Take Time to Give Thanks to Harvesters

Today, all over our nation, family and friends will gather to share a meal and recognize the good life that the United States has bestowed upon so many. Since Thanksgiving is a holiday of gratitude and remembrance, it seems an especially appropriate moment to recognize our country’s farm workers, the 1.5-million seasonal laborers who hand-harvest the fresh fruits and vegetables that grace our tables.

Farm workers are the poorest and most marginalized of laborers in the U.S. They earn an average of $6,500 per year, and more than two-thirds live in poverty. They always have been recruited from among the most vulnerable members of American society--undocumented immigrants, the homeless, the rural poor--and have consistently been denied the legal protections provided to other workers. To this day, our nation’s farm laborers have no right to overtime pay, are denied equal protections for union organizing and work under special rules that allow children as young as 12 to labor in the fields, despite the fact that agricultural work is one of our nation’s most dangerous professions.

Farm workers pass through every region of the country, traveling hundreds if not thousands of miles, crossing state lines and international borders, enduring dislocation and uncertainty. Despite their important contribution to our lives, farm workers remain hidden from our view, their struggles unrecognized. Still, remembering farm workers on Thanksgiving should not be an exercise in guilt, but rather an extension of gratitude to a class of workers whose hard work enables our prosperity.

As consumers, we have a direct, almost visceral, bond with farm workers. Virtually every vegetable or piece of fruit that we purchase was hand-harvested by a farm laborer. While the produce we buy may have been mechanically sorted and packed, super-cooled, chemically treated, waxed and shipped across the nation, often the last hand to touch the produce we buy was that of a migrant farm worker. Simply by purchasing the lettuce, tomatoes, pumpkins, peppers, sweet potatoes, squash and apples found on our tables today, we are connected with a hidden world of laborers, a weave of interconnected lives.

While we are experiencing a moment of great affluence in our nation, this is also a time of growing divisions between those who control wealth and those who do not. As the more fortunate isolate themselves from those less fortunate, living in different neighborhoods, sending their children to different schools, they know little about the lives of the laborers that their world depends on.

Our society is characterized by enormous material wealth and the almost magical availability of a diverse array of commodities whose production often seems automatic and effortless. In fact, there is a growing divide between those who make things and those who consume them within a global economy where labor-intensive commodities are typically made in foreign countries. Remembering farm workers encourages Americans to see that production is always a social process, binding people to each other through the circulation of things. The apparent invisibility of production is, in fact, a form of social forgetting, a politics of glossing over the real structural and economic relations that allow for our high standard of living.

Today, let us not think of our nation’s farm workers simply as a social problem requiring a focused political response, but rather as people whose lives are connected to our own. The tragedy of our nation’s farm workers lies not in their difference from other Americans, but rather in their great and overwhelming similarity. On our nation’s harvest holiday, we should honor the harvesters and recognize their presence at our tables.