Be Conscientious: Vote "No" on Grapes

Today, the grape vote has finally arrived. At breakfast, lunch or dinner today, make your voice heard not only in your dining hall but across the country: vote the "no" option on grapes.

We urge you to vote no on table grapes because currently there is no safe option for Harvard if we care both about the conditions of the workers who pick the grapes pesticide levels on our grapes. With the no option, grapes will come to Harvard tables only when the working conditions are improved through the work of the United Farm Workers (UFW).

To begin with unchallenged fact, the Harvard source for grapes for the winter will be in Chile, whose grapes were ranked the 11th most contaminated produce item on American shelves by the Environmental Working Group, basing its statistics on USDA tests. With scant regulation, there is no reason to think Chilean grapes will not continue to have undetected problems, like the cyanide scare that caused a brief governmental ban on Chilean grapes in the late 1980s.

To the more central issue of the status of California grapes and grape workers, there is no debating that the situation with both pesticides and working conditions have improved since the creation of the grape workers, there is no debating that the situation with both pesticides and working conditions have improved since the creation of the UFW by the late Cesar Chavez in the 1960s. Growers in mushrooms, roses and wine grapes have met their demands and have reached their desired standard of working conditions. However, in the field of table grapes, the situation has not improved enough.

Though the Grape Coalition cites California law and official agriculture agency statistics, this is misleading because a good number of the workers in question are migrants and illegally in the United States and therefore are likely to go unreported in such statistics. The farms may very well have the requisite bathrooms and pay for the workers they report, but the numbers of workers not listed on the payroll could hold the difference between respectable working conditions and utter squalor.

The Coalition does not even take on one of the UFW's main assertions: workers are not free to unionize or to express grievances. The Coalition points to the small size of the union as proof that workers feel satisfied by conditions, but growers have routinely intimidated their workers with the threat of being fired to prevent them from participating. It is not good enough for individual Harvard students to choose each morning if grapes should be shunned; as student body we need to stand up and be heard, for the rights of those workers toiling away in California. Vote no on grapes until conditions improve to UFW standards.