PORTLAND, Maine — New England farm workers with the Milk with Dignity campaign are planning a rally in the city on Saturday, and campaign organizers are demanding action from Hannaford supermarkets.
The organizers want the supermarket chain to sign a farmworker-authored code of conduct that sets standards for labor and housing conditions on dairy farms — including those in Maine — that the chain uses to supply its store brand milk.
Hannaford operates 186 stores in Maine, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont. Locally headquartered in Scarborough, Hannaford’s corporate, multinational parent company is Ahold Delhaize of the Netherlands.
Vermont-based farm worker organization Migrant Justice is heading up the Milk with Dignity campaign. Dedicated to New England farm worker rights, it was founded in the wake of Jose Obeth Santiz Cruz’s 2009 death. Cruz was pulled into a mechanized gutter scraper and strangled to death by his clothing on a Vermont dairy farm.
In Maine specifically, the state’s normal minimum wage is $13.80 per hour. The minimum for farm workers is $7.25 with no right to time-and-a-half when working over 40 hours — though progressives in the Legislature are currently trying to change that.
Also in Maine, farm workers do not have the right to organize for the purposes of collective bargaining for wages, hours, working conditions or benefits.
Migrant Justice succeeded in getting Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream to sign the code of conduct, which includes independent oversight of farms, in 2017. It has lobbied Hannaford to do the same since 2019.
“We’d like to sit down and have a conversation with them,” Migrant Justice organizer and translator Will Lambek said. “But so far, they’ve refused to do that.”
Hannaford is holding that line, according to a statement made on Thursday.
“We differ with Migrant Justice in our approach to the solution,” it read. “In our experience, truly impactful, lasting change is best effected at scale across the industry — not on a state-by-state, commodity-by-commodity, or company-by-company basis — and in partnership with credible, external auditing organizations.”
The Hannaford statement also pointed out that it maintains a 24-hour hotline to take farm worker complaints. However, the complaints are referred back to workers’ farms, via middle-man milk supply companies, for investigation.
Out of fewer than 15 complaints received on the line, Hannaford’s investigators have substantiated no actionable wrongdoing on the part of any employers, the company statement said.
“Sixty percent of the complaints received were either not specific to a particular farm, were solely requests for Hannaford to join the Milk with Dignity program, or concerned an incident or conditions on farms outside of Hannaford’s private brand dairy supply chain,” it said.
Despite Hannaford’s stated refusal to sign Migrant Justice’s Milk with Dignity pledge, organizers are planning to go ahead with Saturday’s march. This week, Maine’s 40,000-member AFL-CIO branch threw its support behind the action.
“Workers are committed to this,” Lambek said. “They’re in it for the long haul and understand how tough it is to get a gargantuan multinational chain to change its ways.”
