From the farm to your door: How our global food system exploits workers

A new report from IPES-Food, an international food policy research group, finds that exploitation runs through the entire global food system, from farmworkers to grocery delivery couriers. Between 60 and 80 percent of food workers are informally employed, the report says, earning roughly half what conventionally employed workers make, and an estimated 2.1 million agricultural workers labor under forced-labor conditions. Migrants, about a quarter of the world's farmworkers, are three times as likely to face those conditions.

In New York, delivery workers organized through Los Deliveristas Unidos, many of them Indigenous migrants from Guatemala and Mexico, face traffic accidents, assault, and robbery while working through snowstorms and smoke events with little job security or insurance. The report ties much of this to colonial-era land dispossession and racialized labor systems that still shape who does the lowest-paid, most dangerous food work today.

The group's organizing has won minimum wage protections for some gig delivery workers, which its director points to as proof that corporations can be regulated without raising food prices, countering the usual argument that better conditions must mean higher costs.

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