May 1, 2020
This year we encounter International Workers’ Day in the middle of a global pandemic. As we adopt physical distancing measures to minimize the spread of COVID-19, we are witnessing two related disruptions: that of the global economy and of those prior assumptions of what type of work is considered essential.
Still, every day we see reports on how the workplaces of those helping heal us, feed us, and keep us sustained are not set up to keep them and their own families safe from infection. We are thus confronted with spiritual reckonings about how the lives of some continue to come at the expense of others, and what we can do to challenge these systemic injustices.
In the United States, many frontline workers at Amazon, FedEx, Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Instacart, and more are today walking off the job or staging “sick outs” and are encouraging customers to boycott those businesses. They are demanding that these companies do more to protect them from COVID-19.
For farmworkers, this is an especially fraught moment; we are essential but most of us are not granted essential rights. Most farmworkers in the United States are undocumented migrants, thus we are not all eligible for government aid and cannot strike without risking detention, deportation, or fates far worse than contracting a potentially deadly virus, if we might pause to imagine that.
When The Abundant Table was founded in 2009 as a non-profit farm with a vision to practice thoughtful stewardship of the land; grow pesticide-free food for our community; and share in the joys and miracles of plants, bugs, and soil, valuing farmworkers as both essential and dignified was early on a foundational pillar of our work, yet it proved at times the most difficult to consistently live into.
On our farm, conversations about race, identity, sexuality, and spirituality have always been as common as questions about which seeds to plant or how much nitrogen is in the soil. So paths were paved for farmworkers themselves to challenge dominant ways of doing and to one day take on leadership positions in dignified ways.
Over the last year, we have been walking along in a process to restructure as a workplace that allows all workers at The Abundant Table to have an equitable say in the decisions that affect how we relate to the farm, to our community, to Mother Earth, and to each other.
On this International Workers’ Day, we happily share the news that we have become a non-profit worker collective—a democratic workplace where all of us propose ideas, deliberate toward consensus, and carry out the decisions we make, always with a view toward the benefit of our collective vision rather than to any one of us individually. Our hearts are also happy to share that, with the enthusiastic support of our Board of Directors, we have named long-time Abundant Table farmworker and spiritual guide Reyna Ortega as our Interim Executive Director, who is guided by the principle of “leading by obeying” our collective word.
In the midst of a dominant agricultural system and economic culture that is primarily characterized by extraction, consumption, and death, we, our Board, and the broader Abundant Table community continue our commitment to create just and equitable structures in our small corner of the world to overturn the unfair working conditions under which 99.9% of farmworkers in the US currently work.
Under the COVID-19 pandemic, we are demonstrating that it is possible for farmworkers to decide under what conditions, wages, and benefits the essential work of food growing takes place. It is our hope that our efforts to create a dignified workplace can show that another world is possible—one that respects and values farmworkers as decision-makers along with the tremendous physical strength, spiritual connection, and earth-literacy required of this essential work.
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The Abundant Table Farm Collective
Camarillo, California
May 1, 2020