New York Farmworkers win court ruling reaffirming union rights amid growers' challenge

A federal judge rejected a request from growers against New York State's farmworker unionization law late last month, upholding workers' ability to organize under a landmark 2019 law.

The lawsuit, brought by the New York State Vegetable Growers Association along with A&J Kirby Farms, Lynn-Ette & Sons Farms and Porpiglia Farms, continues to challenge the constitutionality of workers’ rights to unionize, which was granted to farmworkers for the first time in New York in 2019. All three individual farms have workers represented by the United Farm Workers but have yet to implement first union contracts, according to the UFW.

Workers who grow, process, transport and serve food face some of the highest rates of workplace abuse, wage theft, forced labor, injury and death in the global food system, according to a new report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.

The ruling offers a concrete example of the dynamic Errol Schweizer, an IPES-Food panel expert and co-author and editor of the report, described to The Chief in an interview: Food workers are essential to the economy but face significant barriers when they attempt to exercise collective power.

‘The most important thing is worker self-organization’

“The first and most important thing is worker self-organization,” Schweizer said. Workers, he argued, must be able to organize and unionize without facing employer retaliation or aggressive union-busting.

The IPES-Food report, Food Work: The workers behind our food and the exploitation they face, was released Oct. 5 and was years in the making, Schweizer said. 

Despite their central role in feeding the world, farmworkers are among the workers most exposed to poverty, unsafe conditions and labor exploitation. Agriculture accounts for one-third of global workplace deaths, and 80 percent of agricultural workers have never received workplace safety training. 

Globally, migrant food workers are 70 percent more likely to die on the job than non-migrant workers and lose an estimated $31 billion each year to wage theft and underpayment, according to the report. 

Schweizer said the solution begins with giving workers greater control over their workplaces and enforcing basic labor protections.

“You've got to guarantee decent work,” he said. “You've got to set floors. You have to have enforcement. You have to have standards.”

Since 2022, farmworkers at eight New York farms have unionized with the UFW, according to the union. But workers at the three farms involved in the lawsuit continue to wait for first contracts, potentially losing hundreds or thousands of dollars annually in wages and benefits they would have received under those agreements.

“Since 2019, farm workers in New York have been organizing and winning first ever union contracts with better wages and stronger job protections,” UFW Secretary Treasurer Armando Elenes said in a statement following the judge's ruling.

He said growers have continued fighting against farmworkers' right to unionize and urged them to implement contracts approved by workers.

A representative for the New York State Vegetable Growers Association did not respond to a request for comment on the ruling.

Connection to city-owned grocery stores

Schweizer has also advocated for publicly operated or publicly supported grocery stores as a way to address the high cost of food, a project for which he has worked as a consultant for Mayor Mamdani’s administration. 

“It’s a matter of public provisioning,” Schweizer said. “It’s one aspect, but it’s about making food a public good.”

Under the concept, publicly-supported stores could subsidize prices for basic groceries and operate as a form of city infrastructure, similar to libraries or parks, without means-testing who can shop there. Schweizer said he would prefer the stores to be publicly operated, although he supports the administration’s interest in having private supermarket operators run them with prices at a 30 percent discount, as Mayor Mamdani has suggested.

“We need to see food as a fundamental human right that everybody should be guaranteed access to healthy, fresh, affordable, good food,” he said.

Schweizer said the proposal is not intended to drive existing supermarkets out of business. Instead, he argued that the city could use its purchasing power and public resources to make staple foods more affordable, including potentially supporting independent supermarkets and cooperatives that already serve New York neighborhoods.

“Nobody wants to put these supermarkets out of business,” he said. “Everybody just wants to ensure that people can afford to eat and live in the city.”

But Schweizer cautioned that public grocery stores alone would not resolve the broader problems identified in the IPES-Food report.

Food prices, he said, are also shaped by corporate concentration and the power large companies wield across the food supply chain. The question of affordability is therefore connected to the report’s larger argument about who controls the food system — and the workers who make it function.