Black Farmworkers Say They Lost Jobs to Foreigners Who Were Paid More

Miriam Jordan
Fri, November 12, 2021

Steve Rosenthal, a three-term mayor of Indianola, Miss., stands for a portrait near City Hall on Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2021. (Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times)

INDIANOLA, Miss. — For more than a quarter-century, Richard Strong worked the fertile farmland of the Mississippi Delta, just as his father and his grandfather did, a family lineage of punishing labor and meager earnings that stretched back to his enslaved ancestors brought from Africa.

He tilled the soil, fertilized crops and irrigated the fields, nurturing an annual bounty of cotton, soybeans and corn for a prominent farming family. “I’ve been around farming all my life,” Strong said. “It’s all we knew.”

Black families with deep connections to the Delta have historically been the ones to perform fieldwork. That began to change about a decade ago, when the first of dozens of young, white workers flew in from South Africa on special guest worker visas. Strong and his co-workers trained the men, who by last year were being lured across the globe with wages of more than $11 an hour, compared with the $7.25 an hour that Strong and other Black local workers were paid.

Growers brought in more South Africans with each passing year, and they are now employed at more than 100 farms across the Delta. Strong, 50, and several other longtime workers said they were told their services were no longer needed.

“I never did imagine that it would come to the point where they would be hiring foreigners, instead of people like me,” Strong said.

From the wheat farms in the Midwest to the citrus groves in California’s Central Valley, growers have increasingly turned to foreign workers as aging farmworkers exit the fields and low-skilled workers opt for jobs in construction, hospitality and warehouses, which offer higher pay, year-round work and, sometimes, benefits.

The agricultural guest worker program, known by the shorthand H-2A, was once shunned by farmers here and elsewhere as expensive and bureaucratic. But the continuing farm labor shortages across the country pushed H-2A visas up to 213,394 in the 2020 fiscal year, from 55,384 in 2011.

“Our choice is between importing our food or importing the workforce necessary to produce domestically,” said Craig Regelbrugge, a veteran agricultural industry advocate who is an expert on the program. “That’s never been truer than it is today. Virtually all new workers entering into the agriculture workforce these days are H-2A workers.”

In the Mississippi Delta, a region of high unemployment and entrenched poverty, the labor mobility that is widening the pool of workers for growers is having a devastating effect on local workers who are often ill-equipped to compete with the new hires, often younger and willing to work longer hours.

The new competition is upending what for many has been a way of life in the rich farmlands of Mississippi. “It’s like being robbed of your heritage,” Strong said.

In Mississippi, where the legacy of slavery and racism has long pervaded work in the cotton fields, a federal lawsuit filed by Strong and five other displaced Black farmworkers claims that the new foreign workers were illegally paid at higher rates than local Black workers, who it said had for years been subjected to racial slurs and other demeaning treatment from a white supervisor.

Two additional plaintiffs are preparing to join the suit, which says farmers violated civil rights law by hiring only white workers from South Africa, a country with its own history of racial injustice.

“Black workers have been doing this work for generations,” said Ty Pinkins, a lawyer at the Mississippi Center for Justice, which is representing the Black farmworkers in the lawsuit. “They know the land, they know the seasons, they know the equipment.”

A region steeped in poverty

A vast flood plain, the Mississippi Delta boasts some of the country’s richest soil. It also is the poorest pocket of the poorest state. In Indianola, a town of almost 10,000 about 95 miles north of Jackson, the median household income is $28,941.

The hometown of blues legend B.B. King, Indianola is the seat of Sunflower County, where empty storefronts line forlorn downtowns and children play outside crumbling shacks.

The region, which is more than 70% Black, remains rigidly segregated. Black children attend underfunded public schools while white students go to private academies. Black and white families bury their dead in different cemeteries.

The Delta is only one of a number of places where South Africans have been hired for agricultural work in recent years. While Mexicans accounted for the largest share of last year’s H-2A visas, or 197,908, the second-largest number, 5,508, went to South Africans. Their numbers soared 441% between 2011 and 2020.

Garold Dungy, who until two years ago ran an agency that recruited foreign farmworkers, including for Pitt Farms, the operation that employed Strong and the other plaintiffs, said South Africans represented the bulk of his business. They are “the preferred group,” he said, because of their strong work ethic and fluency in English.

Under the program, growers can hire foreign workers for up to 10 months. They must pay them an hourly wage that is set by the Labor Department and varies from state to state, as well as their transportation and housing.

Farmers must also show that they have tried, and failed, to find Americans to perform the work and they must pay domestic workers the same rate they are paying the imported laborers.

According to the Black workers’ lawsuit, Pitt Farms paid the South Africans $9.87 an hour in 2014, a rate that reached $11.83 in 2020. The plaintiffs who worked in the fields were paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or $8.25 on weekends, plus occasional bonuses.

Both Walter Pitts, a co-owner of Pitts Farms, and the farm’s lawyer, Timothy Threadgill, declined to discuss the farm’s hiring strategy because of the pending litigation.

The reliance on South Africans may reflect the nature of agriculture and the demographics in the Mississippi Delta, compared to places like California.

“In the Mississippi Delta, row-crop production requires fewer workers but workers who have skills to use machinery and equipment,” said Elizabeth Canales, an agricultural extension economist at Mississippi State University. “We hardly have any Latinos in this remote region. Naturally, it’s easier to hire South Africans where language will not be a barrier, especially because in this area, you have a very small Spanish-speaking population.”

The South Africans arrived in the region willing to work weeks that sometimes stretched to 75 hours or more, grueling schedules that might have been difficult for older local workers to maintain, industry analysts said.

There was initially no public controversy over the program in Indianola. Growers in the region described the South Africans as “good workers,” said Steve Rosenthal, a three-term mayor of Indianola who lost his bid for reelection in October. Until the lawsuit was filed, he did not realize that some Black workers had been let go.

“If you have a man that you’ve trained and worked with for years and he knows how to get stuff done,” he said, “how in good conscience can you bring somebody over and pay him more than a man that’s been with you five, eight, 10 years?”

A long family history in the Delta

The Strong family has worked for generations for the Pitts family, which has farmed in the Mississippi Delta for six decades. Richard Strong’s grandfather Henry and grandmother Isadora worked their land. So did his father and his uncle.

Strong and his brother got hired in the 1990s; he eventually operated not only tractors, but big equipment like combines and cotton pickers. He mixed chemicals to control weeds and pests. He ran irrigation pivots in 19 fields, covering some 3,000 acres. He rose to manager, driving across the farm to verify that everything was in working order.

When Strong first heard that Africans were coming to work on the farm, about eight years ago, “I didn’t question it. I just went along doing my job,” he said.

But when four white men showed up, they were not the Africans he had expected. Even so, Strong said, the men, a good 20 years younger than him, were “cool guys.”

He taught the men how to properly plow, how to input GPS settings into the tractors’ navigation systems, how to operate the irrigation system so just the right amount of water was sprinkled on the crops.

Over the next few years, more South Africans came, until more than half the farm’s workforce was there on foreign visas.

One of them was Innes Singleton, now 28, who learned about the opportunity to work in Mississippi from a friend in 2012.

He had recently finished secondary school and did not know what to do next.

He arrived in Indianola in early 2013, and is now earning $12 an hour, making in one week what would take a month for him to earn in South Africa, where the unemployment rate now exceeds 30%.

“I learned a lot here,” he said, adding that he sometimes had to work up to 110 hours a week. South Africans now do the main work on the farm, he said, and four locals “help us out.”

The end of an era

After the 2019 season, Strong traveled to Texas to visit his ailing father-in-law. When he returned, the Pitts Farm truck that he drove had disappeared from outside the house he had rented from the grower for about a year. He was told to vacate and was not offered work for the 2020 season.

A year later, others were let go, including his brother, Gregory, who said he had devoted much of his life to Pitt Farms.

“I gave them half my life and ended up with nothing,” he said. “I know everything on that place. I even know the dirt.”

Andrew Johnson, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, is 66 and said he had worked 20 years at the farm.

“I used to work rain or shine or anything,” he said.

But before the 2021 season began, he said, one of the Pitts owners told him, “he didn’t need me no more.”

Since the lawsuit was filed, other Black workers have come forward, saying they had labored in the fields and catfish farms of the Delta before unfairly losing their jobs, Pinkins, the lawyer, said.

In late October, as the harvesting season came to a close, 18-wheelers in Indianola rumbled down the highway, loaded with bales of cotton. Driving alongside the farm where he spent 24 years, Strong scanned the rows of neatly carved earth as far as the eye could see. “I put in all that,” he said, with a certain pride.

Then a tractor passed by, a young South African man at the wheel, and Strong looked away. “I miss working the land,” he said.

© 2021 The New York Times Company

Florida farmworkers exposed to deadly heat fight for protections


The farmworkers, most of them Latino, are advocating for a municipal heat standard ensuring outdoor workers have access to water, shade and breaks as extreme heat advisories worsen.
 

A migrant worker on a farm in Homestead, Fla., on May 11.

Chandan Khanna / AFP - Getty Images file

CLIMATE IN CRISIS
July 18, 2023
By Nicole Acevedo


Hundreds of farmworkers and others working in predominantly outdoor jobs in South Florida packed a Miami-Dade County board meeting Tuesday, demanding the implementation of a municipal heat standard ensuring workers access to drinking water, shade and breaks on the job.

The effort was led by WeCount!, a membership labor organization in South Florida that has been organizing around the issue for nearly two years through its ¡Qué Calor! campaign.


Its fight to set heat safety standards in the outdoor workplaces has gained a new sense of urgency as the city has endured 37 consecutive days of hot temperatures that often feel above 100 degrees.

Historic heat waves have already killed at least one farmworker in South Florida this year; he had expressed feeling fatigued and leg pain.

Unrelenting heat grips U.S. from West Coast to Florida

JULY 18, 202303:31



A community leader with We Count!, Maria Ramirez, a Guatemalan worker living in Homestead, advocated in favor of a heat standard at the hearing alongside two of her young children.

"If parents die because of the extreme heat, who will take care of our children?" Ramirez said in Spanish. "I have lived through the heat."

Medical professionals have long said that having access to water and shade and taking breaks from long hours of intense physical labor can protect workers from heat illness.

"It is very hard to work 10 hours under the sun without access to water, shade or the bathroom," Ramirez said. "It’s not fair to me.”

Workers on a farm during a heat wave Saturday in Homestead, Fla.

Chandan Khanna / AFP - Getty Images

An ordinance to create the heat standard passed its first reading with a unanimous vote from the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners on Tuesday, a few hours after it was filed.

The matter now "gets referred to a committee hearing in September," said Oscar Londoño, a co-director of WeCount! "It’s definitely good news for the campaign and a step forward."

The hearing has been tentatively scheduled for Sept. 11.

The tentative hearing presents a small glimmer of hope considering that the federal government has been stuck in a yearslong process to draft heat safety rules that would protect workers from dangerously high temperatures.

At least six states have implemented regulations to guarantee workers access to water, shade and breaks. But the Miami ordinance stands out because it would also provide workers with the following:A heat exposure safety program to educate workers and their supervisors about the risks of heat exposure and best practices to minimize heat-related illness.

A notice of employee rights in multiple languages to inform workers about their rights under the municipal heat standard, as well as the process for filing complaints.

The establishment of a county Office of Workplace Health and Safety to help enforce labor protections and support employers and workers.

"If enacted, this countywide heat standard will be the first-of-its-kind in the entire United States," WeCount! claimed in a news release Tuesday.

Marchers on the first day of a five-day trek in Pahokee, Fla., on March 14 to highlight the Fair Food Program, an effort to pressure retailers to leverage their purchasing power to improve conditions for farmworkers.

Rebecca Blackwell / AP

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are an average of 702 heat-related deaths and nearly 68,000 emergency room visits related to heat illness every year. On average, about 9,200 people are hospitalized every year because of heat exhaustion.

At least 344 workers died from heat exposure from 2011 to 2019, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

To reduce the numbers of deaths and injuries due to heat-related issues, the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration created an emphasis program to help employers better protect their employees last year.

“Heat is the silent killer. We want people to understand it’s no joke,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told MSNBC anchor José Díaz-Balart on Monday.

Nicole Acevedo  is a reporter for NBC News Digital. She reports, writes and produces stories for NBC Latino and NBCNews.com.

 

In many major crop regions, workers plant and harvest in spiraling heat and humidity

Rice, maize are most affected globally; production declines could loom

Peer-Reviewed Publication

COLUMBIA CLIMATE SCHOOL

 

IMAGE: 

A RICE FARMER OUTSIDE YEN BAI, VIETNAM. 

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CREDIT: DANNIE DINH/INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

A global study of major crops has found that farmworkers are being increasingly exposed to combinations of extreme heat and humidity during planting and harvest seasons that can make it hard for them to function. Such conditions have nearly doubled across the world since 1979, the authors report, a trend that could eventually hinder cultivation. The most affected crop is rice, the world’s number one staple, followed closely by maize. As temperatures rise, the trend has accelerated in recent years, with some regions seeing 15-day per-decade increases in extreme humid heat during cultivation seasons.

The study appears today in the journal Environmental Research Communications.

“If this affects humans’ ability to grow food, that’s serious,” said lead author Connor Diaz, who did the research as a Columbia University undergraduate student with scientists at the university’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “The global food chain is all connected, and the danger is, this will impact crop production.”

Higher temperatures alone are oppressive, but high relative humidity greatly increases the effects. We cool our bodies by expelling sweat, which contains excess body heat; then, when the sweat evaporates, that heat is carried away. But the more the air is laden with moisture, the less efficiently evaporation can take place—the reason muggy days feel so bad. High humidity is especially prevalent in major tropical and subtropical crop regions in river deltas and near coasts, which supply plenty of moisture for the air to soak up.

Multiple recent studies have already documented increases in extreme combinations of heat and humidity across the world. A 2021 study by Columbia scientists found that the number of city dwellers exposed to extreme humid heat has tripled since the 1980s, affecting more than a fifth of the world population. A 2020 study also out of Columbia found that potentially fatal heat-humidity combinations previously not predicted to appear until mid-century are already popping up in many areas. The new study is the first to look at the effects on farmworkers specifically during cultivation seasons.

Combined heat and humidity are gauged on the “wet bulb” scale, which factors in air temperature, water-vapor content and wind conditions. The authors of the new study define 27 degrees Centigrade wet-bulb as the point where farmworkers will begin struggling. Depending on the exact combination of conditions, this would be equivalent to between 86 and 105 degrees F on “real feel” heat indexes used by popular media.

Some earlier studies have defined 30C wet bulb—roughly 106F or more “real feel”—as extreme for everyday tasks, but farmworkers toiling under direct sun many hours a day may crumble well before that.

The new study found that many major agricultural regions already experience three months of 27C conditions or worse during the year as a whole. These include the Amazon, northern Colombia and parts of Mexico; the coasts of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf; southeast Asia; and much of Malaysia and Indonesia. Countries that see two months or more include Senegal, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon and the northern region of Australia.

On shorter time scales, during the crucial planting and harvest seasons, close to half of the world’s rice cropland is already subject to extreme conditions at some point each year, according to the study. For maize the number is about a third. (That rice is more affected is not a surprise, said Diaz; it is generally grown in water-saturated conditions in already hot climates, while maize is often raised in drier, more northerly regions.)

For rice, the highest farmworker exposure is in Bangladesh, with more than 60 days of high humid heat during cultivation seasons. Other regions with high exposure include Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, Myanmar’s Irawaddy Delta, much of Indonesia and Malaysia, parts of coastal Mexico, and the Amazon.  For the maize seasons, the highest potential worker exposure encompasses much of Pakistan, the Mekong Delta, northern Colombia, Venezuela, the Philippines, and parts of coastal Mexico and coastal Iran.

The researchers identified 10 other major crops affected to lesser but significant extents, including sorghum, soybeans, potatoes, millet and yams.

“In places like the Amazon, these conditions are already common, and sadly, people have adapted to it, because they have to,” said study coauthor Mingfang Ting, a climate scientist at Lamont-Doherty. She noted that areas with the worst heat and humidity tend to be the same ones where conditions are worsening the fastest. If the same rates of increase continue in coming decades, she said, people may not be able to cope any longer. “The curve is going up so fast. It’s the trend that really makes it worse,” she said.

So far, the bulk of research on the future effects of climate change on food production has focused on the crops themselves, especially the results of dry heat and drought. But a 2021 paper led by Purdue University predicts that if average global temperatures go up by 3 degrees C—which some scientists think may happen this century—it would reduce agricultural laborers’ work capacity by 30% to 50% and lead to substantial increases in food prices. That study does not explicitly take in the added effects of high humidity.

Another recent paper looking at heat risk to the over 1 million hired agricultural workers in the United States found that they are already 20 times more likely to die of  illnesses related to heat stress than U.S. civilian workers overall. Apart from the nature of their work, their risks are compounded by poverty and lack of access to health care, the study says—conditions that are common in many of the areas covered by the new heat and humidity study.

The most common means of adapting to rising temperatures in the U.S. and most other countries has been to shift work hours into the night. Allowing workers to reduce their pace and effort, and increasing break times can also help, and some U.S. states and countries such as Spain have mandated such measures. But these efforts reduce worker productivity, which may feed into higher food prices. And fancier adaptations, like air-conditioned retreat spaces and air-conditioned tractors are simply not feasible in much of the world.

“The issue of heat and humidity takes on a whole new dimension when you think about someone who has to work outside all day long under the sun,” said Diaz. Many receive a piecework rate, or are simply trying to raise enough to subsist on, he points out. “That kind of incentive pushes people to work harder and longer than is safe, and people will pay,” he said.

CAPTION

Upward changes over the past four decades in extreme humid heat days over the calendar year in crop-producing regions. Warmer colors indicate faster increases. 

CREDIT

Adapted from Diaz et al., Environmental Research Communications, 2023)

Maize farmer, southeastern Mali.

CREDIT

Francesco Fiondella/International Research Institute for Climate and Society

---

JOURNAL

Environmental Research Communications

DOI

10.1088/2515-7620/ad028d 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Increased Extreme Humid Heat Hazard Faced by Agricultural Workers

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

20-Nov-2023

Pilot program vaccinates Oregon farmworkers at unique clinic

By BRYCE DOLE, East Oregonian
Published: March 31, 2021, 


BOARDMAN, Ore. – Maria Corona knew she wanted to get the vaccine. Three months earlier, eight of her family members tested positive for COVID-19. So had many of her co-workers and neighbors.

“I was really concerned,” said Corona, who, at 49, spends half the year working in food processing plants and the other half working in the fields near her home in Boardman. “You hear a lot in the news that people are dying, so you get afraid.”

The day after Corona learned through Facebook that she and her co-workers were eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, she hopped in her Dodge Caravan and made her way down to the SAGE Center, where state and county health officials were offering doses to farmworkers in a four-day clinic that was the first of its kind.

“In order to not infect other people, to feel safe with your family and to be secure is what’s most important,” Corona told the East Oregonian through a translator after getting her vaccine last week.

Akiko Saito, deputy director for the COVID-19 response and recovery unit, a joint division between the Oregon Health Authority and the Oregon Department of Human Services, said the clinic was a “pilot project” specifically geared to immunize a community long understood to be especially vulnerable to COVID-19.

In all, officials vaccinated over 1,000 agricultural workers at the clinic, according to the Morrow County Health Department.

Saito said state officials are looking to hold similar efforts statewide. State officials recently conducted a survey with 585 agricultural facilities that showed more than 21,000 workers were eligible for the vaccine.

“We’re working with our local public health authorities to connect agricultural, migrant and seasonal workplaces to see if they can do an event(s) like this” across Oregon, Saito said.

The clinic began two days after Morrow County received approval from the state to move ahead and start vaccinating farmworkers after sufficiently providing doses to all other eligible groups.

At least 20 counties, most of them east of the Cascades, received approval from the state last week, including Umatilla County.

The change also comes just in time for harvest season, which brings thousands of jobs to the area. Morrow County Public Health Director Nazario Rivera said harvest season can bring as many as 8,000 workers to the region annually.

“We want to make sure we get some of these vulnerable communities,” he said. “We know with the season changing to spring, a lot more farmworkers are going to be out there. So if we can get them now, before the season starts, it’ll be a lot easier to get them vaccinated, rather than having to ask them to take time out of their busy schedules to come get a vaccine.”

It’s a workforce that drives the region’s economy, but is widely known to place workers, many of whom are Hispanic and Latino, at increased risk of infection.

In Morrow County, Hispanic residents have accounted for 57% of the county’s total COVID-19 cases, according to data provided by county health officials earlier this month. About 38% of Morrow County’s population is Hispanic, according to 2019 U.S. Census data.

Similar trends have been reported in Umatilla County, where residents reporting Hispanic ethnicity accounted for 41% of the county’s total COVID-19 cases in 2020, according to data from the county health department. The population also tested positive at a rate over three times higher than non-Hispanics, the data shows.

Saito said the event was a collaborative effort between a number of groups to immunize a community they recognize as a “priority population.”

“We know they’re exposed because they have to be close together when they work, and there’s been a lot of racism and injustice that’s happened over time,” Saito said, adding that the “ending health inequities” is part of the state’s 10-year plan. “This is one of the ways we’re making sure we have an equity focus and that we’re looking at those populations that have been disproportionately infected and who have historically been underserved.”

Officials have said working conditions in essential workplaces have been a driving factor behind the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on Hispanic communities nationwide.

“We have this whole row of processing plants, so (it’s) definitely a high-risk community,” Rivera said, looking out at the cars moving swiftly through the clinic, dwarfed by the large industrial facilities in the background.

Because of this, everything down to the scheduling of the daily clinics was geared to accommodate agricultural workers, partly because they often cannot take time off work to get a shot, Rivera said. He added that the health department engaged in a variety of efforts to inform residents about the clinic, like advertising it on local Spanish radio stations.

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Similar efforts are ongoing in Umatilla County, where county health officials have been reaching out to agricultural facilities to bring vaccines to workers while they’re on the job.

Umatilla County officials have said they also want to hold similar efforts as the Morrow County clinic, particularly because the state brings more doses with them, which could help with the county’s dismal vaccination rates, which remain the lowest in Oregon, according to state data.

‘Flying blind’: CDC has 1M bird flu tests ready —but experts see repeat of Covid missteps

Amy Maxmen, KFF Health News
June 23, 2024 

Photo by Arib Neko on Unsplash

It’s been nearly three months since the U.S. government announced an outbreak of the bird flu virus on dairy farms. The World Health Organization considers the virus a public health concern because of its potential to cause a pandemic, yet the U.S. has tested only about 45 people across the country.

“We’re flying blind,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. With so few tests run, she said, it’s impossible to know how many farmworkers have been infected, or how serious the disease is. A lack of testing means the country might not notice if the virus begins to spread between people — the gateway to another pandemic.

“We’d like to be doing more testing. There’s no doubt about that,” said Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s bird flu test is the only one the Food and Drug Administration has authorized for use right now. Shah said the agency has distributed these tests to about 100 public health labs in states. “We’ve got roughly a million available now,” he said, “and expect 1.2 million more in the next two months.”

But Nuzzo and other researchers are concerned because the CDC and public health labs aren’t generally where doctors order tests from. That job tends to be done by major clinical laboratories run by companies and universities, which lack authorization for bird flu testing.

As the outbreak grows — with at least 114 herds infected in 12 states as of June 18 — researchers said the CDC and FDA are not moving fast enough to remove barriers that block clinical labs from testing. In one case, the diagnostics company Neelyx Labs was on hold with a query for more than a month.

“Clinical labs are part of the nation’s public health system,” said Alex Greninger, assistant director of the University of Washington Medicine Clinical Virology Laboratory. “Pull us into the game. We’re stuck on the bench.”

The CDC recognized the need for clinical labs in a June 10 memo. It calls on industry to develop tests for the H5 strain of bird flu virus, the one circulating among dairy cattle. “The limited availability and accessibility of diagnostic tests for Influenza A(H5) poses several pain points,” the CDC wrote. The points include a shortage of tests if demand spikes.

Researchers, including former CDC director Tom Frieden and Anthony Fauci, who led the nation’s response to covid, cite testing failures as a key reason the U.S. fared so poorly with covid. Had covid tests been widely available in early 2020, they say, the U.S. could have detected many cases before they turned into outbreaks that prompted business shutdowns and cost lives.

In an article published this month, Nuzzo and a group of colleagues noted that the problem wasn’t testing capability but a failure to deploy that capability swiftly. The U.S. reported excess mortality eight times as high as other countries with advanced labs and other technological advantages.

A covid test vetted by the WHO was available by mid-January 2020. Rather than use it, the United States stuck to its own multistage process, which took several months. Namely, the CDC develops its own test then sends it to local public health labs. Eventually, the FDA authorizes tests from clinical diagnostic labs that serve hospital systems, which must then scale up their operations. That took time, and people died amid outbreaks at nursing homes and prisons, waiting on test results.

In contrast, South Korea immediately rolled out testing through private sector laboratories, allowing it to keep schools and businesses open. “They said, ‘Gear up, guys; we’re going to need a ton of tests,’” said Frieden, now president of the public health organization Resolve to Save Lives. “You need to get commercials in the game.”

Nuzzo and her colleagues describe a step-by-step strategy for rolling out testing in health emergencies, in response to mistakes made obvious by covid. But in this bird flu outbreak, the U.S. is weeks behind that playbook.

Ample testing is critical for two reasons. First, people need to know if they’re infected so that they can be quickly treated, Nuzzo said. Over the past two decades, roughly half of about 900 people around the globe known to have gotten the bird flu died from it.

Although the three farmworkers diagnosed with the disease this year in the United States had only mild symptoms, like a runny nose and inflamed eyes, others may not be so lucky. The flu treatment Tamiflu works only when given soon after symptoms start.

The CDC and local health departments have tried to boost bird flu testing among farmworkers, asking them to be tested if they feel sick. Farmworker advocates list several reasons why their outreach efforts are failing. The outreach might not be in the languages the farmworkers speak, for example, or address such concerns as a loss of employment.

If people who live and work around farms simply see a doctor when they or their children fall ill, those cases could be missed if the doctors send samples to their usual clinical laboratories. The CDC has asked doctors to send samples from people with flu symptoms who have exposure to livestock or poultry to public health labs. “If you work on a farm with an outbreak and you’re worried about your welfare, you can get tested,” Shah said. But sending samples to public health departments requires knowledge, time, and effort.

“I really worry about a testing scheme in which busy clinicians need to figure this out,” Nuzzo said.

The other reason to involve clinical laboratories is so the nation can ramp up testing if the bird flu is suddenly detected among people who didn’t catch it from cattle. There’s no evidence the virus has started to spread among people, but that could change in coming months as it evolves.

The fastest way to get clinical labs involved, Greninger said, is to allow them to use a test the FDA has already authorized: the CDC’s bird flu test. On April 16 the CDC opened up that possibility by offering royalty-free licenses for components of its bird flu tests to accredited labs.

Several commercial labs asked for licenses. “We want to get prepared before things get crazy,” said Shyam Saladi, chief executive officer of the diagnostics company Neelyx Labs, which offered covid and mpox tests during shortages in those outbreaks. His experience over the past two months reveals the types of barriers that prevent labs from moving swiftly.

In email exchanges with the CDC, shared with KFF Health News, Saladi specifies the labs’ desire for licenses relevant to the CDC’s test, as well as a “right to reference” the CDC’s data in its application for FDA authorization.

That “right to reference” makes it easier for one company to use a test developed by another. It allows the new group to skip certain analyses conducted by the original maker, by telling the FDA to look at data in the original FDA application. This was commonplace with covid tests at the peak of the pandemic.

At first, the CDC appeared eager to cooperate. “A right of reference to the data should be available,” Jonathan Motley, a patent specialist at the CDC, wrote in an email to Saladi on April 24. Over the next few weeks, the CDC sent him information about transferring its licenses to the company, and about the test, which prompted Neelyx’s researchers to buy testing components and try out the CDC’s process on their equipment.

But Saladi grew increasingly anxious about the ability to reference the CDC’s data in the company’s FDA application. “Do you have an update with respect to the right of reference?” he asked the CDC on May 13. “If there are any potential sticking points with respect to this, would you mind letting us know please?”

He asked several more times in the following weeks, as the number of herds infected with the bird flu ticked upward and more cases among farmworkers were announced. “Given that it is May 24 and the outbreak has only expanded, can CDC provide a date by which it plans to respond?” Saladi wrote.

The CDC eventually signed a licensing agreement with Neelyx but informed Saladi that it would not, in fact, provide the reference. Without that, Saladi said, he could not move forward with the CDC’s test — at least not without more material from the agency. “It’s really frustrating,” he said. “We thought they really intended to support the development of these tests in case they are needed.”

Shah, from the CDC, said test manufacturers should generate their own data to prove that they’re using the CDC’s test correctly. “We don’t have a shortage such that we need to cut corners,” he said. “Quality reigns supreme.”

The CDC has given seven companies, including Neelyx, licenses for its tests — although none have been cleared to use them by the FDA. Only one of those companies asked for the right of reference, Shah said. The labs may be assisted by additional material that the agency is developing now, to allow them to complete the analyses — even without the reference.

“This should have happened sooner,” Saladi told KFF Health News when he was told about the CDC’s pending additional material. “There’s been no communication about this.”

Greninger said the delays and confusion are reminiscent of the early months of covid, when federal agencies prioritized caution over speed. Test accuracy is important, he said, but excessive vetting can cause harm in a fast-moving outbreak like this one. “The CDC should be trying to open this up to labs with national reach and a good reputation,” he said. “I fall on the side of allowing labs to get ready — that’s a no-brainer.”

Clinical laboratories have also begun to develop their own tests from scratch. But researchers said they’re moving cautiously because of a recent FDA rule that gives the agency more oversight of lab-developed tests, lengthening the pathway to approval. In an email to KFF Health News, FDA press officer Janell Goodwin said the rule’s enforcement will occur gradually.

However, Susan Van Meter, president of the American Clinical Laboratory Association, a trade group whose members include the nation’s largest commercial diagnostic labs, said companies need more clarity: “It’s slowing things down because it’s adding to the confusion about what is allowable.”

Creating tests for the bird flu is already a risky bet, because demand is uncertain. It’s not clear whether this outbreak in cattle will trigger an epidemic or fizzle out. In addition to issues with the CDC and FDA, clinical laboratories are trying to figure out whether health insurers or the government will pay for bird flu tests.

These wrinkles will be smoothed eventually. Until then, the vanishingly slim numbers of people tested, along with the lack of testing in cattle, may draw criticism from other parts of the world.

“Think about our judgment of China’s transparency at the start of covid,” Nuzzo said. “The current situation undermines America’s standing in the world.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

Subscribe to KFF Health News' free Morning Briefing.

As a Latina Vegan, I’m Decolonizing a Cruel & Racist Food System

Story by Lauren T. Ornelas, As Told To Nicole Froio •

Growing up in Texas in the 1970s, I spent long periods away from my mother. My parents divorced when I was 4 years old, so my mom raised my sisters and me by herself. To make ends meet, she spent long hours at work, trying to earn enough money to feed, clothe, and house us. That meant other people in the community took care of us during the day. While my mother was away, I would watch the cows on the hillside, and I would think about how sad it must’ve been for the mother cow to come home and not find her baby there anymore. In this sense, I saw myself in these animals, and I didn’t want to be responsible for disrupting any family of cows the way capitalism was interrupting mine.

As an elementary school student, it was my innate connection to non-human animals like cows, and my understanding of the harms of raising and slaughtering calves, that moved me to become a vegetarian. But, as a kid, it was difficult for me to stick with this diet, mostly because of my family’s financial restraints. Sometimes, all we could eat was what others donated to us or what our school served us, and that often included meals with meat. I realized then that poverty prevented me from eating my ethics and that I didn’t have the freedom to eat how I wanted to.

Being Chicana, I’ve long known that food is political, even if it shouldn’t be. My mom supported the Delano Grape Strike, a labor movement the predominantly Filipino organization Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) launched against the grape growers in Delano, California, in 1965, California, to fight against the exploitation of farmworkers. She boycotted non-union grapes and taught me about the impact of labor exploitation on the bodies and minds of farmworkers. By the time I got to high school, I was getting involved in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. I learned that I could make a difference from far away, that, like my mom, one of the things I could do was boycott companies with vested interests in the apartheid regime, so I did.

For me, food, animal rights, and racialized liberation struggles have always been linked, but I learned early that not everyone recognized the interconnectedness of this violence. In 1987, I was excited to get involved in the animal rights movement. But my elation was stolen by the reality of white supremacy within the movement. My colleagues regularly brought me out as a token Latina vegan in order to shame my people into veganism or to prove that the vegan movement wasn’t only white; however, these same folks rarely listened to me when I discussed why Latines don’t always have the access to plant-based foods or the labor struggles of farmworkers. Instead, they pitted animal rights and human rights against each other, as if I couldn’t care about and work on both at the same time. For decades, I did work I believed in while feeling exploited and misunderstood by organizations and people who were supposed to be my comrades.



As a Latina Vegan, I’m Decolonizing a Cruel & Racist Food System© Provided by Refinery29

Then, in 2006, while I participated in the World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, I felt seen, understood, and affirmed for the first time. I was sharing space with people who looked like me, sounded like me, and shared both my passion for the work and grievance with how it was being carried out. They, like me, understood how the lack of human rights is inherently linked to the lack of rights for non-human animals. There, surrounded by fervor and gripe, I realized that if we wanted to be a part of a movement or organization that cared deeply for all living beings, we would have to take matters into our own hands.

Later that year, I founded the Food Empowerment Project, an organization that seeks to create a more just and sustainable world by recognizing the power we have as food eaters. Through the publication of free, accessible, and culturally sensitive resources on our website, we encourage ethical food choices. We published our first big resource, Vegan Mexican Food, in Spanish and English in 2007, making Mexican recipes available to everyone looking to practice veganism without losing their cultural foods in the process. But more than just veganized recipes, this resource discusses the changes in our diets that took place due to colonization, to explain the introduction of farmed animals into the Americas, and to take us back toward a food system that is free from the exploitation of humans and non-human animals.

Education, a people-animal-land liberation politic, and advocacy are all at the root of this work. Growing up experiencing food apartheid, I know that being vegan isn’t easy for people who are lower income or who live in food deserts. I also know that many people in my community, largely impoverished migrants and people of color, work in the food industry with little-to-no labor protections. As such, we often experience the harms of the non-ethical food production practices. In terms of food consumption, Black, Latine, and Indigenous people are the most impacted by lack of access to healthy foods and, as a result, struggle with higher rates of dietary diseases. When it comes to food labor, cycles of poverty leave our communities with few career paths outside of farm work, forcing us to toil for low wages and no paid time off at companies that break labor laws with impunity.

Through the Food Empowerment Project, we see how these struggles are interconnected and fight against abuses of both human and non-human animals. Through working with community organizations, conducting original surveys and studies, and sharing our findings with local politicians, we increase access to healthy food options where they are absent. Similarly, we advance the rights of farmworkers by supporting legislative and regulatory changes as well as corporate efforts led by the laborers. And we promote ethical veganism through education, outreach, and resources.

We owe young people direct changes, as quickly as we can, to make up for the horrors that we’ve been wreaking on each other, on the planet, and on non-human animals. With the Food Empowerment Project, I am committed to pulling at all of the threads of oppression, tugging at them until everybody’s free.

Libcom.orglibcom.org/article/beasts-burden-antagonism-and-practical-history

Beasts of burden - Antagonism and Practical History | libcom.org

Beasts of burden - Antagonism and Practical History. An attempt to rethink the separation between animal liberationist and communist politics. (Published ...

Libcom.orglibcom.org/article/beasts-burden-review

Beasts of Burden - Review - Libcom.org

Jul 24, 2005 ... A review of the pamphlet Beasts of Burden by Antagonism Press (1999) from undercurrent #8. Author. Undercurrent. Submitted by libcom on July ...

Libcom.orglibcom.org/article/letter-animal-liberation-gilles-dauve

Letter on animal liberation - Gilles Dauvé - Libcom.org

Nov 18, 2005 ... This is a letter sent by French readers to the authors of Beasts of Burden. This pamphlet has the merit of addressing a vital question: If ...

Column: Inside the effort by two Beverly Hills billionaires to kill a state law protecting farmworkers

Michael Hiltzik
Thu, May 16, 2024 


Wonderful Co.'s billionaire owners Stewart and Lynda Resnick: philanthropists, industrialists and union adversaries. (Ryan Miller/WireImage)

Los Angeles-based Wonderful Co. — the world's largest pistachio and almond grower, the purveyor of Fiji Water, Pom pomegranate juice and Justin wines, and owner of the Teleflora flower service — wants you to know that it's committed to "sustainable farming and business practices" and sees its employees as "a guiding force for good."

Wonderful's owners, the Beverly Hills billionaires Lynda and Stewart Resnick, say their "calling" is "to leave people and the planet better than we found them."

Here's another side of the company. Since February, it has been engaged in a ferocious battle with the United Farm Workers over the UFW's campaign to unionize more than 600 Wonderful Nurseries workers in the Central Valley.

'We ask each of you firmly not to sign an authorization card.'

Anti-union script read to Wonderful Nursery workers by company officials

Having lost a series of motions before the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board to delay a mandate that it reach a contract with the UFW as soon as June 3 or have terms imposed by the board, Wonderful on Monday unleashed a nuclear attack: a lawsuit seeking to have the 2022 and 2023 state laws governing the unionization process declared unconstitutional.

If it succeeds, California's legal protections for farmworkers could be rolled back to conditions that prevailed before César Chavez's campaigns for farm unionization in the 1960s.

"This is an attack on farmworkers' rights," says Elizabeth Strater, the UFW's director of strategic campaigns. Farm employers "will do everything they can to prevent workers from empowering themselves and lifting themselves out of poverty."

Wonderful's lawsuit takes a page from arguments made against the National Labor Relations Board by Trader Joe's and Elon Musk's SpaceX. Both companies, facing NLRB regulatory actions, are contending that the NLRB, which Congress established in 1935, is unconstitutional.

Wonderful contends that provisions of the state's agricultural labor code violate its rights of due process guaranteed by both the state and U.S. constitutions.

At issue is a UFW drive to represent more than 600 of Wonderful Nurseries employees that began in early 2023. The UFW ultimately presented the labor board with signed cards from more than half the employees giving the UFW authority to represent them in collective bargaining on a contract, a process known as a "card check."

Read more: Wonderful Co. sues to halt California card-check law that made it easier to unionize farmworkers

The board certified the union as the workers' representative on March 1, triggering a tight deadline aimed at prompting the union and the company to reach a contract.

Read more: Column: The UAW sends a lightning bolt into anti-union states with a huge victory at a VW plant

As often happens in hard-fought union campaigns, this one has generated a cross fire of allegations of unfair labor practices from both sides — the company asserting that the union defrauded workers into signing the representation cards, the union asserting that the company browbeat more than 100 workers into revoking their authorizations to drive the approval rate below the required 50%.

Accounts from the workers themselves vary. As my colleagues Rebecca Plevin and Melissa Gomez have reported, there have been complaints about poor working conditions at Wonderful along with hope that a union would help upgrade standards. Other workers say they misunderstood that signing an authorization card was tantamount to joining the UFW.

Some workers said they had second thoughts about signing the cards after meetings with a company-hired union-buster, Raul Calvo, who told them the union would take 3% of their pay for dues. In late March, some 100 Wonderful workers staged an anti-union protest at the ALRB offices in Visalia, but the UFW has alleged that the rally was the product of company coercion. Wonderful said at the time that it had no involvement in the protest and didn't pay the workers for their time.

"These workers are so vulnerable," the UFW's Strater says. Many are undocumented or have other reasons to worry about job security, arguably making them receptive to management directives.

In this case, another party has weighed in — the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, an independent state agency. Following an investigation, the board's general counsel, Julia Montgomery, alleged that Wonderful trampled its workers' unionization rights through numerous anti-union actions, including coercing them to submit declarations rescinding their authorizations. Wonderful has denied most of the allegations.

Wonderful says that the workers submitted their declarations voluntarily, "without any request having been made" by the company. Montgomery's allegations, however, are mighty specific. She cites a series of meetings that were overtly aimed at persuading the workers to back away from the union.

That process began with employee meetings addressed by Calvo and proceeded to sessions in which workers met with Wonderful human resources personnel, Montgomery alleged. At those meetings, the company representatives read from a Spanish-language script stating that the union could have obtained workers' signatures without their knowledge, that they would be deprived of the opportunity for a secret vote on unionization and encouraging them to sign a declaration revoking their authorization cards.

Read more: Column: A Trump judge eviscerates a pro-worker regulation at the request of big employers

"We ask each of you firmly not to sign an authorization card," the script read. In a line that sounds like it came fresh out of the playbook of anti-union companies such as Starbucks, the script stated that the company wants "to be able to work one on one with you without the interference of a union."

Some workers were led into a large conference room, where company representatives were assigned "to help the worker draft the declaration" revoking the authorization cards, Montgomery asserted. Some agents typed up declarations for the workers and handed them to the workers to sign.

A few words about the plaintiffs in this lawsuit:

The Resnicks are prominent philanthropists and political donors (mostly to Democrats). Their companies' effects on the environment and California agriculture generally are checkered. Indeed, their most eye-catching charitable donation, a record-breaking $750-million pledge to Caltech in 2019 for research into climate change and “environmental sustainability,” isn't inconsistent with a desire to "greenwash" some of their other activities.

As I previously wrote, while it might be churlish to suggest that the gift was devoid of genuine altruistic impulses, it would be naive to assume that altruism is the whole story.

A few years earlier, the Resnicks' Justin Vineyards had been caught clear-cutting an oak forest near Paso Robles to make room for new grape plantings. The work was halted by San Luis Obispo County authorities, and the firm eventually agreed to donate the 380-acre parcel to a land conservancy.

Although the Resnicks say they are "dedicated to our role as environmental stewards," their Fiji Water subsidiary looks like the antithesis of environmental sustainability. It profits from transporting water in plastic bottles more than 5,500 miles from the island nation to California and beyond, places that already have abundant water.

Wonderful's pistachio and almond orchards have complicated efforts to apportion water among the state's competing stakeholders. Because the trees require watering in wet years or dry, their acreage can't be fallowed during dry spells.

That has made the water demand of the agricultural sector less flexible, and arguably has contributed to the devastating decline of the state's salmon fishery and the drying out of rivers and streams that once supported a diverse population of fish and birds.

Read more: Column: American unions have finally remembered how to win

This isn't the first time that the Resnicks have wrapped themselves in the U.S. Constitution to fend off a regulatory agency. In 2010, they asserted that the Federal Trade Commission infringed their 1st Amendment rights by holding that they made “false and misleading” and “unsubstantiated” representations about the health benefits of their Pom pomegranate juice, which amounted to unlawful marketing.

The company pitched the juice as “health in a bottle.” Wonderful put up billboards with the words “Cheat Death” next to a picture of the bottle. Its ads claimed Pom has beneficial effects on prostate cancer (“Drink to prostate health”), cardiovascular health and even erectile dysfunction — all of which claims were judged scientifically dubious by regulators. The company fought the FTC up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected its appeal.

The 2022 and 2023 laws that Wonderful is challenging — indeed, the very creation of the ALRB in 1975 — reflect a reality known in California for more than a century: Bringing labor rights to farmworkers is notoriously difficult.

The first major farm union organizing drive in the state, among hops pickers in Wheatland, north of Sacramento, was broken up by four companies of the National Guard called out by Gov. Hiram Johnson in 1913. A statewide dragnet for organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, ensued, followed by hundreds of arrests. No further significant farm organizing took place for 16 years.

In 1975, a state law passed at the urging of César Chavez's UFW gave union organizers the right to meet with workers on the farms where they toiled. But the Supreme Court, voting on partisan lines, struck it down in 2021—the law allowed organizers to "invade the growers' property," as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote.

To address the heightened difficulty agricultural unions faced, the state Legislature established the card check process in 2022 and 2023. The laws incorporated a tight timeline governing certification and contract bargaining, and stipulated mandatory mediation if no contract is reached with a set period.

Read more: Column: Julie Su would be a perfect Labor secretary. That's why Big Business hates her

The goal was to address "the basic failing of labor law both at the federal and state level, which is delay," said William B. Gould IV, emeritus professor of law at Stanford and a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board and the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board.

"Delay works against the interests of workers and unions, because employers hope that they'll grow weary," Gould told me. The tight deadlines were designed to place the burden of delay on the employers.

Wonderful maintains in its lawsuit, filed in Kern County state court, that the accelerated process has deprived employers of constitutionally protected due process rights by allowing a union to be certified by card check before the employers have a chance to object — effectively rendering the certification and the negotiating deadline faits accomplis.

That's not quite true, however. The law allows anyone to file objections within five days of certification. After that, any certification can be revoked if the employers' objections are later upheld at a hearing, and any mandated contract can be invalidated. Indeed, Wonderful filed its objections in time, citing the workers' declarations; an ALRB hearing on its objections has been underway for weeks.

What appears especially to irk Wonderful is that the board has twice rejected its motions to suspend, or stay, the certification and negotiation procedure until after it rules on the company's objections. The board responded that the law doesn't provide for such a stay.

The company's lawsuit thus amounts to an end run around the law. Gould is skeptical that Wonderful's constitutionality claims will win much favor from California judges, but the case may be aimed at the notoriously anti-union U.S. Supreme Court majority.

"This Supreme Court has indicated that they want to reverse much of what was done in the 1930s," a high-water mark for progressive labor and public interest laws, he said. In its lawsuit, Wonderful "has thrown buckets of paint against the wall in the hope that something will stick. Maybe they'll be right on some of it."