Poll Shows Strong Support for a Food and Farm Bill That Protects Workers

The heat wave plaguing the vital agricultural region of California’s Central Valley this past week serves as yet another reminder of the dangers facing farmworkers, who are essential to putting food on all our plates every day. Overall, the last five years have been particularly hazardous for many farmworkers and other workers across the food system, with COVID-19 outbreaks and deaths among workers at Tyson Foods and other meatpacking plants in early 2020, grocery and food delivery workers toiling on the front lines of the pandemic, and farmworkers dealing with suffocating smoke from western wildfires.

Now, as Congress writes the next five-year food and farm bill, workers and their advocates are demanding that the bill do more to help protect and support the people whose labors ensure we can all eat. And new polling commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) this summer shows that voters—nationally and in a handful of important states—have workers’ backs.

Survey says: don’t let workers continue to struggle

In mid-June and early July, we surveyed nearly 3,000 registered voters nationally and in four key states: Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all represented by members of the House and Senate committees that are drafting what is usually called the “farm bill.” As I’ve suggested previously, this legislation is more aptly called the food and farm bill because it shapes nearly everything about the system that produces and distributes food in the United States. And yet, although this system is driven by the labor of more than 21 million people, or 10.5 percent of the US workforce, recent farm bills have had little or nothing to say about their working conditions.

Chart courtesy of the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy/ So what did our polls show? We asked about a variety of issues relevant to the next food and farm bill, ranging from how to help farmers build climate resilience to how to help people of color, women, and young people succeed in farming (see the full national and state results). Here I’ll focus on the findings related to workers.

Source: ucsusa.org