The Global Food System Is Structurally Built on Worker Exploitation and Requires Worker Power and Corporate Accountability to Change
Source: Errol Schweizer. "The Food Industry Is Rife With Worker Abuse." October 29, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author says that the people who grow, process, and sell our food are routinely underpaid, endangered, and sometimes enslaved, and that this is how the system is designed to make profits rather than a malfunction. He argues the fix is giving workers real power, enforcing labor rights, holding big companies accountable, and treating food as a public good.
Conclusion
The global food system is not broken but is working as designed, concentrating wealth by exploiting the workers who produce food. Changing it requires shifting power to workers and the public through unions, enforceable labor rights, corporate accountability, equal migrant rights, and revaluing food work.
Premises
- Food systems employ about 1.4 billion people, more than any other sector, yet workers face widespread low pay, wage theft, forced and child labor, informality, unsafe conditions, and exclusion from protections (e.g., ~400 million earn below a living wage, 2.1 million forced laborers, 83 million child laborers in agriculture, and migrants three times more likely to be in forced labor).
- This exploitation is not accidental: governments exempt food and farm employers from basic wage, safety, and bargaining standards, and weak enforcement and unequal power leave workers exposed.
- Corporate concentration (e.g., poultry wage-fixing settlements, Walmart's market dominance and its workers' reliance on public assistance) suppresses wages, weakens unions, and prioritizes shareholder returns over decent work.
- Climate change, pesticide use, and digital technologies such as algorithmic management and surveillance are intensifying danger, productivity pressure, and wage suppression for food workers.
- Worker-led and public initiatives (Coalition of Immokalee Workers agreements, India's National Hawkers Federation, public procurement rules, public grocery stores, Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement) show that organizing, enforceable standards, and public-good orientation can improve conditions.
Assumptions
- Patterns of exploitation across diverse countries and sub-sectors reflect a single underlying structural logic (profit maximization under capitalism) rather than separate local causes
- Statistics from the IPES-Food report are accurate and representative
- Successful local or sectoral organizing models can scale to the global food system
- Higher labor standards can be achieved without unacceptable food price increases or can be paid for by redistributing value along the supply chain
- Governments and firms can be compelled to change through worker power and political pressure
- Exploitation is intended or systematically functional rather than an unintended byproduct of market conditions