A new report released by the Food Chain Workers Alliance takes a closer look at the wages and working conditions of the occupations and industries involved in bringing us our food. Core food occupations along the food chain include farmworkers, processing facilities workers, warehouse workers, grocery store workers, and restaurant workers. Together the “food system” employs one in five private-sector workers, yet taken as a whole, provides some of the least sustainable working conditions. Here are some data points from the study:

• 86.5 percent of the workers surveyed reported earning low or poverty wages,
• 79 percent lacked access to paid sick days,
• 83 percent did not have health insurance,
• 36 percent experienced wage theft in the previous week, and
• 57.2 percent suffered injury or health problems on the job.

These poor working conditions affect the economic security of workers, but also increase public costs (food system workers use public assistance at higher rates), risk public health (53 percent of workers had worked when sick due to a lack of paid sick days), and keep local economies from thriving.

Mark Bittman wrote an interesting opinion piece about the report in the NY Times yesterday, noting that sustainable food does not always mean sustainable labor practices.

If you care about sustainability — the capacity to endure — it’s time to expand our definition to include workers. You can’t call food sustainable when it’s produced by people whose capacity to endure is challenged by poverty-level wages.

For more information about occupations in the restaurant industry in North Carolina and the history and impact of the sub-minimum wage, take a look at our report: Tipping the Scales toward Fair Wages.

A recent Yes! Weekly article, Wage Theft: Is the Boss’ Hand in Your Wallet, puts the spotlight on wage theft in the Triad, telling some of the stories of workers experiencing wage and hour violations and the significant impact of wage theft on their lives.

Workers in the area, who didn’t give their names for fear of retaliation from employers, listed a wide range of ways they are denied what they are owed. Restaurant workers were promised raises they never received. A manager on Elm Street was forced to come in and do prep work without clocking in, some workers had to clock out while cleaning the shop….Paychecks bounced, wages were lowered without notification, businesses closed and never gave employees’ their last checks, workers were forced to pay for supplies and campaign workers said they were paid a fraction of what they were promised, if at all.

Wage theft – the illegal underpayment or non-payment of workers’ wages – is on the rise and the scope of violations is substantial.  Claims filed under the FLSA have increased by 400 percent over the last decade. And, as we have written before,  data from the NC Dept. of Labor’s Wage and Hour Bureau, which administers the North Carolina Wage and Hour Act, shows that documented wage theft cost workers and their communities almost $4.7 million in just one year. While these figures are significant, the numbers likely underestimate the occurrence of wage theft. As the Yes! Weekly article reiterates, workers may fear retaliation, hang on to bad jobs because of a lack of other options, or have difficulties seeking redress.

As North Carolina works to sustain this slow economic recovery, it is critical that workers have good jobs and are paid for their work. Wage theft can be devastating for families struggling to make ends meet, but can also impact the broader economy. Businesses that illegally withhold wages are at an unfair competitive advantage and wage theft keeps money and taxes out of local economies.

North Carolinians have long believed that hard work should be rewarded with fair wages. Policy makers must ensure that our existing wage and hour laws are enforced and that unscrupulous businesses are held accountable. By addressing the issue of wage theft, North Carolina can reinforce the value of work, help struggling families, and accelerate the economic recovery.

As of last week, approximately 17,000 jobless workers in North Carolina were cut off from unemployment benefits. Payments under the federal Extended Benefits (EB) program were terminated in eight states, including North Carolina, due to a small decline in the state’s unemployment rate that disqualifies the state from additional weeks of UI benefits. In these eight states, over 200,000 long-term unemployed workers lost their benefits on Sunday.

A decrease in the unemployment rate should be good news. Indeed, North Carolina’s unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent in March, the lowest it had been in over three years. But it’s important to remember that the unemployment rate is still at a record high, almost twice as high as it was in 2007 before the Great Recession. And North Carolina is still not creating enough jobs to replace those lost in the recession and to keep up with population growth. The jobs deficit – the number of jobs the state needs to create in order to catch with these employment levels – stands at over 500,000.

This means that there simply are not enough jobs for job seekers. And the 17,000 long-term unemployed who have now lost their benefits face a grim reality in which there are four unemployed workers for every job opening.

Unemployment benefits don’t replace earnings from a job. In fact, the average UI benefit of $290 does not even allow a family of three to meet all basic expenses. But these benefits are a modest support that allow many North Carolinian families to put food on their tables and pay their bills while they are looking for work. This week, there are 17,000 workers out of a job and without the benefits necessary to make ends meet.

Flowers and chocolate are great. Really, they are. But our state’s working moms deserve so much more. North Carolina’s mothers deserve equal pay. As we’ve written before, North Carolina’s working women are still only earning 80.7 percent of men’s earnings. And that’s despite the fact that 42.7 percent  of working mothers in North Carolina are the family’s breadwinner.

In addition to affordable, quality child care, working parents – mothers and fathers –  also need job security and economic stability when they need to take care of sick kids or parents. Parents need paid maternity and paternity leave when welcoming a new child into the family. And parents need time off work to care for themselves and their families if an unexpected longer-term illness strikes.

In time for Mother’s Day, the NC Justice Center has released a brief on the importance of Family and Medical Leave Insurance, a policy that can increase job and economic stability while North Carolina’s parents are raising the next generation. As this Huffington Post blog points out:

This Mother’s Day, when you pick out that special card or place your bouquet order, consider the working mom at the register. She too needs a gift. It’s time for us to unify around more than our purchases and realize that what moms (and dads) want and what our nation needs is for their children to thrive. It turns out that if our infants do well, our nation does well too. By packaging paid family leave and quality affordable infant care, we can give babies a strong start in their first year of life. That’s a package of policies ready for wrapping.