How would collective bargaining work for dairy farmers?
Let’s say the nation’s dairy farmers decide to work together to build economic power through collective bargaining. How might it work? First of all, it’s not about dumping milk, says Richard A. Levins, economist with the University of Minnesota Extension Service. Levins says the term “collective bargaining” brings images of the angry milk-dumping episodes of 40 years ago for many dairy farmers. And that’s unfortunate, Levins says. “Collective bargaining is often confused with supply control,” he says. “But many objections to supply control don’t apply to collective bargaining.” There are about nine million milking cows in the U.S. “Let’s say the milk from all of those cows was priced by a single agency acting on behalf of all dairy farmers, rather than by individual farmers trying to get the best deal on their own. You could call this the ‘nine-million cow dairy,'” Levins says. “In a nine-million cow dairy, individual farmers would continue to make their own decisions on how to run the
