Starvation Wages
Reader Article Submission - Author: @SettleIt (Twitter)
Is 2024 the year we admit that $7.25 is a starvation wage?
What exactly is it going to take for Americans to start using the phrase “starvation wages”? We are already seeing major publications put out articles like “To Save Money, Maybe You Should Skip Breakfast” and “Millenials and Gen Z’s trendy new splurge: groceries”. We already know that housing is completely unaffordable, but why don’t we talk about food the same way?
Between 2019 and 2024, hundreds of food items have increased in price by more than 50%. So let's say food inflation was an even 50%, if you spent $100 a week on groceries in 2019, that's $150 now. You're spending $2,600 more on groceries every year. If prices jump another 50%, five years from now, that grocery trip will cost $225 or $6,500 more than 2019 prices annually. That's more than I paid for my car. The article describing these skyrocketing prices ends with an ominous quote:
"Sharon Faelten, a 74-year-old retiree from Underhill, Vt., said that instead of a wallet-punishing ordeal, she tries to think of trips to the store like procurement raids depicted in apocalyptic novels, where the goal is to stock her fridge, freezer and pantry for as little money as possible. “Chicken is always on sale somewhere,” Faelten said.”
If our seniors are pretending that it's the apocalypse to get through grocery shopping, what is going to happen in five years? A five year plan used to mean saving up for a house, now it means hopefully having enough for groceries. How soon will “job benefits" mean access to the company food pantry? A five year plan used to mean kids, but what happens when that’s “financially irresponsible” for an entire generation? How are we supposed to reconcile living in the richest country on the planet, with the hunger we feel? When is it enough? Aren’t you tired? Aren’t you hungry?
Do Americans “deserve” food?
In 2021, the UN voted on a committee draft to make food a universal human right. The US and its proxy Israel voted no. Now, we are watching Israel use food as a weapon of war. From attacks on bakery infrastructure to flour massacres, they know that food is life and starvation is control. If our leadership does not believe food is a universal human right, do our people?
To put it mildly, we are in a culture with a lot of moral hang ups about food. Should you “indulge” in the calories? If we give people food stamps, will they spend it on food they don’t “deserve”? If someone is struggling to feed themselves, could they “stand to skip a meal”. We equate thinness with health to the point that we are ill equipped for a serious conversation about feeding everyone.
Are we even ready to have that conversation with ourselves? If you are in a situation where you can barely afford to eat, is it easier to look at the entrenched systems of power starving us on a population level, or is it easier to say “I wanted to lose weight anyways”? Are you intermittent fasting or are you being starved?
Starvation wages are simply defined as “wages insufficient to provide the ordinary necessities of life”. Food stamps, food pantries, and other forms of donated food do not erase the fact that our wages are insufficient to provide the ordinary necessities of life. We should not be required to do additional labor to access food.
Labor is entitled to all it creates
We all depend on the agricultural system, but we do not control the means of production so we have no say in what is produced, how it is produced, or how it's distributed. The people who should be at the center of this conversation are agricultural workers. Most Americans have no idea how difficult this labor is or how many hours of work go into every ingredient, but they do know that slavery happened, so let's start there. To give a quick simplified overview, capitalists had a source of free labor and they designed their farms around it. When the emancipation of slaves left a massive gap in food production who did the farmers turn to? Workers that could not vote: migrant workers, prisoners, and even child labor. Now in 2024, there are workers we rely on for food making less than the minimum wage of $7.25. We are starving the people that feed us.
The goal of the slave owners and modern capitalists is to harvest food using the cheapest possible labor. The legacy of slavery is structured into how we produce food. We need more people doing less labor so that farms can move beyond the plantation model. Instead we have criminalized the people who leave their home countries to supply our grocery stores with food. We are biting the hand that feeds us on a daily basis. Nothing about this is sustainable.
Capitalists will always seek to maximize profits by paying the lowest possible price for labor. When the ongoing covid pandemic first began, we popularized the phrase “essential workers” to highlight the people whose labor we depend on. There are no workers more essential than the ones that produce food, but we are not acting like we value agricultural workers.
There is currently an outbreak of avian influenza (H5N1) in cattle, and too many people have responded that they’ll change to a vegan diet, and not enough people have responded that we need to get PPE to every dairy worker as soon as possible. Before the jump to cattle, the first person to be infected with H5N1 in the US was a prisoner assigned to dispose of infected dead poultry. Were they even warned about the danger? This worker had no control over these working conditions. No union. No control over their living conditions or who they're exposing to viruses. No control over the quality of medical care they receive. No ability to even warn the public. We are playing with fire.
The fact that prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands is hidden from the public, but it's nothing new. Convict leasing became common after the emancipation proclamation, when “black codes” criminalized recently freed slaves. These are some of the most vulnerable workers in the entire country, and without them we starve.
But what about the people who want to be farming? Well, we're failing them too. Farmers have a rate of suicide 3.5 times higher than the general population. Most of that is attributed to financial pressure, instead of retiring many farmers are opting for suicide. We have hollowed out small farms like we have hollowed out the middle class. Instead of subsidizing small farms, tax money goes to the massive corporations that can afford lobbyists. Small, rural communities are too disenfranchised to take on these monopolies by themselves, so where do we go from here?
What is to be done… about food
It is time to vastly rethink, recalibrate, and reorganize our food infrastructure for the singular and very possible purpose of feeding everyone. This may seem radical but, what could be more important in a system of food production than to actually make sure everyone is fed?
Right now the powers that be have us by the stomachs. What mechanism do we have to combat price gouging on staple foods? Do we beg for help from the leadership that is happy to watch Palestinians starve? Do we boycott the grocery stores that have consolidated into monopolies? Do we ignore further exploitation of agricultural workers? No. We don’t have to do that. Here are a few places to start.
Raise the minimum wage and tie it to inflation
$7.25 is a slap in the face. $7.25 is a debt sentence. $7.25 is a joke and we're the punchline. The minimum wage hasn't changed since 2009, that's fifteen years of inflation. We need a living wage that automatically increases with inflation because Congress has shown that they will not act to stop us from starving. We have record homelessness, record suicide rates, record food insecurity, and they're still asking us for campaign donations. The next opportunity we get to increase the minimum wage we have to tie it to inflation because we cannot keep letting inflation erode our standard of living.
The minimum wage needs to be the actual minimum wage for every US worker. No more loopholes for tipped workers, agricultural workers, prison workers, or any new category to be exploited. It's time to remove the financial incentives behind worker exploitation. Wouldn't an end to tipping be the nail in the coffin for the restaurant industry? Without this next policy, yes that's a real risk.
Universal Basic Food Stamps
We have allowed our society to be structured in such a way that continued profits for wealthy individuals are vastly prioritized over feeding living human beings. How can we ask children to participate in a society that lets them starve? To end food insecurity, I propose universal basic food stamps that are tied to the price of staple goods. Tupac knew if we got money for war, we can feed the poor. Never let anyone pretend we can't afford to feed everyone.
If every local restaurant could accept these food stamps, we could spark a restaurant Renaissance that heals all of the damage from covid. I want you to think about a life where everyone could grab a meal without financial barriers. Hunger for it.
A vote for every farm worker
A vote for every farm worker means an end to child labor, dual citizenship for migrant workers, and voting rights for prisoners. Dear reader, I cannot stress to you enough that if prisoners are the only ones who cannot vote they will become the only ones who produce food, and the for-profit prison system will have an even larger prisoner quota. We cannot leave anyone behind. If a government imprisons so many of its citizens that their votes can change elections, their votes should change elections. It feels childish to write about more people getting the right to vote in a collapsing, fascist “democracy”, but it’s the truth. I will say that the last major upheaval in agricultural labor came after the Civil War, and these states aren't very united at the moment.
Nationalize Cargill
I live in the rust belt, named after the rusting machinery abandoned after manufacturing was moved overseas. What would stop capitalists from outsourcing all food production to a place where labor is cheaper? Nationalizing the industry.
What Amazon did to small retail stores, Cargill did to small farms. If we nationalize Cargill we will have democratic control over nearly every bottle neck in the agricultural system. We could force the giant monopolies to buy from family farms at a fair rate. We could force the giant monopolies to pay migrant workers a living wage and provide them with safe working conditions. But I know that we don’t have the institutional power to nationalize the food system right now. So is there anything to do in the meantime?
Make Harvesting A Sport
What if you could live stream competitive harvesting? What if you could root for your Fantasy League of agricultural laborers who kicked ass at their jobs? What would the Olympics of harvesting food look like? Let’s make it happen. Let’s highlight the athletes that work, the same way we highlight the athletes that play. We know the power of the media, we know these workers have been hidden from the public, why not create media to show off their skills? Let’s build a culture that respects the people that put food on the table. I want to see kids begging their parents for a strawberry patch so they can practice picking the fruit without bruising it. Let's create demand for gardens. Gardening is a radical act because after one season of watering, weeding, pest control, and harvesting, you will never look at a fully-stocked grocery store with picture-perfect produce the same way. Let's reconnect with our food.
American communists wear a hammer and sickle as a logo, but have forgotten the sickle in practice. If we have no plan to feed the people, we have no future. If we do not put down roots we will be washed away. Will we learn from the Black Panthers free breakfast program? Will we learn from the history of the National Farm Workers Association? Will we learn from Cuba’s agricultural shift after the fall of the USSR? Will we learn from the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement occupying farmland right now? Now is the time to garden, to learn, to grow together because money doesn't grow on trees, but food does.