To the Editor:
I am commenting on Suzanne Butterfield’s letter regarding Prop 4 and Prop 3. I cannot speak from personal experience about the need to protect rights of marginalized groups, as Suzanne Butterfield has.
I can speak to migrant and farm labor and suggest that Suzanne is inexperienced in her opinions. Having worked in orchards in the Northeast and elsewhere for nearly two decades, I experienced my wages drop because H-2 visas made negotiations for pay raises impossible. My research showed that, in their first year of inception in orchards in Pennsylvania, crews of Puerto Ricans recruited with Department of Agriculture encouragement arrived to find that Jamaicans with H-2 visas had taken their jobs. That was my experience in Vermont. I would prefer a labor union to Department of Agriculture or Department of Labor management of food systems.
When we talk about Vermont farms, we have spent decades referring to dairy farms. We overlook vegetable, fruit, maple, marijuana, and fiber farms, and nurseries. We assign them to a sink-or-swim category and place our concerns with big dairy. However, smaller, more viable farms are more numerous, more apt to thrive, and less likely to pollute with herbicides, pesticides, and nitrogen in waterways. Bashing unionization broadly simply plays into corporate wealth production, including big dairy, and overlooks the finer-grained picture of food production.
Sincerely,
Julie Levy
Weathersfield, Vt.