for any of these, or might be completely indifferent as to which one wins out; whereas an interventionist statist might also favor traditional employer-employee relationships (as in Fascism) or any number of different arrangements (as in various forms of state socialism).

With these distinctions on the table, it’s worth pointing out that many 19th century libertarians–Benjamin Tucker chief among them–who considered themselves both radical free marketeers and radical critics of capitalism; what they meant was that they attacked capitalism in senses (2) and (3)–holding that state intervention on behalf of big business was unjust and at the root of most social evils, including the exploitation and impoverishment of workers which they identified as being part and parcel of capitalism in the third sense. (They also believed that exploitative and impoverishing practices would collapse in a free market; although many of the practices of landlords, bankers, bosses, etc. were not coercive in themselves, Tucker and his circle argued, they were evils that workers would not put up with if it weren’t for a background of systemic coercion and restriction of competition. So they were worth railing against, even if they were not themselves forms of aggression.)

I point all this out because I don’t think there’s actually anything about being a libertarian, or an Austrian about economics, that requires you to plump for capitalism in the second or third senses. Both Austrian economics and libertarian theories of justice require you to be a free marketeer, of course, but whether that makes you capitalist, anti-capitalist, or just doesn’t decide the matter one way or another depends on how you pin down the term capitalism. Part of my worry is that the way that statists have jammed together three completely different concepts under the chimerical term capitalism has tended to blind libertarians, in the 20th century, to some of the insights that their forbearers in the 19th century had. The idea is usually that if something is anti-capitalist, it is therefore anti-libertarian. But that only follows if it’s anti-capitalist in the sense of wanting to use violence to intervene in the free market. My worry is that Daniel has probably got a good argument for showing that CIW’s actions are anti-capitalist in senses two and three, and mistakenly figured that undermining capitalism in those senses tends to undermine capitalism in the first sense, and therefore destructive. In order to try to avoid confusion on the matter, I’m going to be sticking to the term free market when I talk about what Austro-libertarians are committed to defending.

With that out of the way, let’s look at what Daniel objects to in the rhetoric of the Taco Bell boycott and its supporters. Here’s one objection:

Simply put I believe, there are more ways to be anti-capitalist than just using government. Mainly promoting ideas that capitalism is evil or claiming it resorts to rampant market failure are, in my view, anti-capitalist.

There are two things that this might mean.

  1. It might mean that you can undermine capitalism in the sense of the bosses’ labor market without going for government intervention. That’s certainly true, but it’s not yet clear that this is a vice. If you think (as I do) that there are serious economic problems with the sort of bureaucratic, boss-controlled, centralized, top-down corporate commerce that rose to dominance in the 20th century, then undermining that–by pointing out, for example, that it typically involves crippling knowledge problems, fosters a culture of petulant entitlement among the decision-makers, exploits the workers and systematically shuts them out of important channels for autonomous and rewarding labor, and so on–then undermining capitalism in that sense can only be counted as a good thing. If you also think that the cultural and material conditions created by boss-directed labor profits from and tends to promote the growth of corporate statism that expropriates wealth in order to support the bosses, then that gives you even stronger libertarian reasons to support anti-capitalist agitation in this sense. And indeed there are good reasons for Austrians and their fellow-travelers to think these charges against boss-centric are solid–the knowledge problems that Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard pointed out in central planning also apply when that central planning is done by bureaucratic corporations; the potential of free market competition ameliorates the problem but doesn’t eliminate it, and if decisions are being made on the margin in a market that is already dominated by centralized interlocking bureau-corps, which are supported not only by their existing market share but also by a network of cultural attitudes towards work and jobs, it looks like it is going to be a long, hard struggle to undermine those structures and make the threat of serious competition into a practicable reality. The sort of long, hard struggle, in fact, that groups like the CIW are, at their best, engaged in.

  2. On the other hand, this might mean that there are ways to undermine the free market other than calling down the government. That’s true, I guess, but it’s unclear that the things Daniel cites are examples of it. It’s true that spreading economic fallacies is dangerous, and undermines people’s willingness to stand up for economic freedom even if the person spreading the fallacies isn’t personally calling for government intervention. But whether saying capitalism is evil or that capitalism involves frequent and systemic market failures does that or not depends on whether the critic is using capitalism in the first sense, the second sense, the third sense, or an unstable congerie of different senses. If it’s in the first sense, then clearly it involves an economic fallacies–liberty as such is always an economic (and moral) good, and the Austrians have shown that, while the utopia of neo-classical equilibrium is just that–utopian nonsense–liberty doesn’t create systemic market failures, but rather creates the opportunities and incentives to overcome them. But if capitalism is being used in the sense of the corporate State, then both the condemnation and the accusation of systemic market failure are obviously right. If it’s being used in the sense of boss-directed labor, then the charges involve economic fallacies and undermine the free market only if you think that boss-directed labor is a necessary condition for a free market (which it obviously isn’t), or a necessary condition for a flourishing free market (which is a premise that has not yet been convincingly argued). In fact, I’d say that the history of big business support for stifling Progressive regulation–cf., for example, Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism–the economic record of big corporations over the past century, and the considerations about bureaucratic planning that I mentioned above are all very good reasons for saying that the link doesn’t exist, that if anything boss-directed labor is corrosive to the free market, and that if it takes a fighting union to weaken or supplant it, then that’s as good an argument as any for vibrant, agitating, government-free union organizing.

    Now, it’s true that most labor organizers and labor activists today are hardly consistent libertarians, and it’s likely that their rhetoric is going to jostle back and forth between different meanings as they go along just as much as when anyone else uses the terms. But that’s not a reason to issue a blanket criticism of the action as anti-market; it’s a reason to call for a clarification of the argument, and an attempt to grasp the dominant principle in the particular case–as stated in their talk and as manifest in their actions. Coming back to the CIW and their supporters specifically, it would be a lot easier to convict them of being swayed mainly by anti-market maxims if they were, for example, a State-protected union, or if they were calling for State action against Taco Bell or its contractors, or if they were proposing that the free market in farm work is the problem, rather than the practices of specific farm employers. But they aren’t; they are making a point specifically about the common labor practices of farm employers in southern Florida, as far as I know aren’t attributing their evils to the free market (maybe their supporters in JVC were making this claim; I don’t know), and they did a lot of really quite fascinating and groundbreaking work in doing labor organizing and achieving goals without the suffocating help of the federal labor bureaucracy. All of these facts are well worth noting when we try to piece out what we should think of as the dominant trends in CIW’s campaign.

The other strand of Daniel’s objection I find a lot more puzzling: he objects that their means (boycotting) are not efficient in obtaining their ends (higher real wages and living conditions for the Immokalee workers), that this is so because the boycott strategy ignores the effects that a drop in demand for tacos will have on wages related to the production of tacos, and so that alternative means would be more effective at obtaining the ends of higher wages and living conditions for the Immokalee workers.

It seems to me that the question of obtaining the end has already been settled now that the boycott has been won. Taco Bell established a pass-through program, the workers will be getting more money, and whatever effects the slow-down in Taco Bell sales might have had on the workers have now ended with the boycott. Workers will be getting about $100 more or so per year, and the amount will increase if CIW can leverage their success in the Taco Bell campaign to convince other companies to adopt a similar policy. So I’m especially puzzled by Daniel’s argument that the drop in demand for tacos (and thus tomatoes) hurts the CIW workers rather than helping them. Sure, the boycott may have hurt their income for the three years of the boycott–although my suspicion is that the change on the margin per worker was probably pretty negligible. But people make decisions that will result in less income for the short term in order to get a better result in the long term all the time. Boycotts and strikes are an example; so are school, investment, and quitting your job in order to become an entrepreneur. One thing you have to keep in mind here is that it was the workers themselves who decided that the trade-off of potential present losses for future gains was worth it; that doesn’t guarantee that the decision was a wise one, but it’s certainly not a bizarre sort of decision to make and here, at least, it seems to have begun to pay off.

Daniel’s right to point out that the Taco Bell boycott didn’t encourage consumers to patronize competing tomato-purchasing industries (in order to keep tomato prices steady or raise them by increasing demand for substitute uses of tomatoes, while encouraging Taco Bell to change its ways in order to recapture some of the lost business). But surely here he has misunderstood the strategy behind the boycott. Tomato-pickers aren’t paid directly by the tomato-using industry that consumers buy from; they’re paid by big tomato farmers, who put sell their tomatoes to Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Heinz, Pace, et al. as contractors. Since none of those competing tomato-users has a pass-through system either, there’s no reason why the boycott should want to funnel business to them; that would merely be shifting business from one sharp dealer to another; and while it might give Taco Bell an incentive to change its ways, it would reward other tomato-using companies for engaging in exactly the same practices as Taco Bell.

Further, Daniel’s too uncharitable to the CIW when he suggests the following as an alternative, higher-valued use of resources that the CIW could have employed:

Any form of productivity. Allegedly the housing prices in the Immokalee area are exorbitant, and contribute to the poverty conditions of those who live there. So this is an entrepreneurial area that could host the energy of riled activists that is instead being diverted by this boycott. If these activists were instead producing houses, clothes, and consumable goods to be exchanged with the Immokalee workers they would be more successful in improving their quality of life.

But look, these are things that the CIW is already working on. They have already established, among other things a (tremendously successful) grocery store in Immokalee (run on a co-op model, providing goods at near-wholesale prices) and a multilingual community radio station (which helps keep workers communicating and up-to-date on community news). CIW isn’t just a fighting labor organization–although it is that; it’s a community organization and they’ve put a lot of resources into improving living conditions in Imokalee on the ground. They’ve done this in a lot of ways: by putting money into producing community resources, by organizing general strikes and boycotts to negotiate higher wages, by exposing slavery rings, fraud, and violence in the fields (sometimes through the government, sometimes through the press, and sometimes through direct action by workers). The workers have made their decisions about when and how to apply their resources by developing strategies over time to prioritize their needs, and when they launched the Taco Bell boycott it was because they decided it would be worth it to use some resources in the boycott in order to gain better pay and conditions later using a public education and pressure campaign. Now, the mere fact that they decided that this would be best doesn’t mean that they were right; but it’s important to see that their decision wasn’t different in kind from any number of other decisions in the free market, such as: quitting your job, going back to school, starting your own business, investing your money in what you think will be a winning stock, buying a tool, etc. There are plenty of cases where each of these decisions would be wise and plenty where each would be foolish; that depends a lot on the specifics of the case at hand. In this particular case, it looks like the boycott has paid off nicely for the workers–both in direct results and in precedent for future campaigns–and unless you can come up with some pretty specific plans and give some pretty strong reasons in favor of thinking that they would have been a better way to improve farmworkers’ quality of life, I think the presumption is going to be in favor of chalking this campaign up as a good move for the workers.

Of course, you might instead argue that it benefitted the workers, but only at the expense of either Taco Bell, or consumers, or both. That’s a separate argument, but it’s one worth worrying about when we talk about campaigns in which part of the outcome is raising the price of a consumer good. But of course here we need to keep a couple of things in mind. First, the marginal increase in price of the tomatos for Taco Bell is $0.01 per pound of tomatos; in total it will cost Taco Bell about $100,000 / year more than they spent before. If Taco Bell eats that cost it will hardly be noticed, and if the fraction of that cost on the margin is passed on to Taco Bell patrons, it will hardly make a difference. But also, second, that even if the change were likely to make a difference on the margin, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the change in price comes at the expense of the people buying the tacos. One way to look at CIW’s strategy in the Taco Bell boycott is that they were working to earn more money for themselves by changing consumer preferences; what they aimed to do, and succeeded in doing enough to win the boycott, was to educate Taco Bell consumers and get them to recognize the worth of a decent standard of living for farmworkers, and to take that value into account when they deliberate over purchasing a taco. Of course, once they take that into account, they will be willing to pay more for the taco in order to secure the decent standard of living for farmworkers. But it’s not at all clear that this is an loss to them. Sure, it means more money going out, but it’s money being exchanged for something they now value. You could argue that they only ought to value the pleasure of eating the taco, and drop the sentimental concerns about farmworkers; but Jesus, why would you argue that? The market isn’t an arena for machines to maximize their store of precious metals or for hedonic calculators to maximize their bodily pleasures; it’s a process that emerges from the deliberations that free human beings make about what they want and how they can achieve it. People have every right to value tasty food, of course, but they have just as much right to value solidarity with fellow workers, concern for fellow human beings, charity for people suffering, and a lot of other things that come into play when we think about the labor practices of the people we do business with.

Finally, Daniel is again too uncharitable when he worries that the CIW’s practices and demands aren’t as free of government meddling as I’ve made them out to be. Let me be clear–as far as I know, CIW aren’t principled anarchists; while I’m excited about the model of organizing that they’ve developed, and I think their successes have a lot to do with the fact that they are free from both the worm of government union protections and the hook of government union controls, I don’t claim that they’re any kind of infallible resource. My point here has been to draw out the aspects of them that have something to teach libertarians. But it’s not fair to accuse them of grabbing for government backing based on this line from their press release:

The Company indicated that it believes other restaurant chains and supermarkets, along with the Florida Tomato Committee, should join in seeking legislative reform, because human rights are universal and we hope others will follow our company’s lead.

It’s not fair because (1) the statement about seeking legislative reform came from Taco Bell, not from the CIW; and because (2) it’s not specified what sort of legislative reform they mean. There are two different things that CIW has objected to in southern Florida: (1) the prevalent low wages and harsh working conditions; and (2) the use of fraud, coercion, and outright slavery against immigrant farm workers. Both of the complaints were part of the Taco Bell boycott campaign, and if the legislative reform is aimed at dealing with enslavement of farmworkers or making local law enforcement more responsive to issues of slavery and trafficking, then there’s no reason at all why an anarchist should object. If Taco Bell is proposing some kind of bureaucratic labor regulation by the Florida legislature, then yes, we’ll have to oppose that when the time comes. But that suggestion came from Taco Bell, not CIW, and if CIW were to come out in support of it, I wouldn’t be terribly shocked, but it would represent a substantial break from the strategy and tactics behind all of their successful organizing and activism so far.

So enjoy César Chávez Day, and wish the Coalition of Immokalee Workers well on their recent victory. It’s OK. In fact, if you care about workers bettering their lives without coercion and in organizations autonomous from the State, it’s pretty exciting. Even if you’re a libertarian. Really. I promise.

El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!

Victory to the Farm-Workers!

It’s been a good two weeks since I meant to put up a post on some great labor news–the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ have won the Taco Bell boycott after four years of ground-breaking organizing and agitating for and by the migrant farmworkers of southern Florida in the Taco Bell Boycott and Boot the Bell! campaigns. You can read more about it from the CIW themselves.

March 8, 2005 (IMMOKALEE/LOUISVILLE) – In a precedent-setting move, fast-food industry leader Taco Bell Corp., a division of Yum! Brands (NYSE: YUM), has agreed to work with the Florida-based farm worker organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), to address the wages and working conditions of farmworkers in the Florida tomato industry.

Taco Bell announced today that it will fund a penny per pound pass-through with its suppliers of Florida tomatoes, and will undertake joint efforts with the CIW on several fronts to improve working conditions in Florida’s tomato fields. For its part, the CIW has agreed to end its three-year boycott of Taco Bell, saying that the agreement sets a new standard of social responsibility for the fast-food industry.

Taco Bell has recently secured an agreement with several of its tomato-grower suppliers, who employ the farmworkers, to pass-through the company-funded equivalent of one-cent per pound directly to the workers.

With this agreement, we will be the first in our industry to directly help improve farmworkers’ wages, added Brolick, And we pledge to make this commitment real by buying only from Florida growers who pass this penny per pound payment entirely on to the farmworkers, and by working jointly with the CIW and our suppliers to monitor the pass-through for compliance. We hope others in the restaurant industry and supermarket retail trade will follow our leadership. Yum! Brands and Taco Bell will also work with the CIW to help ensure that Florida tomato pickers enjoy working terms and conditions similar to those that workers in other industries enjoy.

The Company indicated that it believes other restaurant chains and supermarkets, along with the Florida Tomato Committee, should join in seeking legislative reform, because human rights are universal and we hope others will follow our company’s lead.

— CIW / Taco Bell Press Release 2005-03-08: Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Taco Bell reach groundbreaking agreement

The penny-per-pound increase means a cost increase of only $100,000 / year for Taco Bell. Here’s what it means for migrant farmworkers:

As part of the agreement announced Tuesday, Taco Bell will pay an extra penny paid per pound — about $100,000 annually — that will be funneled to about 1,000 farm workers through a small group of suppliers, Yum! spokesman Jonathan Blum said. Taco Bell buys about 10 million pounds of Florida tomatoes a year, Blum said.

Lucas [Benitez], co-director of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, said farm workers earn about $7,500 a year, without health insurance or paid vacations. The extra penny added per pound picked will almost double the yearly salaries of the roughly 1,000 farm workers employed by Taco Bell suppliers, [Benitez] said.

— Miami Herald 2005-03-09: Taco Bell agrees to pay extra pennies for tomatoes

Update 2005-03-24: As has been pointed out to me, the numbers here need a bit of explication. The best I can make of it is this: there was a misstatement somewhere along the line–either by Benitez, or by the translator, or by the reporter when summarizing what he said. Yes, about $100,000 per year over about 1,000 workers means about $100 each per worker per year. But the piece rate for tomato-picking in Southern Florida ranges between 40 and 50 cents for a 32 pound bucket–about 1.5 to 1.25 cents per pound picked. So the Taco Bell program will almost double the effective piece rate for the portion tomatoes that the workers pick that goes to Taco Bell. Since the tomatoes they pick go to places besides Taco Bell, the piece rates they get for the portion of the tomatoes bought by Taco Bell was about $125–$150 per worker per year; now it will be about $225–$250 per worker per year. If all the tomato buyers instituted a program like Taco Bell’s, then that would mean a near-doubling in total annual salary, all other things being equal. As a labor victory that’s a lot less exhilerating than a doubling of their annual salary; but $100 more means a lot when you’re only making $7500 a year, and it sets a precedent for future campaigns.

Which the CIW is planning as we speak.

So, feel free to eat at Taco Bell again. In fact, I’ll be going out for dinner at Taco Bell tonight to thank them now that they have given in to farm workers’ demands, and I’ll be contacting them to be sure that they know why I’m buying food from them again.

This is a major victory for the CIW and for farmworkers as a whole. There’s a lot that organized labor can learn from it: how CIW won while overcoming barriers of language and nationality, assembling a remarkable coalition in solidarity (from students to fellow farmworkers to religious organizations and onward), drawing on the dispersed talents of agitators and activists in communities all across the country, and making some brilliant hard-nosed strategic decisions (e.g., the decision a couple of years ago to begin the Boot the Bell campaign–which hit Taco Bell where it hurts by denying it extremely lucrative contracts with college and University food services). I only know a bit of the story from following the boycott, and I already know that it’s a pretty remarkable story to tell. I look forward to hearing more.

It’s also — although you won’t hear this as much — a major victory for government-free, syndicalist labor organizing. The CIW is not a bureaucratic government-recognized union; as a form of organizing it’s far closer to an autonomous workers’ syndicate or a local soviet (in the old sense of a democratic, community-based workers’ council, not in the sense of the hollow state apparatus that the Bolsheviks left after the party committees seized power at bayonet-point). Of course, not having the smothering comfort of the US labor bureaucracy to prop them up has often made things harder on the CIW; but it’s also made them freer, and left them free of the restraints on serious and innovative labor activism that have held the government-authorized union movement back for the past 60 years. (Example: the strategic decision to target Taco Bell in the first place–that is, the whole damned campaign that allowed the Immokalee workers to win such a huge improvement in their standard of living–was a secondary boycott, and so would have been illegal under the terms of the Taft-Hartley Act and the Landrum-Griffin Act. But since the CIW doesn’t need a permission slip from the NLRB to engage in direct action, they won the day–not in spite of, but because of their freedom from government restraints on labor organizing.

Unfortunately, some of my libertarian comrades haven’t been quite so willing to celebrate. In fact, I first heard about the victory from Daniel D’Amico’s post lamenting the development. D’Amico wrote a misguided attack on the campaign before and so did Art Carden. The problem is that the arguments given in these articles seem to proceed from a double confusion: first, a confusion about the nature of CIW; and second, a confusion about economics and the nature of market processes.

Both Carden and D’Amico seem to make the initial mistake of thinking about the CIW campaign entirely by analogy to either (a) the student anti-sweatshop movement or (b) government-authorized trade unionism, and so feel free to lift boilerplate from the standard arguments against those (e.g.: that it is the misguided effort of patronizing college students who ought to pay more attention to the real interests of those they claim to act on behalf of; that it courts the coercive power of the State in order to achieve its goals) when it is in fact completely alien to how CIW actually works. They’ve never requested government assistance against Taco Bell, and they couldn’t legally get it if they asked. And whether the standard accusations against student-driven anti-sweatshop organizing are apt or inapt (I think they are apt in some aspects and unfair in others), they don’t apply to CIW. It’s certainly true that they’ve been more than willing to draw support from anti-sweatshop organizations and to draw comparisons between their struggle and the anti-sweatshop movement in order to curry support on college campuses (and did so very intelligently); but this isn’t the anti-sweatshop movement. It’s not directed from college campuses; the shots are called by a community organization of immigrant farmworkers in Southern Florida. You might try to argue that they’re acting foolishly against their own interests, or avariciously at the expense of other people’s legitimate interests, but to simply try to lift the standard Where are all the third world workers in the anti-sweatshop movement? objections won’t hold water for anyone who has actually met (as I have) CIW organizers.

Carden and D’Amico’s articles are both mostly about their economic complaints against the CIW strategy; they may think that they can simply dismiss any mistakes about how CIW organizes as marginal to the main point. That’s fine, but the economic complaints are also unfounded. D’Amico, for example, complains that CIW is interfering with the market processes that set wages for labor:

CIW expects the boycott to put pressure on Taco Bell to pay more for its tomatoes and thus more for migrant laborers. But this would not be a sustainable market scenario. Prices are not set by arbitrary moral standards, but rather by available levels of supply and demand in the market.

Stopping the market transactions of mutually benefiting exchange in the name of moral obligations does not produce anything of lasting value to assist in capital accumulation or increasing standards of living.

But the entire complaint presupposes two things which are in fact false: first, that the moral demands on Taco Bell to improve its contracting for tomato-picking so that farmworkers are paid a better wage are arbitrary; second, that moral obligations are not part of what people take into account when they determine which transactions count as mutually beneficial in the first place. Let’s bracket the first presupposition for a moment in order to clear away the second: prices and markets are not mechanistic systems; they are the results (both intended and unintended) of people’s choices. Notice how little attention this point gets when D’Amico offers the following weirdly primitive picture of how someone decides whether or not to buy a taco:

The value of a chalupa is not imputed through the sweat equity of the Immokalee migrant workers. When the typical college kid is watching his favorite episode of The Simpson’s and a Taco Bell commercial comes on, he does not pause and reflect on the condition of the plighted migrant laborer; rather he sees a funny Chihuahua that speaks Spanish, standing next to a greasy bundle of cheesy goodness, and his stomach growls accordingly.

Of course, I’m sure that some people do think like this about their meals, but there is no reason that they have to. When you are trying to figure out how people will make the choices they make, you always need to refer to a notion of benefit. But the judgments of benefit that people make don’t just issue from some hydraulic system of inborn drives and aversions; they are the result of deliberation, and involve answers to a lot of questions about not only hunger, thirst, low-grade humor, etc., but also decisions about what kinds of pleasures are worth the cost, what sort of life you want to live, what sort of society you want to live in, and so on. Sure, not everyone thinks about those things when they deliberate over whether to go to Taco Bell or not; and the fact that they don’t ponder them had heretofore meant that wages would be as low as they were. But what the hell were CIW doing if not trying to educate people about the conditions that people picking the tomatoes they eat face, and so encouraging them to think about whether a marginal decrease of less than a penny per chalupa is really worth it to them? That’s as much a part of the free market as deliberations which issue in decisions to seek the lowest price at any cost are.

What about the first issue? Is it right to think that workers deserve more than they get paid, or is it foolish? D’Amico might try to push his point here by arguing: sure, given that you can convince people of those values, that’s as much a part of market processes as anything. But it shouldn’t be a part of people’s values; it’s foolish and economically destructive to act on the preference that people deserve extra money just for being hard workers that you feel sorry for, and not for any marginal increase in the valuable material output that they produce. So the campaign has gotten people to agree to giving the farm workers more than they should get if our aim is greater economic prosperity and higher standards of living. Which it should be.

But again, this seems to presuppose a weirdly mechanistic picture of the economic concepts involved. Prosperity and higher standard of living are irreducibly evaluative terms no less than mutually beneficial; and you have to ask whether it’s possible to exclude basic considerations of fairness and solidarity with our fellow workers from a reasonable conception of what counts as a prosperous commonwealth and what doesn’t. Furthermore, even if you grant D’Amico his principle, it’s unclear why he’s as certain as he is that it applies here. He points to the backward imputation of value and seems to be taking for granted the standard economic argument that at equilibrium, wages are set by the worker’s marginal productivity. Since workers were making sub-poverty wages from the tomatoes for tacos before sentimental comparisons of their yearly income to the average came into play, it must be that those sub-poverty wages reflect their marginal productivity to the consumers of tacos when consumers of tacos are thinking only about the factors that D’Amico thinks they ought to think about.

But that conclusion rests on at least two unargued premises: (1) that farmworkers’ wages are set in a free market for labor, and (2) that farmworkers’ wages are at the equilibrium point. But why should we believe either of these? As CIW itself has repeatedly demonstrated, farmers and caudillos in Southern Florida have repeatedly been willing to use violence, coercion, and fraud against their laborers, up to and including outright slavery; and since many of the workers in Immokalee and elsewhere are undocumented, they also have to face the constant threat of violence from La Migra. All of these factors use coercion to undermine farm workers’ wages and bargaining positions. Further, even if the market were completely free, that wouldn’t be any guarantee at all that it would be no guarantee that wages would be set at marginal productivity given how consumers evaluate the taco; that argument depends on the kind of neo-classical anti-economic argument that I think Roderick Long rightly criticized as the doctrine of Platonic Productivity.

All of this is too damn bad. Not just because it makes for mistaken conclusions, but also because the willingness to make those mistakes tends to paint 21st century libertarians as court intellectuals for the bosses of the world, and it puts them directly at odds with their 19th century forebearers. Radical individualists like Benjamin Tucker, for example, defined their position as both the most consistent form of free market economics, and the most consistent form of the labor movement. Sure, part of that position was based on economic and philosophical error–e.g., commitment to the Smithian labor theory of value–but part of what I hope to show in all this is that corrections to their economic premises don’t require abandonment of their economic conclusions. In fact, if you want to learn something about how people can get together and make their lives both freer and happier in the course of just a few years, without the false help and bureaucratic meddling of the State, you’d do well to look at what the CIW has accomplished over the past several years.

So here’s to libertarian labor organizing and state-free struggle. ¡Si se puede!

Further reading

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