Privatizing Farm Worker Justice: regulating labor through voluntary certification and labeling

This paper assesses the possibilities and limits of efforts to incorporate social accountability into California agricultural production through voluntary certification and labeling, in the context neoliberal governance. We argue that, in its contradictory role as market mechanism, regulatory form, and social cause, certification both resists neoliberalization of the agro-food system and reinscribes neoliberal thinking. Unlike more traditional forms of social justice organizing, which have historically sought to alter power relations between labor, capital, and the state, the very notion that production conditions can be regulated through voluntary, third-party monitoring and labeling embraces several key neoliberal principles: the primacy of the market as a mechanism for addressing environmental and social ills, the privatization of regulatory functions previously reserved for the public sphere, and the assertion of the individual rights and responsibilities of citizen–consumers. Interviews with certification actors lead us to conclude that the strategic embrace of certification is driven by contradictory motivations within the movement for social accountability in agriculture, which can only be understood in relation to the confluence of a broader neoliberal political–economic order with California’s particular arrangements of farm labor politics and agro-food activism. Specifically, agro-food consolidation, rollback of protective labor regulation, the evisceration of the farm worker movement, and the conservative agrarianism of the sustainable agriculture movement intersect to circumscribe the realm of possibility and create conditions that undermine farm worker representation in the governance of agricultural labor practices.