Organizing the New Food Labor Movement: From Neoliberal Alternatives to Worker-based Justice

Abstract

Scholars and activists have launched numerous critiques against the alternative food movement, deriding its neoliberal politics and privileging of white notions and imaginaries of "good food." This commentary examines the recent formation of a U.S.-based food labor movement that is actively responding to the pitfalls of the alternative food movement and developing strategies for building coalitions across class, race, ethnicity, gender, and occupation. It also highlights some of the key ways the movement organizes around issues of discrimination, wage exploitation, and abuse throughout various sectors of the industrial food system, and challenges corporations to assume accountability in the ways workers are treated.