FERN’s Friday Feed: A tell-tale tragedy
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
A deadly fire points up the failings of U.S.’s biggest farmworker visa program
FERN and Investigate Midwest
“The H-2A visa is supposed to be a safe alternative to crossing the border illegally — a win for both farmworkers and farmers,” write Esther Honig and Johnathan Hettinger. “With the visa, Gomez and Feliciano expected to earn $13.15 an hour picking sweet potatoes and blueberries — a fruit they’d never tasted before coming to the United States. Instead, the men were exploited from the start. When they finally began working, they were in debt, living in a squalid trailer, and were never paid the full wages they’d come all that way for. In the end they died in a fire, the exact cause of which remains unclear.”
Why grocery co-op S Market would ‘make the ghost of Ronald Reagan cry’
The American Prospect
“The interesting thing about S Market … is not this bog-standard grocery store. It’s the parent entity S Group, a cooperative network owned by its members—and one of the biggest and most successful companies in Finland,” writes Ryan Cooper. “From an American perspective, this is difficult to understand. Practically our whole society is built on the assumption that the only way to have a wealthy, productive economy is for entrepreneurs to be incentivized with massive rewards for building efficient businesses … One might attack this narrative empirically—Amazon was helped tremendously in its early days by not paying state sales taxes, while Tesla has relied on large government subsidies for most of its existence—but S Group poses a more fundamental challenge. Here we have a hyper-efficient retail operation, run with cutting-edge management and logistics, dominating half the grocery market of a wealthy country, without minting a single billionaire in the process. It is not just competitive with capitalist businesses; it is more successful.”
Corn harvests in the Yukon?
Inside Climate News
“Climate change has the potential to restructure the world’s agricultural landscapes, making it possible to plant crops in places where they have never been viable historically,” writes TK. A new study says that “[w]ithin the next 40 years, these new growing regions could overlap with 7 percent of the world’s wilderness areas outside Antarctica … The problem is that these emerging agricultural frontiers lie within some of the last untouched ecosystems on Earth, particularly in Arctic regions … ‘As soon as you go in and you start to do anything to that land, it loses its status as wilderness,’ said Alexandra Gardner, the study’s lead author. ‘Those areas are so precious for biodiversity, for actually meeting our climate goals in terms of reducing our carbon emissions. Those intact ecosystems are really good at storing and sequestering carbon.’”
Self-checkout is a failed experiment
The Atlantic
“When self-checkout kiosks began to pop up in American grocery stores, the sales pitch to shoppers was impressive: Scan your stuff, plunk it in a bag, and you’re done. Long checkout lines would disappear. Waits would dwindle. Small talk with cashiers would be a thing of the past. Need help? Store associates, freed from the drudgery of scanning barcodes, would be close at hand to answer your questions.You know how this process actually goes by now,” writes Amanda Mull. “You still have to wait in line. The checkout kiosks bleat and flash when you fail to set a purchase down in the right spot … Then you need to locate the usually lone employee charged with supervising all of the finicky kiosks, who will radiate exasperation at you while scanning her ID badge and tapping the kiosk’s touch screen from pure muscle memory.”
The restaurant revolution has begun
The New York Times
“Like so many other chefs, I was drawn to the restaurant business because it is exciting. I ignored its dysfunction and accepted that I’d forgo higher education, financial stability and holidays with family in order to share my craft with others,” writes Anthony Strong. “All it took was a pandemic, an enormous wave of inflation and an impossibly tight job market to force me and many others to burrow to the very core of what a restaurant does for its guests, workers and community and redefine it from the ground up. This is the silver lining of the pandemic and the never-ending economic uncertainty that has ensued: More places are finally figuring out how to make this business an actual business.”