As of 2012, 11.8% of executive and senior level officials and managers, and 21% of all first- and mid-level officials and managers were people of color, despite people of color comprising over 25% of the US population. Agricultural workers in particular experience ongoing and widespread violations of the limited protections afforded to them by federal law. This is oftentimes the result of competing producers aiming to drive down their costs by not complying with employment laws. Between 2010 and 2013, for example, among agricultural employers, the Department of Labor found 1,901 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act , which sets the federal minimum wage, overtime pay, child labor rules, and payroll record keeping requirements. A 2009 survey of approximately 200 farmworkers paid by “piece-rate” in Marion County, Oregon, found that workers experienced extensive violations of the state’s minimum wage law. Almost 90% of workers surveyed reported that their “piece-rate” earnings frequently amounted to less than minimum wage, averaging less than $5.30 per hour—37% below hourly minimum wage. Furthermore, a 2013 survey of farmworkers in New Mexico found extremely low wages and high levels of wage theft: 67% of field workers surveyed were victim to wage theft within the year prior to the survey; 43% stated that they never received the minimum wage, and 95% said they were have never been paid for the time spent waiting each day in the field to begin working. The combination of employers’ exploitation of the immigration system, and workers’ low income, limited formal education, limited command of the English language, and undocumented status, greatly hinders farmworkers from seeking any retribution or recognition of their rights. For example, as of 2009, the National Agricultural Workers Survey found that 78% of all farmworkers were foreign born, with 75% born in Mexico; 42% of farmworkers surveyed were migrants, pipp rack with 35% of migrants having traveled between the United States and another country, primarily Mexico.

Furthermore, 44% said they couldn’t speak English “at all” and 26% said they could speak English only “a little”; and the median level of completed education was sixth grade, with a large group of farmworkers completing fourth to seventh grades. With limited legal aid, many agricultural workers fear that challenging the illegal and unfair practices of their employers will result in further abuses, jobs losses, and, ultimately, deportation. Worse yet, few attorneys are available to help poor agricultural workers, and federal legal aid programs are prohibited from representing undocumented immigrants. The exploitation of migrant agricultural workers begins long before they reach the United States, and this migration has largely been driven by US trade and foreign policy in Central and Latin America. Specifically, most agricultural workers are in the United States as part of the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Workers program, which allows US employers to bring foreign nationals to the United States to fill temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs. However, nearly all such employers rely on private recruiters to find available workers in their home countries and arrange their visas and transportation to the fields. US agricultural employers thrive and rely upon an immigration system and recruitment network that provides “cheap” labor , and, as such, this recruitment network outside US borders remains unregulated and highly exploitative. Among the most grievous of such practices, for example, is the collection of fees from workers as a prerequisite to being hired. Many growers are willfully ignorant of recruiters’ activities, despite recently revised regulations that require growers to promise that they have not received any such fees. With many potential workers striving to escape poor conditions in their respective homelands, there is much incentive for recruiters to charge “recruiting fees” for personal profit, leaving H-2A workers with a great deal of debt upon their arrival to the United States. While some have paid upwards of $11,000 for such opportunities to work, others have given the deed to their house or their car to recruiters as collateral so as to ensure “compliance” with the terms of their contract. Many fear for their physical safety and safety of their family members if they are not able to repay their debts.

Many farmworkers been deceived about their wages and working conditions , and, to make matters worse, many workers are tied to one employer and therefore have no choice but to work regardless of the low pay and abysmal working conditions of their employers. Ultimately, the H-2A program and US labor market creates conditions ripe for debt-peonage. Furthermore, although H-2A program regulations require employers to give job preference to qualified US workers, in practice the H-2A program ultimately puts US workers out of work given the seeming cost benefits of employing H-2A workers. Toward this end, employers go to great lengths to unlawfully exclude qualified US workers in favor of H-2A workers, many of whom have themselves migrated to the United States during prior seasons. For example, employers schedule interviews at inconvenient times or locations; hire too early in the season, lead workers to arrive for work when there is none; limit their hours in order to discourage them from continuing to work; use employment contracts that demand that workers forfeit their right to sue a grower for lost wages and/or other illegalities; and impose productivity quotas and other unrealistic work demands on employees. These practices greatly discourage US workers from applying to these jobs, which then allows employers to “legally” hire H-2A workers. Additionally, the profits reaped by large agricultural employers and by corporations at all levels of the food system not only come at the expense of the food system worker’s livelihoods and US job loss, but are also subsidized by taxpayers themselves. For example, Walmart, which sells 25% of all the groceries in the United States and is the largest employer in the US and world, has among the lowest wages across the retail industry. Walmart workers cost US taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion in public assistance that would counteract the consequences of their low wages, including SNAP, Medicaid and subsidized housing. Because 58% of food system workers surveyed reported having no health care coverage, more than one-third of workers surveyed have used the emergency room for primary care, which taxpayers help cover. Finally, corporations like Walmart are able to determine wages and benefits for workers throughout their entire supply chain, given their massive procurement power and ability to dictate purchasing prices to its suppliers.

This pressure and influence forces suppliers to lower their worker’s wages, multiplying the number of workers robbed of fair and livable wages and taxpayer subsidization of corporate profits. In short, when food system workers require public assistance, the onus rests on taxpayers and the federal government, rather than on those that are responsible for creating these unhealthy outcomes—corporations. After over thirty years of liberal trade policies beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many developing countries have been left with a great dependence on the global market for basic food and grains. Developing countries had yearly agricultural trade surpluses of $1 billion in the early 1970s. Yet by 2000, the food deficit in such countries had grown to $11 billion per year. At the height of the 2007–2008 global food price crisis, Low-Income Food Deficit Countries import bills reached over $38 billion for basic cereal grains. Such systemic vulnerability is, in part, a result of international finance institutions, structural adjustment, free trade agreements, and a broader divestment of the state from agricultural development. Furthermore, pipp racking system not only are overproduction and US food aid to blame, but also corporate actors use such international crises as opportunities to make additional calls for emergency aid coupled with further trade liberalization and increased investment in agricultural productivity. For example, although the 2014 Farm Bill authorizes $80 million annually for the Local and Regional Procurement Program, which encourages greater use of food that is locally or regionally grown for food aid, it pales in comparison to the $1.75 billion Food for Peace Title II through which United States Agency for International Development provides food assistance. Furthermore, foreign economies are undermined not only by such efforts that directly shuttle surplus and heavily subsidized commodities—produced for the benefit of corporate entities—to developing countries, but also by production support programs themselves, such as commodity payments or crop insurance. For example, a 2012 International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development report found that the shift from direct payments to crop insurance support for farmers is likely to have far reaching effects on global trade and prices because of the anticipated change to cropping patterns. Specifically, the likelihood that the new programs will influence planting decisions is greatly enhanced because payments in all the new programs are calculated using actual planted acreage. Ultimately, if planting decisions are influenced enough, then program-induced changes in US crop acreage will be reflected in trade flows that have the potential to harm farmers in developing countries and cause fluctuations in global food prices. Academic Research and Development: One major way corporations profit and exert their control with regard to education, research, and development is their influence over academic research and development. Agricultural research in the United States is carried out primarily by three entities: the federal government, largely through the US Department of Agriculture; academia, primarily through land-grant universities; and the private sector. Over the past several decades, corporate interests have co-opted publicly-oriented agricultural research and land-grant university research efforts in particular. The federal government created land-grant universities in 1862 by deeding tracts of land to every state to pursue agricultural research to support agricultural production in the United States. Although public investments have maintained agricultural research since the creation of these universities, over recent decades public funding has stalled, prompting land-grant universities to appeal to agribusiness to remedy such financial shortcomings. Significantly, the landmark 1980 Bayh-Dole Act pushed universities to take this particularly entrepreneurial role, generating revenue through producing patents from which the private sector could profit. The Bayh-Dole Act, as part of the neoliberalization of science and academic research itself, prompted greater industry influence over land-grant research, as university research agendas became oriented toward the needs of corporate partners. Major agribusiness donors to land-grant universities across the United States, including Syngenta, Monsanto, PepsiCo, Nestle, Dow Agroscience, Chevron, DuPont and others, now push research carried out by faculty and students toward developments in bio-fuels, commodity crops research, genetically engineered foods, and other areas of interest. Land-grant universities today not only carry out corporate-directed research but also depend on agribusinesses to underwrite research grants, endow faculty chairs, sponsor departments, and finance the construction of new buildings. Even USDA research and USDA-funded research itself reflects corporate interests. The USDA spends roughly $2 billion per year on agricultural research, which goes toward funding USDA researchers and researchers at land-grant universities. This money, however, is largely directed toward a corporate-friendly industrial agriculture research agenda: the National Academy of Sciences found that USDA research prioritizes commodity crops, industrialized livestock production, technologies geared toward large-scale operations, and capital-intensive practices. The Farm Bill does not prioritize funding for more sustainable farming programs, with programs such as the Organic Agriculture Research and Education Initiative and Specialty Crop Research Initiative accounting for only 2% of the USDA’s research budget. Most research funding is directed toward commodity crops research. In 2010, for example, the USDA funded $204 million to research all varieties of fruits and vegetables, and spent $212 million to research just four commodity crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton. Seed Patents: Another major way private industry continues to profit and exert their influence vis-à-vis relations of education, research, and development, is seed research and patents. Since the early 1980s, the global seed industry has grown substantially and is now worth an estimated $44 billion and is expected to grow to an estimated $85 billion by 2018. The cumulative effect of seed legislation has facilitated the massive consolidation of corporate power, thus securing corporate control of one of the most crucial agricultural inputs. This history of seed legislation began shortly before the New Deal, beginning with the US Plant Patent Act of 1930 and continued with the 1970 Plant Variety Protection Act. Significantly, seed legislation did not move into the judicial system until the 1980 Supreme Court decision Diamond v. Chakrabarty, which laid the legal groundwork for the privatization and commodification of the genetics of seeds.