Building Agrifood Worker Power: A Memo for Students on the Food Chain Workers Alliance, 2023 Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven Award Recipient

Abstract

This memo introduces students and faculty to the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA), the 2023 recipient of the Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven Award given by the Critical Political Science section of the American Political Science Association. Founded in 2009, FCWA provides a model of how to build and sustain agrifood worker power across the food chain from farm to table. Its coalition illustrates key themes relevant to the study of how we might transform the agrifood system by centering the diverse workers who provide us with our daily food. Three themes stand out from this discussion: the importance of the decommodification of labor, the interconnection of labor and alternative food movements, and the need to connect rural with urban spaces. For students, FCWA provides rich material for research papers on a policy issue with important implications for climate change, for constructing concepts such as food justice and food democracy, and for studying how coalitions strengthen the impact of intersectional activists.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Wendy Sarvasy

Wendy Sarvasy is Lecturer Emerita in the Department of Political Science at California State University, East Bay. Her forthcoming book is Refounding Democracy Through Intersectional Activism: How Progressive Era Feminists Redefine Who We Are, and What it Means Today (Temple University Press, 2024). She contributes a chapter, “Essential Citizenship: Theorizing the Practices of Women Agrifood Workers,” to the Palgrave Handbook on Gender and Citizenship: Intersectional and Transnational Perspectives (forthcoming 2024), edited by Birte Siim and Pauline Stoltz. Her current project, From Anita Hill to Dobbs: Women’s Bodies as Sites of Political Struggles, theorizes the political meanings of sexual bodies, reproducing bodies, authoritative bodies, and migrating bodies.