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Athens Impact Socially Responsible Investments |
We offer a full range of personalized responsible investment strategies including Fossil Fuel Free portfolios, designed to meet your financial goals, promote a better society and a healthy planet. We help people align their money with their values by making socially responsible choices. Our clients invest in what matters to them and make a difference in society by using the power of shareholder advocacy. Placing your core beliefs at the center of the financial planning process helps you make better long-term decisions with your assets. The variety of ethical investment and impact investment options we provide means you don't have to choose between your values and investment performance.
Our firm is deeply committed to making a positive difference in the world. We help individuals, small businesses, non-profits, and other organizations align their investment decisions with their values and mission statements. Athens Impact is located off East State Street in Athens Ohio next to Village Bakery. Your portfolio is screened for issues that are important to you. We use both positive and negative screens to create a customized, individualized, tailored portfolio for you. You can be part of shareholder advocacy efforts from the comfort of your couch.
We offer fossil fuel free investing for climate focused clients. We also have the ability to create a passive direct index stock portfolio to minimize costs and aid in generational transfer without excessive tax consequences. Everything we offer is screened for environmental, social and governance aspects of a company, i.e. ESG investing. That is the starting point. From there, we apply both positive and negative SRI screens. Our positive screens include investing in companies that value refugees, women leaders, healthy hearts, LGBT rights, disability inclusion, racial justice, ethical supply chains. We can divest from the prison industrial complex, dark money, deforestation, weapons, big tobacco, fossil fuels, and pipelines on indigenous lands. We can measure and minimize the greenhouse gas emissions of your portfolio and we offer community impact investments that can be incorporated into any portfolio.
We consider our clients, friends. The foundation of our practice is based on strong, meaningful relationships with a clear understanding of what is important to you. We offer a wide variety of financial planning strategies including legacy and estate planning, retirement income planning, portfolio construction and management, charitable giving strategies, long-term care and end of life planning, education, budgeting, and savings options, and group retirement plans. Begin with a free consultation. All services can be canceled and prices are negotiable.
We offer comprehensive financial plans and ongoing financial analysis. This includes, values screening, investment analysis, retirement income planning, risk analysis and what-if planning, insurance analysis, tax planning strategies, estate planning, charitable giving strategies, ongoing updates and advice, behavioral finance coaching if desired, discounted AUM and AUA rates, and tax services when needed. We work with an attorney to help with wills, trusts, health care power of attorney, living will, medical power of attorney, and advanced directives. We also offer a fee only insurance shopping service, hourly advisory services, assets under advisement, business planning, cash flow and debt management, college savings, employee benefit optimization, and will soon be offering ongoing financial coaching.
Michelle Wilson is an independent, fee-only fiduciary who holds a Master's degree in financial planning and has over 25 years of experience in the financial services industry. She founded Athens Impact LLC to deliver a comprehensive wealth management experience to her clients focused on ethically and socially responsible investment principals. She earned her Accredited Investment Fiduciary ® certification and passed the FINRA series 7 and 66 licenses. She holds an insurance license in the State of Ohio. As a fee-only fiduciary, she does not offer any commission-based products and does not accept any kick-backs for her services. She was one of the first in the region to earn her Chartered Socially Responsible Investment Counselor ® certification.
Michelle owns a cabin on 30 acres in SE Ohio. Her goal is to have a self-sustainable lifestyle by the time she retires. She enjoys spending time with her partner, Gil, and being near her children and their families. On founding a business dedicated to sustainable practices, Michelle is grateful to be doing something that matters and makes a difference in the world. In the future, she plans to fund a non-profit dedicated to financial education for Appalachian women.
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Fair Labor at Home |
As last April’s tragic Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh illustrated, worker exploitation and abuse is still happening around the world. More than 1,200 people lost their lives, most of them women sewing clothes for US companies like Walmart. The workers had been ordered back into the building to sew, despite police warnings that it wasn’t safe.
Many Americans believe that a similar tragedy couldn’t possibly happen here in the US, and it’s indeed unlikely that any domestic company could get away with sending employees into a condemned building. That said, several US industries have workers who toil in the shadows and are subject to horrific abuse—from employees in US clothing sweatshops to workers on American farms to people toiling alone as house or hotel cleaners, child care and car wash workers, and more. One group that gets hit the hardest is US immigrants, who are often subjected to the worst workplace abuses. In the midst of very real backlash against the recent immigration reform bills (S. 744/HR 547), what gets lost in the debate is the fact that many immigrants are lured to the US by unscrupulous American employers seeking vulnerable workers to underpay and exploit.
Sweatshop Conditions at Home
When Natalicia Tracy first came to the United States from Brazil, it was under a contract to work as a nanny for two years for a family in the Boston area. Excited by the prospect of seeing a new country, learning English, and making a good living, Tracy was in for a rude awakening.
Though she’d expected to work hard, she’d also expected a respectful relationship with her employers. But it soon became clear that that wasn’t going to happen.
Upon arrival, rather than being given her own bedroom in the family’s spacious home, she was shown to their three-season porch, where she was to sleep on a futon on the floor, even during harsh Boston winters.
“They had told me I was just supposed to nanny [for a regular 40-hour workweek] and help out a little bit, but before I knew it, I was supposed to do everything around the house,” she says. “I worked seven days a week and until 2 a.m. on the weekends.”
In addition to caring for the children, Tracy had running errands, cooking meals, and cleaning the family’s home added to her job. When the family told her to hand-scrub their white rugs with toxic cleaning products, she began having severe asthma attacks.
“At night, I couldn’t breathe,” she says.
Instead of taking her to the doctor, the family told her to just take some of the medicine they had on hand for their asthmatic son—after she was finished giving him his nebulizer treatment.
They only paid her $25 a week—not even close to a living wage, and certainly not enough for her to save and pay her way back to Brazil. Not that they would have let her go anyway.
“I lived in their home and didn’t have family close by and didn’t speak any English,” she says. “I was here alone. I didn’t have a place to go or friends. They wouldn’t let me use the phone to call someone to talk about what was going on. They wouldn’t let me put mail in the mailbox. It was a very traumatic experience.”
If it sounds like modern-day slavery, that’s because it is, and it’s shockingly common here in the US.
“People talk about sex trafficking, but they don’t talk about the very prevalent problem of labor trafficking,” says Andrea Mercado, communications director for the National Domestic Worker Alliance. “There are many cases of people who were brought [to the US from other countries] to work. They’re promised they can learn English or even be able to go to college. Often we see situations where their passports are taken away, they’re taken from their family, paid very little if at all, subjected to horrible working conditions, and have no privacy or adequate sleeping conditions. Every month we learn of new cases across the country.”
Immigrants: A Vulnerable Population
About 23.1 million immigrants work in the US, and only eight million are undocumented. Another 240,000 come here legally as temporary guest workers. Many of the most exploited workers on American soil come from this immigrant population, both those who are undocumented and those who are legal residents or recent citizens.
Because recent immigrants may still be learning English or may be unfamiliar with US labor laws, many are taken advantage of, says Rebecca Smith of the National Employment Law Project.
As a result, immigrant workers are frequent victims of wage theft, dangerous conditions and uncompensated workplace injuries, discrimination, and even physical assaults, according to Smith.
Though legal status doesn’t mean a worker is immune to abuses, the situation can be worse for workers who are undocumented. “Our broken immigration system has created an underclass of vulnerable workers in our country, easy prey to employer retaliation,” says Smith. “Across the country and across low-wage industries, employers use threats to expose workers’ immigration status as a cudgel to ensure that workers can’t complain about abusive conditions.”
A System Rooted in Slavery
Forty-six percent of US domestic workers—i.e. child and elder caregivers and housecleaners—are immigrants, and they’re particularly susceptible to abuse because they often operate in isolation. But domestic workers and farmworkers are also exploited because of an archaic rule that excludes them from important federal protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938.
FLSA was signed by then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt and provided basic rights to US workers—a 44-hour maximum workweek, a national minimum wage, overtime pay, and a ban on child labor. But to get it passed through a divided Congress, Democrats bowed to pressure from Southern Republicans, who wanted farmworkers and domestic workers excluded from basic protections like the right to organize to overtime pay.
Those exclusions continue to this day.
“It’s the legacy of slavery,” says Mercado. “The Southern Congresspeople didn’t want domestic workers and farmworkers—who at that time were primarily African American—to have the right to organize.”
“Domestic and farm work are forgotten professions,” adds Tracy, who is now the executive director of the Brazilian Immigrant Center in Allston, MA. “Who did this work in 1938? African Americans, who back then weren’t thought of as real people. Because of that mentality, the US developed this invisible, dehumanized workforce that still makes the rest of the economy happen.”
In absence of a federal bill that would plug the domestic- and farmworker hole in FLSA, organizations like NDWA are campaigning for state laws to do so. So far, Hawaii and New York have passed state laws, with California and Massachusetts currently moving similar bills through their state legislatures.
Sweatshops of the Field
Immigrants make up 72 percent of US farmworkers, or those who labor on farms owned by others, according to the National Center for Farmworker Health. As noted above, because of their exclusion from FLSA, they often don’t make the minimum wage—legally.
In fact, 30 percent of all US farmworkers had total family incomes below the poverty line ($22,050 for a family of four), according to the Department of Labor. Whether working in California’s garlic fields, Florida’s tomato farms, or Carolina blueberry fields, farmworkers are often victims of wage theft, where supervisors withhold or steal their pay, and legal oversight is often lax, says the National Farm Worker Ministry.
They’re also victims of other types of abuse. A 2012 report by Human Rights Watch found that women farmworkers face a very high risk of sexual harassment or abuse, including “rape, stalking, unwanted touching, exhibitionism, or vulgar language by supervisors, employers, and others in positions of power.” Most farmworkers interviewed for the report said they had not reported the abuse, fearing reprisals, including job loss.
Farmworkers Fight Back
One group of immigrant farmworkers in Florida has had such powerful results in their fight to change abusive working conditions that the Washington Post recently called them “one of the great human rights success stories of our day.”
In 1993, a group of mainly Latino and Haitian tomato pickers in Immokalee, FL, met to discuss that their wage of 50 cents per 32-pound bucket hadn’t increased in 30 years. This meant a worker had to pick nearly 2.5 tons of tomatoes per ten-hour day to earn the Florida minimum wage, notes Guadalupe Gonzalo, an Immokalee farmworker.
“Physical abuse and sexual harassment were common,” says Gonzalo. “There were cases of modern-day slavery on farms,” which she says, means that farm owners would force workers to work overtime, threaten them with violence, and even “lock them in a box truck.”
And so the pickers started the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to end abuse on Florida tomato farms. Since then, the CIW has achieved several victories, including pressuring 11 major US fast food and grocery chains to sign a groundbreaking agreement with the CIW called the Fair Food Program. The program includes independent monitoring of farms and worker protections in cases of wage theft, sexual harassment, and forced labor. It also mandates a penny-per-pound wage increase, which, Gonzalo says, may seem small but does add up to make a difference in their lives.
In 2005, Taco Bell became the first to sign the agreement. Since then, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Chipotle, and others have followed suit.
Under the program, if a farm owner won’t take action to address worker complaints, the workers can go to the grocery and fast food companies themselves, which will pressure owners to make changes. If a farm continues to abuse workers, the corporations are legally obligated to stop purchasing from it—a significant threat that gets results.
“Conditions [on FL farms] have changed in a major way since the Fair Food Program was enacted,” says Gonzalo. “Workers are calling it a new day for pickers in the fields.”
Today, the program has improved conditions for tomato pickers at 90 percent of Florida’s farms. CIW staff, including Gonzalo, focus on educating workers at those farms about their rights and on working to bring more retailers on board. They are currently targeting Wendy’s for its failure to sign the agreement. Wendy’s is the only prominent US fast food chain to not sign.
“Wendy’s response is that it’s already purchasing from farms in the Fair Food Program, so it feels no need to join the program itself,” says Gonzalo. “But the program has teeth because of the companies that join—the farms know there will be market consequences if they violate the agreement. [By not joining], Wendy’s is not paying the penny-per-pound premium, and it doesn’t suspend farms that violate worker rights.”
While the CIW has been a force for change in Florida, abuse still continues on farms in other parts of the country. But CIW workers are helping to spark change outside of their state.
“Workers in Immokalee are migrant farmworkers, so they’ll work in Florida for eight or nine months and then travel up to other states to pick other crops,” says Gonzalo. “CIW workers understand what rights they should have, and they [spread the word].”
Food for Thought
In the restaurant industry, one out of every ten workers is an immigrant, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Hispanic Center. That report found that 20 percent of cooks and 30 percent of dishwashers are undocumented immigrants.
“In many New York restaurants, the American waiters and hosts owe their jobs to the underpaid [undocumented] immigrants in the kitchen, whose low wages allow the restaurant to exist,” columnist Eduardo Porter wrote in the New York Times in 2012.
Saru Jayaruman, co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), stresses that the industry gets away with incredibly low wages across the board for immigrants and non-immigrants alike—and the ROC study Behind the Kitchen Door found that it’s race, not immigration status, that keeps most workers from moving up to higher-paying jobs in the industry.
“But the industry uses fear to keep immigrants in the lowest-wage positions, like dishwashers,” she says, pointing out that employers can intimidate both documented and undocumented immigrant workers by threatening to use the federal eVerify system to prove whether an individual is legally able to work in the US.
“eVerify is notoriously inaccurate, so employers can use it to keep [all immigrants] afraid and at the mercy of their employer,” she says. “This hurts all workers across the board, because they can pay low wages to immigrants, and that results in low wages for everyone.”
Cultural Exchanges Gone Wrong
Even foreign students who come to the US for a cultural exchange experience aren’t exempt from abuse. In March 2013, student guest workers at McDonald’s, who came from Latin America and Asia as part of a State Department-sponsored J-1 visa cultural exchange program, walked off the job amid allegations of wage theft and forced overtime.
The students, who worked in central Pennsylvania, had been promised $3,000 to work full time at McDonald’s for a summer. Some received only a handful of hours, while others were forced to work 24-hour shifts with no overtime pay. They were housed in cramped basements owned by supervisors who took rent payments out of their paychecks, often bringing their net pay to zero, says the National Guestworker Alliance.
While the J-1 visa program is meant to provide foreign-born students with a meaningful cultural exchange, McDonald’s isn’t the only company to use it as a source for cheap, exploitable labor. In 2011, student guest workers at the Hershey chocolate factory in Hershey, PA, also went on strike, claiming that Hershey’s paid them only $40 to $140 per 40-hour workweek to toil in the factory.
In 2012, the students won a settlement in which contractor companies in Hershey’s supply chain agreed to implement new labor protections and to pay $213,000 in unpaid wages and $143,000 for health and safety infractions.
“Not only is Hershey exploiting children on cocoa farms in West Africa, but it has even exploited student guests on American soil,” says Liz O’Connell, Green America’s Fair Trade director. “This is a company that really needs to clean up its act and treat all of its workers not just fairly, but humanely.”
And Then There’s Walmart
Walmart is infamous for alleged abuses against workers of all cultures across its supply chain, and its role in the Rana Plaza tragedy was only one example. It also stands accused of having sweatshop conditions in its US-based supply chain. In 2012, the National Guestworker Alliance found adult guestworkers, mainly from Mexico, being subjected to horrific abuses at CJ’s Seafood, a Walmart supplier in Breaux Bridge, LA. The workers reported that supervisors forced them to work 16- to 24-hour shifts, imprisoned them in the plant, and threatened them and their families. They were also subject to wage theft.
The Alliance’s work triggered federal investigations at CJ’s, and Walmart ultimately suspended the company. The Alliance also examined 18 more US-based Walmart seafood suppliers—and found over 200 labor and safety violations at 12 of those companies in the last five years.
In addition, six lawsuits have been filed recently against Walmart warehouse contractors for wage theft—“workers not paid for all hours worked, not paid overtime, not paid the minimum wage, and not paid benefits they were owed,” says Leah Fried of Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), a worker-run organization. WWJ has, to date, helped recover over $700,000 in stolen wages through the lawsuits, with more pending.
The victims? Mainly people of color, says Fried, with an estimated one-third to one-half of them being immigrants.
WWJ is calling on Walmart to develop “a responsible contractor policy that allows for worker enforcement” at US warehouses doing business with Walmart, says Fried. “Its current system of monitoring has done nothing to end abuse in its US supply chain. As the largest importer of goods in the US, Walmart sets the standard for the entire distribution industry, but its layers upon layers of contractors have created an industry of poverty jobs with no job security or benefits. One thing is clear—wage theft and abuse is rampant [at Walmart-contracted warehouses].”
The US Economic Backbone
While the picture many anti-immigration pundits paint of foreign-born workers is that they’re illegally taking good jobs away from US citizens, many industries have come to rely on their labor—because they’re often more willing to accept temporary work and lower wages, often in difficult industries like farm work.
In addition, a popular myth is that immigrant workers don’t pay taxes. A 2011 study by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented immigrants alone paid $11.2 billion in state and local taxes in 2010. “Immigrants—even legal immigrants—are barred from most social services, meaning that they pay to support benefits they cannot receive,” notes the Center for American Progress, which points out that as a result, immigrants are a net positive to the country.
It’s important to note that while US immigrants are more likely to labor on farms, in back-of-the-restaurant jobs, and as housekeepers than native-born workers, they’re also more likely to work as physicians and surgeons, says the Brookings Institution. And studies by the George W. Bush Institute in partnership with the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce found that 40 percent of all Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or a child of an immigrant. Their research also found that although immigrants make up only 13 percent of the US population, they are 16 percent of the US labor force and in 2006 were responsible for nearly 25 percent of US patent applications.
A Richness of Experience
All of these facts only hint at the richness of experience a diverse immigrant population has to offer the country.
Natalicia Tracy is a prime example. She left the abusive Boston household when her two-year contract was up. For the next 13 years, she would take on other jobs as a caregiver for children and the elderly.
As her confidence grew, so did her sense of social justice. She started volunteering at a homeless women’s shelter. She also put herself through college and is currently working on a Ph.D. in sociology. Her organizing abilities and passion for helping others caught the attention of the Brazilian Immigrant Center in Allston, MA. She became the executive director of the nonprofit, whose mission is to provide support for workers from the Brazilian and broader Latino community. Under her leadership, the Center expanded to include programs for domestic workers, to co-found the Massachusetts Domestic Workers Coalition, and to advocate for a state Domestic Worker Bill of Rights.
“Having been a domestic myself, it was a very natural thing for me to do,” she says of the expansion. “I understand the issues, and now I’m in a position where I can do something about it and support women who are marginalized and exploited.”
Tracy is only one person who gave back to the US after coming to its shores from another. There are many more who could achieve their full potential and do the same, if only they weren’t trapped in hopeless working situations.
The immigrant rights movement is not about handouts, but about ensuring that every US immigrant’s situation is handled fairly and with compassion—and that exploitation of this vulnerable worker population comes to an end.
“Immigrants have always contributed to our country,” says Mercado. “They make it more diverse, play really critical roles in our economy. All of us are touched in some ways by the jobs they do. In a lot of ways, many do the work that makes everything else possible. They’re putting food on the table and taking care of our homes and loved ones so we can go to work in other professions every day. They’re our neighbors and our friends. And they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.”
Four Ways to Fight for Immigrant Worker Rights
1. Reach out to immigrant workers in your community who may be laboring under abusive conditions. If you don’t share the same language, find someone who can interpret for you. Take extra care to find out what their situation is and whether they need help.
The following organizations welcome calls from people who want advice on how to best intervene in a potential abuse situation:
2. Have a conversation. “Talk to others about treating immigrant workers in low-wage jobs with respect and making sure they get fair pay and meet basic needs. Normalize the conditions of thinking of each of these workers as a person—one who is doing a real job,” says Natalicia Tracy of the Brazilian Immigrant Center in Allston, MA.
3. Support protections for whistleblowers. Immigrant workers may fear retaliation if they blow the whistle on abusive employers. Senator Richard Blumenthal had introduced an amendment to the Senate immigration reform bill that would have protected immigrant guest workers who alert authorities about abuse from retaliation, but the amendment didn’t make it into the final version of the bill. As the debate moves to the House, let your legislators know that you support whistleblower protections for all immigrant workers.
4. Buy green and fair. Get what you need from the truly green companies in the National Green Pages®, which are screened and certified by Green America, take extra care to ensure that all their workers earn a living wage and work in healthy conditions.
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National Weeks of Action: Show Kroger What They’d Be Missing without Bees and Other Pollinators |
Thank you for joining thousands of people coast-to-coast to swarm Kroger stores the weeks surrounding Labor Day (August 26 – September 10) to urge Kroger to stop selling food grown with bee-killing pesticides.
We need your help to turn up the heat on Kroger by demonstrating how many sales they would lose if they don’t stop selling food grown with bee-killing pesticides. If Kroger doesn’t help combat pollinator decline, the retailer and its customers are going to lose the most delicious and nutritious foods that stock store shelves and make up a big chunk of Kroger’s bottom line!
We are talking about foods such as apples, strawberries, kidney beans, tomatoes, grapes (bye bye wine), and so many more. You can view the full list of foods pollinated by bees here.
We’re asking folks across the country to take two pictures of their grocery cart. One picture with all the food you’d purchase at Kroger pollinated by bees and one with only food not pollinated by bees!
This Kroger photo action is easy. Below are some tips to help. If you have any questions or need help preparing, please drop a line to our buddies at Friends of the Earth at beeaction@foe.org or call 202-222-0738 To learn more visit www.foe.org/beeaction.
I. Instructions for Kroger Photo Action:
1) Pick a day and time to go grocery shopping at one of Kroger’s supermarkets between August 26 and September 10 (work this into your Labor Day or normal weekly shopping!).
2) Find a Kroger store near you by entering your zip code into the following website:
- https://www.kroger.com/stores/storeLocator
- Note: Kroger operates under a lot of different brand names! Kroger’s brands include Delta, Dillon, Food 4 Less, Fred Meyer, Fry’s, Harris Teeter, Jay C, King Soopers, QFC, Ralph’s, Roundy’s and Smith’s.
3) Download and print the sign found below. Or get creative and make your own!
4) Bring the sign on your grocery-shopping trip.
5) Take two pictures with your sign that show Kroger what your cart would look like with and without pollinators!
- Below is a list of foods that require bees for pollination
- An easy way to do this is to shop for food that does not require bees first and take a picture of your cart. Then, fill your cart up with delicious produce and other foods, courtesy of bees, and take a picture of the huge difference!
- Try to position your cart near a Kroger logo and store sign to prove you’re in a Kroger store and make sure you include your printed sign!
- We took some example pictures for you below!
6) Ask to Speak to the Store Manager and show them your pictures. Use the sample script below!
7) Send your photo(s) to gmoinside@greenamerica.org and beeaction@foe.org and tell us how it went. We’ll post all of the photos we receive on our social media pages to create a buzz about the week of action and send a strong message to Kroger that people across the country want the company to stop selling food grown with bee-killing pesticides.
II. Talking Points and Tips
A. Tips for Talking with the store manager:
- Be Polite! Thank the manager for taking time to talk with you.
- Ask if they have heard about the campaign and direct them to the www.foe.org/beeactionwebsite if they haven’t.
- Tell your story! Explain why the need to protect bees matters to you as a customer and as a concerned citizen.
B. Sample Conversation:
Hi, my name is _______. I’m shopping here today to urge Kroger-owned stores to help protect bees, butterflies and other pollinators, upon which our food supply depends, by committing to establish a pollinator protection policy that includes the phase out of pollinator-toxic pesticides, including neonicotinoids and glyphosate, in your company’s supply chain and encourage suppliers to employ alternative pest management strategies. I also urge your company to increase its offerings of USDA organic food, prioritizing domestic, regional and local producers.”I took these pictures to show you and Kroger leadership the sales you would lose if you don’t stop selling food grown with bee-killing pesticides. As you can see, we rely on pollinators for some of the most delicious and nutritious food in your store. Can you contact Kroger headquarters and request that they implement a pollinator policy that reduced pollinator-toxic pesticides and increase offerings of domestic, organic food?III. Other ways to take action this week
A. Swarm the phone lines: Call Kroger’s Corporate Headquarters and deliver the following
message: Kroger: 800-576-4377
“Hi, my name is _______ and I’m a concerned Kroger customer in xxx city. I’m calling to urge Kroger to help protect bees, butterflies and other pollinators, upon which our food supply depends, by committing to establish a pollinator protection policy that includes the phase out of pollinator-toxic pesticides, including neonicotinoids and glyphosate, in your company’s supply chain and encourage suppliers to employ alternative pest management strategies. I also urge your company to increase its offerings of USDA organic food, prioritizing domestic, regional and local producers.”
B. Spread the Buzz on social media
1) Facebook: Post the statement below, along with the picture you took with your sign or the Facebook image below (also available at www.foe.org/beeaction), on Kroger’s Facebook Wall (https://www.facebook.com/Kroger/) and spread on your own page to spread awareness! Use the following message: Kroger: Stop selling food grown with bee-killing pesticides and increase offerings of organic bee-friendly food! www.foe.org/beeaction #SavetheBees”
2) Twitter: Tweet any of these tweets at Kroger’s Twitter account. Be sure to use this hashtag on any of your tweets: #SavetheBees
- @Kroger Stop selling food grown with bee-killing pesticides and increase USDA organic offerings! #SavetheBees
- @Kroger You'll lose the most delicious & nutritious food on your shelves if you keep selling food grown with bee-killing pesticides! #SavetheBees
- @Kroger Organic farmland supports 50% more pollinator species, increase USDA organic offerings free of bee-killing pesticides! #SavetheBeesSee the sign and an example of the action below!
V. Sign for Pictures/Social Graphic
Without Bees
With Bees!
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Are RXBAR’s as “clean” as they claim to be? |
It is great to see more clean products popping up on grocery store shelves. But many companies are making bold claims and not necessarily backing them up. A popular new protein bar, RXBAR, markets itself based on its bold claim that its product is clean. But that all depends on one’s definition of “clean.” Here at GMO Inside we believe clean should mean that a product is free from exposure to toxic chemicals, is a result of high animal welfare, and without GMOs in its supply chain.
Though RXBAR claims its products are clean, as long as its eggs, nuts, and fruit are coming from the conventional food supply they are bound to be laced with toxic chemicals and a result of concerning animal welfare practices. RXBAR’s eggs likely come from chickens raised in factory farms, a far cry from organic farming.
The reality is if eggs aren’t coming from organic pasture-raised production and/or certified by a transparent third-party organization, the chickens producing those eggs are exposed to very poor unhealthy conditions and are fed GMOs. These conditions aren’t just unhealthy for the animals, they are disastrous for the environment and those that live “downstream” of chicken operations.
Concerns about Eggs and CAFOs
Corporate and Geographic Consolidation
Gone are the days of pastures, barns, field crops, and farm animals. Eggs are produced in industrial operations with hundreds of thousands of laying hens in each facility, growing by nearly 25 percent from 1997 to 2007. Nearly half of egg production is concentrated in five states: Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, California, and Pennsylvania. Egg operations have grown by 50 percent in the same ten-year period, averaging 750,000 hens per factory farm.
Animal Welfare
The way laying hens are raised directly affects their well-being and health. Egg-laying hens are subjected to mutilation, confinement, and deprivation of the ability to live their lives as the active, social beings they are. More than 90 percent of eggs in the US are produced in confinement conditions. Welfare abuses run rampant in egg CAFOs including: killing male chicks upon hatching because they have no value to the egg industry, debeaking young female chicks causing severe pain, living in battery cages with the equivalent of less than a sheet of paper of floor size, being subjected to a process called “forced molting” where hens are starved and deprived of food for up to two weeks to shock their bodies into the next egg-laying cycle, and slaughtering them after their egg production declines in 1-2 years even though the lifespan of an industry chicken would be 5-8 years.
There is growing concern about the living conditions in which food animals are raised; however, there is little oversight when it comes to product labels. Most egg labels have no official standards or oversight or enforcement mechanisms, nor much relevance to animal welfare. Labels include cage-free, free-range, free-roaming, pasture-raised, certified organic, vegetarian-fed, and more. The highest-welfare eggs come pasture-raised with certification from Animal Welfare Approved. Unfortunately, few farms are certified to this standard. Though the state of California now requires chickens sold in the state to be raised cage-free this does not guarantee animals access to the outdoors and can mean the animals spend the vast majority of their lives in crowded chicken houses.
Even certified organic is not without flaws. According to a report by Cornucopia, industrial-scale organic egg producers, with facilities holding as many as 85,000 hens each, provide 80 percent of the organic eggs on the market. This means that less than half of a percent of egg-laying hens in this country are on pasture-based farms. Therefore, it is important to dig deeper and do research into the company. Local producers offer a shorter supply chain and more transparency.
Public and Environmental Health
Poor living conditions directly impact public and environmental health. Large-scale factory farm operations produce more than just eggs; they are also breeding grounds for disease and pollution.
Large hen facilities house hundreds of thousands of animals in each structure and result in Salmonella poisoning of eggs. Due to a Salmonella outbreak in 2010 where close to 2,000 cases in three months were reported, the US experienced the largest shell egg recall in history—half a billion eggs. While Salmonella rates are higher in battery cage systems, it is still a problem for cage-free facilities due to the sheer number of hens living in such close quarters.
As seen in other factory farm operations for pigs and cows, chicken CAFOs produce higher levels of waste that can be disposed of in a timely and environmentally responsible manner. The imbalance of a large number of animals in an increasingly smaller space causes mountains of fecal matter to pile up. Ammonia levels increase, negatively impacting air quality and water quality, running off into local streams and rivers. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), ammonia can be carried more than 300 miles through the air before returning to the ground and then into waterways. The nutrients in runoff from animal waste can then cause algal blooms, which use up the water’s oxygen supply killing all aquatic life, leading to “dead zones.” Dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico are growing larger every year, in addition to those along the East Coast.
In addition to having a devastating impact on aquatic life, industrial egg production also contributes to climate change. After assessing the life cycle of eggs from “cradle-to-grave” production, the Environmental Working Group reported that consuming two extra-large eggs is equivalent to driving a car more than one mile.
Concerns about GMOs
GMOs and growing herbicide resistance have increased the use of toxic chemicals on crops, polluting our soil and water and posing a significant negative environmental impact. Corporate control of GMOs hurts small farmers. The biotech and chemical corporations, such as Monsanto, spend millions to support anti-labeling efforts and keep consumers in the dark about their food. There are also health risks. Monsanto's GMOs are not yet proven safe for human health—the FDA does not require independent testing of GE foods, allowing for many of the studies on GMOs to be industry-funded and heavily biased. The vast majority of egg laying hens (egg-producing chickens) are fed Monsanto's GE corn and soy sprayed with Monsanto's Roundup.
Non-Organic Almonds & Fruit
Conventionally grown almonds and fruit are often sprayed with toxic pesticides. Recently, nine different pesticide residues were found by the USDA Pesticide Data Program on conventionally grown almonds including one probable carcinogen, three neurotoxins, and four honeybee toxins. The most common pesticides used on dates include Roundup and Imidacloprid, a systemic neurotoxic insecticide. RXBAR's can't be considered "clean" while they continue to use non-organic ingredients.
What Next?
Eggs are part of many people’s daily lives and the choices we make around eggs and products containing eggs have a huge impact on people and the environment. We can all help by making informed and conscious choices when purchasing your eggs. Companies like RXBAR can make a difference by living up to their marketing claims and pushing the egg industry to change its ways, working to provide truly “clean” products for its customers.
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