Lessons from the Food Justice Movement for the Asset Building Field

The Applied Research Center, a racial justice think tank, hosted a webinar on Thursday to discuss their new report “Good Food and Good Jobs for All: Challenges and Opportunities to Advance Racial and Economic Equity in the Food System.” The webinar featured three speakers: Yvonne Yen Liu of ARC and the report’s author; Liana Foxvog of the International Labor Rights Forum; and Jose Oliva of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United). The report seeks to understand and begin to address the existing divide between two movements seeking different, but highly intertwined goals (“good food”: healthy, sustainably grown food and “good jobs”: living wage jobs with benefits and safe working conditions). The “Good Food” and “Good Jobs” movements are increasingly seeking to work in concert to address widespread inequality in the food system. By applying an intersectional analysis (that is, one that incorporates an understanding of how race, class, gender, and other factors affect our interaction with food production and consumption), the report sheds light on various opportunities for collaborating across movements and addressing economic injustice from multiple angles.

There are two primary ways this webinar/report connects directly to the asset building field. First, the report highlights the widespread economic insecurity faced by workers across the food system. From farming to processing to food retail, workers in this sector are overwhelmingly paid subminimum wages and are disproportionately people of color. According to a report cited in the webinar, Hands That Feed Us, by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, “40 percent of jobs in the food industry provide a wage above their regional poverty line, but only 13.5 percent of jobs provide wages higher than 150 percent of the regional poverty level.” Food workers experience high rates of poverty and food insecurity, and rely in large numbers on public benefits programs. For example, people employed in food-related industries use food stamps (SNAP) at twice the rate of the rest of the workforce. Furthermore, few food workers have access to workplace benefits, such as health insurance or paid sick time. Research from the Employee Benefit Research Institute shows that fewer than 1 in 10 workers with less than a high school diploma and 1 in 14 earning less than $10,000 have a retirement savings account. All of this adds up to a significant segment of the population (there are an estimated 20 million U.S. workers in food industries) that is burdened with the uncertainty that accompanies working poverty, inadequate opportunities for advancement in the workplace, and limited prospects for economic mobility or future-oriented savings.

Second, the webinar and the participating organizations’ promotion of ownership--in particular, business ownership--resonates with some of asset building’s key principles. Several of the participants noted that community- or worker-owned businesses have the potential to foster greater structural change for the food and labor systems than a focus on “alternatives” that ultimately relies on an ethic of individualism and ignores the root causes of racial and economic inequities. Community- or worker-owned retail businesses bring asset building to the community level, while providing many of the same benefits as household asset ownership—namely, economic security, a sense of control and ability to plan for the future, and the opportunity to build equity. ROC-United has opened worker-owned restaurants in New York and Detroit, both called COLORS, which double as worker training centers during the day. Another great example is the People’s Grocery in Oakland, which describes itself as a “health and wealth” organization that prioritizes community self-determination. These types of businesses can create sustainable, structural change by empowering communities and giving workers and consumers a greater stake in their local economy. Moreover, they are prime examples of effective merging of the “good food” and “good jobs” movements, in that they support both grassroots food justice efforts and healthy working conditions that promote upward mobility for employees.

Unfortunately, however, the barriers to starting a business in the U.S. are steadily increasing. As Barry Lynn and Lina Khan explained in a recent article about the decline of entrepreneurship, “fewer and fewer average families have the savings needed to invest in a small business.” Likewise, access to loans has diminished significantly; just between October 2011 and June 2012 alone, small business loans dropped 17%. Similarly, as demonstrated in our Assets Report infographic, twenty-seven million small business loans were disbursed in 2008, compared to only twenty-two million in 2010. ARC’s report also notes that communities of color have historically been excluded from government subsidies and loans to support farmers.

Ultimately, some of the recommendations presented in the webinar and report would be beneficial for the asset building movement as well. In particular, the webinar organizers focused attention on the role anti-racism training and effective coalition building work can play in addressing economic injustices. Other recommendations from the webinar included creating alternatives to the existing system and building multi-racial and multi-interest coalitions. Some of this work is already taking place within the asset building movement. As an example, yesterday Princeton University’s alumni magazine featured the work of Jose Quinonez, whose work as executive director of San Francisco’s Mission Asset Fund helps connect low-income families from diverse racial backgrounds to lending circles that help them build credit. This model provides an alternative to predatory lending and simultaneously builds relationships among community members. However, more attention to the role structural inequalities play in the lives of families would help the asset building field better address disparate access to assets, ownership, and economic stability.