Businesses

By Sara Nurmi

In many American towns, plants and factories rely on immigrant labor to keep business and the economy running smoothly. Such is the case for a large kosher meat packing plant called Agriprocessors Inc. in Postville, Iowa that was raided earlier this year.

However, before the immigration raid took place, Morris Allen, a conservative Jewish Rabbi of Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, MN made a visit to the plant. Rabbi Allen was disturbed with the working conditions he saw in the plant and was now faced with a contradiction: a worker must slaughter an animal according to the ethical laws of kashrut, yet at the same time he/she is underpaid and working in unfair conditions. He knew that something had to be done soon to protect the livelihoods of the workers.

Not long after Rabbi Allen witnessed the conditions in Agriprocessors Inc., the largest single immigration raid in the country at the time took place on May 12, 2008. Workforce members and city residents were detained and there were over 700 warrants and 300 arrests, causing Agriprocessors Inc. to lose ¾ of its workforce. After hearing this news, the Orthodox Union contacted the plant threatening to take away their kosher certification unless new management was hired.

Agriprocessors Inc. avoided losing their certification and hired their long time attorney, Bernard Feldman, as the new C.E.O. and a new compliance officer to meet the requirements of the Orthodox Union. However, Feldman has little experience in meat packing and will now be taking over slaughterhouses in Iowa and Nebraska and a distribution center in Brooklyn.

At the moment, there are several initiatives in progress to improve guidelines for fair working conditions. Agriprocessors Inc. is currently locked in a legal battle over attempted unionization in the Brooklyn Warehouse. Feldman has mentioned that he is open to discussing possibilities of unionizing the company’s workers but the United Food and Commercial Workers says they have not yet heard a response after attempting to contact him.

Rabbi Allen, who had visited the plant prior to the raid, has also started a Justice Certification process, known as Hekhsher Tzedek, that he describes as "a way to demonstrate our concern for the vertical relationship between ourselves and God and also the horizontal relationship between ourselves and other people." This certification seeks to create an additional seal for kosher food to show it was produced according to ethical standards for wages and worker safety and is based on five guidelines:

1.Employees Wages & Benefits

2.Health & Safety

3.Product Development

4.Corporate Transparency

5.Environmental Impact

According to Rabbi Allen’s Blog,

Keeping kosher must translate into living kosher, and exploiting workers, the environment, or an animal in the process of producing food makes that an impossibility. It is important to understand that the goal of this initiative is not to replace any existing, honored heksher, nor to revise any traditional beliefs or practices. Rather, it is intended to enhance what living kosher means.

The Rabbinical Council of America, an organization of Orthodox Jewish Rabbis, has praised the initiatives of Hekhsher Tzedek for the fact that is has built bridges between Jews of various walks of life. They have also announced forming a task force to devise Jewish principles and ethical guidelines on the kosher food industry and business in general with hopes to publish their results in a guide.

“What began as a modest initiative in my own community of Mendota Heights, MN to further promote the observance of kashrut has been snowballed into a national, interdenominational effort to create a culture of kashrut in America”, says Allen.

Five months after the raid, Postville, Iowa is still hurting after losing 1/6 of its population.

CNN reports:

Tensions are high, crime is up, and businesses are hurting. The nation's kosher supply has taken a big hit because the plant is only functioning at partial capacity.

The vice president of Palau, a Pacific Island, has journeyed thousands of miles to Postville and offered about 160 of his countrymen for the open jobs at Agriprocessors. Residents of the island nation can legally live and work indefinitely in the United States under a special arrangement with the U.S. government. Another 125 Somali Muslims, legally classified as refugees, have already moved in. Many have come via the Minneapolis area, as well as Illinois and Texas.

However, will the fleet of new workers be greeted with new and improved working standards than what was previously in place? It is not certain what progress will be made to ensure better workers rights at Agriprocessors Inc, but Shmuel Herzfeld, an Orthodox Rabbi from Washington states that, “I think unless there’s transparency in the process, there’s always going to be questions.”

Co-op managers and employees are invited to two information and feedback sessions by the Local Fair Trade Network (LFTN). The session for managers will be at 9:30 AM on Tuesday, November 27 at the Seward Co-op satellite office. The session for employees will be at 7:00 PM on Wednesday, November 28 at the Bedlam Theater.

LFTN works to apply the Fair Trade model to local food in order to create a better life for everyone involved in our local food system. During the 2007 local growing season LFTN has been working with Seward Co-op, Bluff Country Co-op and four local farmers on a pilot project for a Local Fair Trade food label. We have also begun discussions with local farmers about creating a cooperatively-owned transportation system in order to get their produce to the Twin Cities market more efficiently.

by Joe Riemann

On April 18th, 2007 LFTN steering committee members met with marketing and management staff from regional food cooperatives to discuss the Local Fair Trade Label pilot program that LFTN has been working on with our partners, the Agricultural Justice Project(see above article for more information). Staff from Whole Foods Co-op (Duluth), Lakewinds Co-op (Minnetonka, Chanhassen and Anoka), Bluff Country Co-op (Winona), The Wedge Co-op, Linden Hills Co-op, Seward Co-op and North Country Co-op (all Minneapolis) discussed how the program would fit into the needs and expectations of co-op shoppers. While there have been ongoing discussions within the co-op network about the emerging domestic fair trade movement, this discussion created a unique opportunity to cultivate opinions and advice from co-op retailers, the ones who know how to deliver complex messaging and abstract concepts to shoppers hungry for healthy, sustainable, and socially just foods.

In general, co-ops affirmed that they have been pioneers of the fair trade and buy local movements, so domestic fair trade is a very small leap of faith for many co-op shoppers to make. Everyone agreed that customers would be receptive if the appropriate marketing was used. To this accord, many of the co-op representatives suggested that the messaging has to be straightforward and simple, utilizing words already familiar to co-op shoppers and staff (like Local Fair Trade).

With “Fair Trade” and “Buy Local” campaigns experiencing marketing and sales booms, one would only assume that “Local Fair Trade” would be an easy sell. While co-ops said the idea is great, shoppers still respond most often to quality and price point. For decades these values-based co-ops have been paying fair prices to local farmers and cultivating long term relationships that benefit the entire food chain. Therefore, many respondents felt that their prices already reflected a “fair trade” to local farmers. Finally, it was also noted that due to an ever-competitive natural foods market that pits locally owned co-ops against national chain retailers and consolidated distribution systems, co-ops would have difficulty increasing prices too much for domestic fair trade products, but everyone generally agreed that it was worth the effort (for more on pricing of local fair trade products see "The Price of Fair Wages").

The group ended the meeting conversing more about how to communicate with consumers about this somewhat revolutionary idea. It was agreed that there is a need and desire for information sharing from all the participating constituency groups. While co-ops have been buying products from local farmers for a long time, both farmers and co-ops agree that they are lacking the tools and resources for sharing the stories of these often very unique relationships. In response to these concerns, Local Fair Trade Network has been working hard at building a web-interface for message sharing, including blogs, and will soon be telling the stories of the farmers, farm workers and food cooperatives who are building a better society through alternative trade relationships.

The information gathered from the table was essential in the branding of the Local Fair Trade label pilot launched in July. LFTN will be following-up with regional co-ops this Fall with the results of the pilot program and proposals for expanding cooperation on Local Fair Trade.