Biden Is Paying Growers to Replace Farmworkers With Bracero Contract Labor

Under the new visa pilot program, the administration is prioritizing growers’ profits over farmworkers’ rights.

By David Bacon ,

TRUTHOUT

December 21, 2023

Farmworkers brought to the U.S. in the H-2A visa program harvest melons early in the morning in a field near Firebaugh, in California’s San Joaquin Valley. 

DAVID BACON

On September 22, 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it would begin paying growers to use the notorious H-2A contract foreign labor (or guestworker) program. Tapping into $65 million from the American Rescue Act, the USDA will pay between $25,000 and $2 million per application to defray the expenses of recruiting migrant workers from three Central American countries — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — transporting them to the U.S., housing and feeding them while they’re here, and even subsidizing part of their wages. Labor contractors, who compete with each other to sell migrant farm labor to growers at low wages, will be eligible as well as growers themselves.

The H-2A program is the modern version of the old bracero scheme, under which growers brought Mexicans to work in U.S. fields from 1942 to 1964. Workers had to pay bribes to come, were kept separate from the local workforce, and deported if they protested or went on strike. Because of widespread abuse of the workers who came through the program, and growers’ use of bracero labor to prevent farmworkers from organizing, the program was abolished — one of the main achievements of the Chicano civil rights movement. But even at its height, the U.S. government never actually paid growers to bring in workers. Now, the Biden administration is doing just that.

The H-2A program allows growers to recruit workers, who today mostly come from Mexico. They can and do discriminate, hiring almost entirely young men and then pressuring them with production quotas to work as fast as possible. Workers have an H-2A visa, which allows them to stay only for the length of their contract — less than a year — and they cannot legally work for anyone other than the grower or labor contractor who recruits them. They can be fired for any reason, from protesting to working too slowly, and once they are terminated, they lose their visa and must leave the country. Recruiters maintain blacklists of workers fired for those reasons, and especially for striking and organizing, refusing to rehire them in future seasons.

Although the bracero program had ended in 1965, the H-2A visa category reestablished a contract labor program, in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The program remained relatively small until it began to mushroom during the Bush and Obama administrations. The Biden administration is now expanding it even further by subsidizing growers who use it.

The Biden administration’s purpose for its subsidy program, called the Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Program (FLSPPP), is political. In announcing it, the USDA lists three goals. The first, “addressing current labor shortages in agriculture,” means not just giving growers a government-sponsored labor recruitment system, but even paying them to use it. While growers complain about labor shortages, unemployment in farmworker communities is higher than in urban areas. Agribusiness has been intent, however, on keeping wages extremely low. Many growers were Donald Trump supporters, and the rural areas of California and Washington State are still littered with old Trump signs from the 2020 campaign. But hope dies hard. The Biden campaign would welcome whatever support it can get from agribusiness in the tight 2024 election to come.

NEWS |

ECONOMY & LABOR

Migrant Farmworkers Have No Safety Net in the Face of Catastrophic Flooding

Many farmworkers are still out of work and struggling to afford food in the wake of California’s disastrous floods.

By Leanna First-Arai , TRUTHOUTJanuary 30, 2023

Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, held a meeting with growers at the USDA in September 2022. She thanked them for working with the administration on “a critical priority — expanding the pool of H-2A farmworkers from Central America, specifically from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.” “We have got your back,” she promised them. “We are committed to helping maintain a strong pipeline of experienced farmworkers to support you.”


It is no coincidence that a work visa program is being unveiled as Biden negotiates with Republicans over measures to make the asylum process basically unavailable to those same migrants fleeing poverty and repression.

The second stated goal of the pilot program is to “reduce irregular migration from Northern Central America through the expansion of regular pathways.” As Republicans attack the president for being “soft” on immigration, the Biden administration hopes to forestall caravans arriving at the border by channeling thousands of potential migrants into work visa programs. The FLSPPP does nothing to change the conditions that produce migration, nor does it allow migrants to access the asylum system and become U.S. residents. In fact, it is no coincidence that a work visa program is being unveiled as Biden negotiates with Republicans over measures to make the asylum process basically unavailable to those same migrants fleeing poverty and repression.

The third goal, “improving the working conditions for all farmworkers,” is political theater. Applicants for subsidies under the pilot program are required to provide H-2A workers with living wages, overtime pay, workers’ rights training, health and safety protections, and no retaliation if they try to organize a union. These protections and benefits — in many cases, simply the base legal requirement — don’t even exist on paper for almost all farmworkers who are already living in the U.S. And because, according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey, about 44 percent of all farmworkers are undocumented, it’s difficult for them to use what legal protections exist. However, instead of pushing for immigration reform that would provide them with legal status, the Biden administration is helping growers bring in H-2A workers to replace them.

This trailer, at 1340 Prell Rd., in Santa Maria, California, was listed as the housing for six H-2A workers by La Fuente Farming, Inc.

DAVID BACON

With weak enforcement on the ground, it’s unlikely that H-2A workers would get these benefits either. Violations of the rights and minimum standards for both H-2A and resident farmworkers are endemic in U.S. agriculture. The program contains no funding for even a minimal increase in Department of Labor (DoL) investigations of existing violations, much less those to come.

The proposal shocked many farmworker advocates and organizers. A number of them sent a letter of protest to the Biden administration, which I also signed as a fellow of the Oakland Institute. “As farmers, farmworkers, and their advocates, we are writing to express our indignation that USDA is committing $65 million of public money to pay farm employers, including Farm Labor Contractors, to raise wages, improve housing or other adjustments for H-2A workers before making any significant changes in the conditions of the millions of farmworkers already in this country,” the letter read.

Documentation of worker abuse in the H-2A program goes back decades, and many farmworker advocates and unions doubt it can be reformed. “Because of its record of abuse of both H-2A workers and local farmworkers,” the protest letter stated, “we have called for the abolition of the H-2A program for many years.” Sarait Martinez, director of the Binational Center for Oaxacan Indigenous Development, which organizes farmworkers against wage theft and other abuse, told Truthout, “This program pits resident farmworkers against contract workers recruited by growers, and makes it impossible to end the poverty in farmworker communities, treating it as normal and unalterable.”

“This program pits resident farmworkers against contract workers recruited by growers, and makes it impossible to end the poverty in farmworker communities, treating it as normal and unalterable.”

At the same time that USDA is handing out subsidies, the enforcement system that should protect farmworkers from wage theft, illegal wages, and other violations of workplace standards and rights is in freefall. A 2023 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that investigations by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) have plummeted by over 60 percent — from a high of 2,431 in 2000 to only 879 in 2022. The department has only 810 investigators for the nation’s 164.3 million workers, or one inspector per 202,824 workers. As a result, the DoL only investigates fewer than 1 out of every 100 agricultural employers each year, although, notes the study, “when WHD does investigate an agricultural employer, 70 percent of the time, WHD detects wage and hour violations.”

From 2000 to 2022, violations of the H-2A visa program accounted for roughly half of the few cases in which employers were forced to pay back wages and civil penalties, rising to nearly three-fourths during the Biden administration. Because enforcement is weak, cases of employers and labor contractors using H-2A workers to replace local workers, and cheating those H-2A workers, are multiplying.

One example of cheating occurred with notorious labor violator Sierra del Tigre Farms in Santa Maria, California. In September 2023, more than 100 workers were terminated before their work contracts had ended and told to go back to Mexico. The company then refused to pay them the legally required wages they would have earned. Its alter ego, Savino Farms, had already been fined for the same violation four years earlier, an indication that the profits of labor violations outweigh the small penalties.

One worker, Felipe Ramos, was owed more than $2,600. “It was very hard,” he remembers. “I have a wife and baby girl, and they survive because I send money home every week. Everyone else was like that too. The company had problems finding buyers, and too many workers.” In fall 2023, Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, Inc., another labor contractor, was forced by the Department of Labor to pay $1 million in penalties and back wages to workers it had cheated in a similar case. The frequency and seriousness of these cases in one relatively small valley alone indicate that the problems with the program are fundamental, structural and widespread.

As the USDA “pilot” subsidy program is being rolled out, the U.S. Department of Labor has proposed a set of reforms it says may reduce the long-documented abuse of H-2A farmworkers. Yet even in the published text of the proposed reforms, the DoL staff who drafted it summarize the structural reasons that make the impact of reforms so doubtful:


Over the past decade, use of the H-2A program has grown dramatically while overall agricultural employment in the United States has remained stable, meaning that fewer domestic workers are employed as farmworkers. … Some of the characteristics of the H-2A program, including the temporary nature of the work, frequent geographic isolation of the workers, and dependency on a single employer, create a vulnerable population of workers for whom it is uniquely difficult to advocate or organize to seek better working conditions. … This lack of sufficient protections adversely affects the ability of domestic workers to advocate for acceptable working conditions, leading to reduced worker bargaining power and, ultimately, deterioration of working conditions in agricultural employment.

The existing local farmworker workforce suffers from the conditions the Department of Labor describes. In another wage theft claim in July 2023, a group of resident workers charged that high-end winery J. Lohr conspired with a group of labor contractors to pay less than the minimum wage, while hiding records of the violation. The Binational Center for Indigenous Community Development, which brought the suit, has fought five similar cases in the last year.


There is no requirement from the USDA that employers of local workers implement any of the pilot program’s conditions, and no additional resources are destined for defending the existing farmworker workforce.

Instead of spending its limited resources to protect and advance the wages and job rights of the farmworkers who live and work in the U.S. (68 percent of whom are immigrants themselves), the Biden administration is making it more attractive for growers to bring in guest workers to replace them. This gives growers a workforce that is easier to control, and who leave the country when the work is done. It continues a policy that extends back through the Trump, Obama, Bush and Clinton presidencies.

About 2 million workers labor in U.S. fields. Last year, the Department of Labor gave growers permission to bring 371,619 H-2A workers — or about a sixth of the entire U.S. farm labor workforce — an increase from 98,813 in 2012. Employing such a large quantity of H-2A labor cannot be done, as the DoL admits, without displacing domestic workers, who continue to endure extensive wage theft and an average family income of $20,000 per year.

Employers who hire local workers are ineligible for the pilot program subsidies unless they recruit H-2A workers — essentially bribing them to use H-2A workers to replace residents. There is no requirement from the USDA that employers of local workers implement any of the pilot program’s conditions, and no additional resources are destined for defending the existing farmworker workforce. This will directly hit farmworker families and communities across the country.

The Biden administration’s political calculations could prove disastrous as well. By doubling down on the program, it is essentially telling farmworkers and their advocates, in an election year, that the administration is solely concerned with the welfare of growers. Yet almost all farmworker unions and communities campaigned heavily against Trump in 2020. They were often Biden’s main support in rural areas where growers were solidly in the Republican camp.

“By implementing this pilot program, the Department of Agriculture has failed miserably to engage with us or hear our arguments,” the protest letter concluded. “We call upon USDA to cancel it and redirect the $65 million to a campaign to rebuild the domestic farm labor force.”

DAVID BACON is a writer and photographer, and former union organizer. He is the author of several books on labor, migration and the global economy, including In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte, The Children of NAFTA, Communities Without Borders, Illegal People and The Right to Stay Home. His photographs and stories can be found at here and here.

Hundreds of California Farmworkers Are Marching for Union Voting Rights

The marchers are demanding better protections against voter suppression by employers in union elections.

UNITED FARM WORKERS / @UFWUPDATES

BY Sara Herschander, 

Waging Nonviolence

August 6, 2022

On Wednesday, around 250 farmworkers and their supporters took their first steps of a 24-day Delano-to-Sacramento march to demand more voting options for farmworkers when casting a ballot on unionization.

The march, organized by United Farm Workers, or UFW, has been billed as the “March for the Governor’s Signature,” a reference to demands that California Gov. Gavin Newsom sign a new bill meant to protect farmworkers from voter suppression by employers.

“California is a very wealthy state and agriculture contributes to that wealth, but farmworkers continue to be poor and their families suffer — that’s what we need to change,” Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the UFW, told a crowd of marchers gathered at Forty Acres, the site of UFW’s original headquarters in Delano.

“We want everything that you’re doing here to reach the hearts of the growers and the heart of the governor,” said Huerta, before shouting “Si se puede,” a phrase she originated in 1972, while campaigning against legislation that denied workers’ right to organize during harvest seasons.

Over the next several weeks, participants are expected to march roughly 15 miles per day, before reaching the state capital in Sacramento on Aug. 26, which Gov. Gavin Newsom declared “California Farmworker Day” last October. They’ll be marching in the scorching summer heat, behind the same Lady of Guadalupe banner that UFW has been using since the 1960s.

According to Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns at UFW, that history was palpable during the march’s launch, which she called a kind of “family reunion” for farmworkers, organizers, clergy and other union workers who attended in solidarity with the farmworker movement.

The new bill — the Agricultural Labor Relations Voting Choice Act, AB 2183 — would allow farmworkers to cast a vote on unionization through mail-in ballots or at a drop-off location. Current regulations dictate that workers must cast ballots at in-person-only polling places, typically located at their place of employment, where they may face intimidation from supervisors.

“The vast majority of those elections are on the growers’ property, under the watchful and often retaliatory eye of their bosses,” said Strater, who explained that such a system has “an incredibly chilling effect” on a largely undocumented workforce.

Even as policymakers have lauded farmworkers as essential workers at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ve largely sided with the agricultural industry in curtailing or neglecting workers’ right to organize over the past several years. As of 2021, fewer than three percent of farmworkers belong to a union, and farmworkers still lack the right to collectively bargain and unionize in most states.

On Cesar Chavez Day this April, farmworkers and advocates organized marches in 13 California cities criticizing the governor’s continued refusal to meet with farmworkers to discuss the most recent bill. Newsom also vetoed a similar bill in September 2021, which would have allowed for mail-in unionization ballots.

Farmworker organizers faced another blow in June 2021, when the Supreme Court ruled in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid that labor organizations could no longer go on grower’s property to meet with workers.

Still, longtime organizers like Roberto “El Capitan” Bustos, who led UFW’s famed 400-mile march to Sacramento in 1966, were in attendance on Wednesday to encourage marchers to persevere despite political setbacks.

“I’m here again — I’m still marching,” Bustos told those gathered on Wednesday. “You can’t get lost. Follow our footprints. You’re going to see our footprints along the way.”

About half of the farmworkers in the US don't have legal status. They're risking getting COVID-19 to supply our food.

Michelle Mark and Jacqueline Baylon
Sep 3, 2020

Nearly half of America's 2.4 million farmworkers are in the country without legal permission.
These farmworkers have been deemed essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic, and are often working long hours in harsh conditions to supply the country with food.

These workers weren't eligible for most of the federal assistance given to Americans amid the crisis, and one worker said she fears what could happen if she gets sick.

But she said she's proud of her work, and hopes President Donald Trump will one day make it easier for workers like her to stay in the country legally.

More than 1 million of America's 2.4 million farmworkers are in the country without legal permission.

These farmworkers plow, pick, and harvest the country's fields, often for long hours and low wages, and in grueling conditions. And despite their unauthorized status, these farmworkers have been deemed essential workers during the US coronavirus crisis, which has plunged the economy into uncertainty and raised fears about food shortages.

Now, these workers risk getting COVID-19 to supply food for the country, while arguing the country isn't doing enough to protect them during the pandemic.

Farmworker advocates have expressed concern that a lack of education could leave workers susceptible to a major outbreak. That would not only wreak havoc on America's immigrant community, but it could disrupt food supply chains and cause shortages in grocery stores.

"We're treated as essential workers right now because if we don't do this kind of work, the United States is not going to have food in supermarkets, food to feed the nation," Mily Treviño-Sauceda, cofounder of the farmworkers advocacy group Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, told Business Insider Weekly.

Unauthorized immigrant farmworkers say even though they've been deemed "essential workers," they feel vulnerable. Louis DeBarraicua for Business Insider Today

Carmelita is one of more than 1 million unauthorized immigrants who are working through the pandemic. She told Business Insider Weekly she's been working in the country for 13 years.

"I don't feel 'essential,' as they say, because we don't have the same privileges," Carmelita said in Spanish.

She was referring to government programs and services available to Americans that she cannot access due to her immigration status.

Carmelita did not receive a $1,200 stimulus payments like her American counterparts, and she's also ineligible for health insurance programs like Medicaid, which would cover the costs of her treatment if she grew sick with COVID-19.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom allocated $75 million to provide $500 cash to the state's unauthorized immigrants, but it only covered about 150,000 people.

Irene de Barraicua of Lideres Campesinas, a group that works with women farmworkers in California, told Business Insider Weekly that one of her top concerns is the workers' lack of awareness about the disease, which could be solved by bringing more health care workers out to visit the farms and educate the workers.

"That's definitely a concern that some people are going to work and they might have already more information than others in terms of what COVID-19 is," she said. "And so they worry when they're working next to someone else that hasn't read anything or isn't as informed."

Still, despite everything, Carmelita said she's proud of her work.

"We are the ones who are harvesting the products, fruits, and vegetables so they get to the table of the people who have to stay home," she said.

Farmworker advocates say a lack of education for the immigrants could contribute to a coronavirus outbreak Laura Rishell for Business Insider Weekly

But she longs to one day not have to worry about losing everything she's worked for simply due to her immigration status.

She says she hopes that one day President Donald Trump will give workers like her a "blue card," which Democrats have proposed for agricultural workers. The blue cards would provide the immigrants with a pathway to permanent, legal status in the US.

Carmelita's sons are American citizens, but she said she hopes to one day call herself the same.

"Right now what motivates me to work so hard is to help my children get ahead so that they can have a better life than I have," she said. "I know I can't give them everything, but at least they can get a better education than I did, so they'll be less likely to end up as farmworkers."

Meanwhile, the pandemic continues to draw attention to the nation's food sources. Last week, the Hispanic Heritage Foundation announced that farmworkers are being honored at this year's Hispanic Heritage Awards.

"Every single time we take a bite of food, we should think about the importance of our farmworkers in our lives, especially during the COVID-19 crisis as they put themselves and their families at risk to nobly nourish our families. Their service is nothing short of heroic," Antonio Tijerino, president and CEO of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, said in a statement.

"It is with tremendous gratitude, pride, and admiration that we honor farmworkers."

How coronavirus threatens the seasonal farmworkers at the heart of the American food supply

April 3, 2020 By The Conversation


Many Americans may find bare grocery store shelves the most worrying sign of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their food system.

But, for the most part, shortages of shelf-stable items like pasta, canned beans and peanut butter are temporary because the U.S. continues to produce enough food to meet demand – even if it sometimes takes a day or two to catch up

To keep up that pace, the food system depends on several million seasonal agricultural workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants from Mexico and other countries. These laborers pick grapes in California, tend dairy cows in Wisconsin and rake blueberries in Maine.

As a sociologist who studies agricultural issues, including farm labor, I believe that these workers face particular risks during the current pandemic that, if unaddressed, threaten keeping those grocery store shelves well stocked.

Essential labor

It is difficult to accurately count the number of hired agricultural laborers in the United States, but official sources place the number at
1 million to 2.7 million people, depending on the time of year.

Most of these workers are employed seasonally to perform the hard manual labor of cultivating and harvesting crops. One-half to three-quarters of them were born outside of the United States, with the majority holding Mexican citizenship.

The H-2A visa program authorizes noncitizen agricultural laborers to work in the United States. This program allows farmers to recruit workers for seasonal agricultural jobs, provided the workers return home within 10 months.

But the H-2A program doesn’t cover enough workers to meet the needs of the food system. In 2018, only 243,000 visas were issued under the program – far less than the total number of workers needed to power the farm economy.

Government research suggests that approximately half of the remaining workers on U.S. farms are in the United States without legal authorization. These workers often live in the U.S. year-round, choosing to be in legal limbo rather than risk crossing an increasingly policed border. Some travel from state to state, following the harvest cycle of crops.

These farmworkers play an essential role in U.S. agriculture. They pick fresh fruits and vegetables, which are often difficult or impossible to harvest mechanically. They milk cows on dairy farms. In my home state of Iowa, they detassel the hybrid corn varieties – a form of pollination control – that farmers rely on.

Remove these workers, in other words, and large sectors of the American food system would grind to a halt.

Dangerous conditions

Yet there are several factors that put them at higher risk during the pandemic.

For example, social isolation is almost impossible for farmworkers, who often live and work in close proximity to one another.

Those in the H-2A program typically live in on-site, dormitory-style housing, with up to 10 people sharing sleeping quarters and restroom facilities.

The mostly undocumented workers not covered by H-2A visas frequently work for labor contractors, who arrange for their transportation to work sites in shared vans or trucks.

And once on the job, workers interact closely to harvest crops at a rapid pace.

This near-constant physical proximity to one another can facilitate the rapid transmission of the coronavirus.
Seriously susceptible

The nature of their work also makes farmworkers especially susceptible to serious coronavirus infections.

Although COVID-19 tends to be most severe in the elderly and people with underlying health conditions, farm laborers face working conditions that may elevate the risk for severe disease.

Exposure to dangerous pesticides is not unusual, and agricultural workers must also contend with lung irritants from dust, pollen and crops. This can trigger asthma attacks in farmworkers and their children and contribute to other respiratory disorders. Heath officials have found that these conditions contribute to serious coronavirus infections.

Moreover, farmworkers face a number of barriers to accessing medical care, ranging from linguistic and cultural differences to lack of reliable transportation to the limited number of medical facilities in many rural communities.

These barriers are especially high for the many undocumented farmworkers, who are not eligible for insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act, which does cover workers on H-2A visas.

They may also be reluctant to seek medical care, not wanting to draw attention to themselves in a political climate in which immigration laws are strictly enforced. And farmworkers aren’t typically granted sick leave.

Finally, the labor contractors who employ undocumented workers generally pay only for work that is completed. This means that a day at the doctor’s office is a day without pay – no small sacrifice for a worker making less than $18,000 a year.
Impact on the food supply

But what would an outbreak of COVID-19 among farmworkers mean for the food system?

Fortunately, the risk of direct transmission of the coronavirus passing from farmworkers to consumers through food products is low.

However, widespread infections among farmworkers could make it difficult for farmers to harvest crops. Even before the pandemic, farmers in many agricultural areas were already struggling with labor shortages.

The coronavirus could make this problem worse, potentially causing the loss of crops that cannot be harvested in time. Demand for farmworkers peaks in the summer, so this problem is only a few months away.

Another concern is that fewer workers, fearful of the coronavirus, will apply for H-2A visas to work on U.S. farms, instead seeking work in their home countries. Farmers in hard-hit Italy are already grappling with a similar issue. And on the other side of this issue, the suspension of visa services at U.S. embassies and consulates may restrict the number of H-2A visas given out.

Eventually, consumers could begin to see the impact of any labor shortages in the form of higher prices or shortages of products ranging from strawberries and lettuce to meat and dairy.

There’s no easy solution, but a good start would be ensuring farmworkers are able to follow effective social distancing guidelines, are wearing protective gloves and masks, and are able to get the medical care they need without fear of lost wages or deportation.

Americans depend on these laborers to continue putting food on their tables during this crisis. A little support would go a long way.

Michael Haedicke, Associate Professor of Sociology, Drake University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

After enduring ‘complete hell’ during pandemic, food workers face obstacles getting COVID-19 vaccinations

“Vaccinating our essential farmworkers will ensure the safety of their workplaces, their homes, their families, our food supply, and the vital services that they perform.”

By

 Leah Douglas

 -

February 1, 2021Common Dreams

The thousands of workers who pick, pack, and process our food have become eligible to receive the Covid-19 vaccine in many states. But they still face obstacles to actually getting the vaccine, as companies sort out their vaccination policies and advocates struggle to secure enough doses for a workforce that ranks among the most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

Labor organizations and the food industry spent months pushing for agricultural and food processing workers to be in early distribution phases of the Covid-19 vaccine. In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended that agricultural workers be vaccinated in Phase 1b, and many states have followed suit.

Yet with the vaccine rollout moving slowly because of continued shortages and with some states shuffling around their priority populations, there are still unanswered questions about how and whether the vaccines will actually get to workers and about what role food manufacturers will play in getting shots into arms.

Florida is now requiring vaccine recipients to show state driver’s licenses or proof of residence, potentially excluding the state’s 200,000 migrant and seasonal farmworkers

Meanwhile, food system workers are still contracting the virus at workplaces across the country. More than 85,500 food and farmworkers have contracted Covid-19 and at least 368 have died as of Jan. 27, according to FERN’s tracker. Nearly 7,000 cases have been added to the database since the beginning of January, even with just a few states regularly reporting data.

Kristy Tijerina, a worker at a JBS meatpacking plant in Plainwell, Michigan, says it’s essential that the vaccine be allocated to the industry’s workers as quickly as possible. At her plant, at least 88 workers have contracted the virus and one has died. Tijerina herself contracted Covid-19 in the spring, and her father died of the virus in August.

“It’s just getting really bad right now,” she says of the case rates in her community. “The more everybody gets vaccinated, it’s a lot better for everybody working here together.”

One obstacle to expediently vaccinating food workers is the still-changing prioritization of essential workers in states’ vaccination phases. Amy Liebman, director of environmental and occupational health at the Migrant Clinicians Network (MCN), which has been supporting local health systems in vaccinating farmworkers, says it’s “been a disappointment” seeing food and farmworkers still unable to access vaccines in many states, given their high risk of contracting Covid-19.

“First and foremost, we need the doses,” Liebman says.

In California, home to as many as 800,000 farmworkers, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently shifted the state’s vaccine distribution structure to be age-based, leading to concerns that many essential workers would need to wait longer for their shots. Florida, another major agricultural producer, is now requiring vaccine recipients to show state driver’s licenses or proof of residence, potentially excluding the state’s 200,000 migrant and seasonal farmworkers from being vaccinated at all.

“Farmworkers are among the most vulnerable populations, because they work in close proximity to each other [and] they go home, often to multigenerational households,” said Fresno County supervisor Brian Pacheco at a vaccination site on Wednesday. Fresno County became one of the first counties in the country to begin vaccinating farmworkers this week and plans to vaccinate more than 3,000 agricultural workers in the coming days at vaccination sites around the county.

“Vaccinating our essential farmworkers will ensure the safety of their workplaces, their homes, their families, our food supply, and the vital services that they perform,” Pacheco said.

One of the logistical questions facing employers and health departments is where, exactly, workers should get inoculated. Particularly for migrant farmworkers, who may relocate between shots, vaccine distribution must happen at easily accessible locations, says Leibman. MCN is aiding in that effort with a virtual case management program that can help workers figure out how to get a second vaccine dose if they move after their first shot.

“We need to make sure that the vaccine is available to workers rather than the workers being available to the vaccine,” she says.

For meatpacking workers, the best option is to get vaccinated at work, says Mark Lauritsen, vice president of meatpacking at the United Food and Commercial Workers union. Many large meatpacking plants have their own health clinics, where workers already receive medical care. Workers may be less nervous getting vaccinated in a familiar setting, he says.

“We’re going to work to make sure that it’s an efficient process and a safe process, and that there’s no barriers to accessing [the vaccine],” he says. “The power of having it right there at the plant means we get to these people with very few obstacles.”

Yet there’s also an essential role for public health departments, especially in cases where workers may not trust their employer or report to work on a regular schedule. Advocates who represent subcontracted workers in food processing recommended recently that local health departments be “heavily involved” in vaccine distribution to ensure that temporary workers are reached.

In some states, meatpacking and other agricultural workers can already receive the vaccine or will qualify imminently. Iowa’s meatpacking workers are expected to be able to set up vaccine appointments by Feb. 1, and in Kansas, they began to qualify for vaccine appointments on Jan. 26.

Meatpackers are still figuring out some of the details of how they will vaccinate workers. Nikki Richardson, director of communications for JBS, says vaccination logistics are still being determined at each plant, and that in some cases, public health departments, pharmacies, or local health clinics will carry out worker vaccinations. But the company is “prepared for our phase of vaccine allocation whenever it may occur,” Richardson says.

Tyson Foods plans to “offer vaccinations on-site at our facilities, at no cost, while our team members are on the job,” said the company’s public relations manager, Derek Burleson. Tyson has contracted with Matrix Medical Network to coordinate its worker testing and vaccination, so the timing of vaccinations will depend on when states make vaccines available to Matrix, Burleson says.

Meatpacker JBS says it will pay workers $100 to get vaccinated. A critic called the incentive program an “attempt to distract from the company’s failure to protect its workers.”

Smithfield did not respond to questions about the specifics of its vaccination program.

Employers are also still sorting out whether to incentivize or compensate workers for getting vaccinated. In the grocery sector, where at least 109 union workers have died of Covid-19 and more than 17,000 have contracted the virus, some retailers are introducing incentives to encourage workers to get the vaccine, though they’re not requiring it. For instance, Instacart will pay $25 to employees who take time off to the get vaccinated. Trader Joe’s will give its workers two hours of pay per vaccine dose.

So far, JBS is the only meatpacker that has said it will pay workers to get the vaccine—$100 for employees of the Brazilian-owned meatpacker and its subsidiary Pilgrim’s Pride. But that approach isn’t uniformly popular.

Kim Cordova, the president of UFCW Local 7, said in a statement that JBS’s incentive program is an “attempt to distract from the company’s failure to protect its workers.” Local 7 represents workers at a JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado, where six workers have died of Covid-19 and nearly 450 have been sickened by the virus. The company should quickly restore hazard pay for its workers and implement daily testing, among other precautions, Cordova said.

Meatpackers are also mixed on whether the vaccine should be mandatory for their workers. JBS is “currently focused on achieving the highest voluntary participation rate possible,” says Richardson. Tyson is “strongly encouraging team members to take the vaccine but are not mandating it,” says Burleson.

Lauritsen says the UFCW is opposed to making the vaccine mandatory and that receiving the vaccine should not be a condition of employment. Besides, he says, workers are ready to get the vaccine without it being made compulsory.

“Given the work that’s been done, the complete hell that these folks have went through during this pandemic,” he says, “our members are ready to get the vaccination, and the sooner the better.”

Leah Douglas  is an associate editor and staff writer at FERN. Prior to joining the team, she worked for three years as a reporter and policy analyst with the Open Markets Institute, where she researched economic consolidation and monopolization in the food and agriculture industry. She founded and wrote Food & Power, a first-of-its kind resource on food sector consolidation.

Farmworkers say they are essential workers without essential protections

March 25-31 is officially designated as National Farmworker Awareness Week.

By Austa Somvichian-Clausen | March 28, 2021
HECTOR MATA/AFP via Getty Images

Story at a glance

Though farmworkers were deemed essential and have started to finally receive vaccines, many of them, especially those who are undocumented, face multiple barriers that keep them isolated and vulnerable.

Farmworkers suffer from a lack of protections and benefits that keep them living a hand-to-mouth existence.

Organizations such as Justice for Migrant Women and Farmworker Justice are working to push forward policies that better protect farmworkers.

When Norma Flores López was growing up, her least favorite crop to pick was the onion.

“For any 12-year-old coming back from spring break, the last thing they want us to smell like was onions, and let me tell you: once you have that smell on your hands, you cannot wash it off,” says López.

“That made me very not popular at school [she laughs], so those were actually sort of my first moments of realizing, oh man, I'm not like some of these other kids. These kids were coming back from spring break with a suntan from the beach, and I was coming back very tan because I was out in the field helping my parents.”

Now the Chief Programs Officer for Justice for Migrant Women, López comes from generations of agricultural and farm workers. Despite being a natural-born U.S. citizens, both of her parents dropped out of school by the end of the sixth grade — heading to the fields to help their parents out.

“It didn’t matter that they were U.S. born, and I point that out because I think that people tend to think like this is an issue of people who are undocumented,” she says. “Pointing out the desperate poverty that my U.S. born [parents] grew up in is important. They ended up not being able to get an education, but instead were dedicated to a life of working in the field, and that's what we ended up being raised as well.”

López’ parents are two of the nation’s 2.5 million farmworkers, an estimated 32 percent of which are female, including thousands of teens and girls as young as 12. While the exact number is unknown, at least 300,000 farmworkers are under the age of 18.

As she got older, López began to work with programs meant to aid families of farmers and migrant children. It is through sharing her firsthand experiences that made her realize the power of storytelling to create a lasting change and impact.

Now, she works alongside other inspiring women such as Mónica Ramírez, a lawyer and activist who founded the organization Justice for Migrant Women. Ramírez also came from a family of farmworkers and has devoted her life to serving this key group of essential workers that are often forgotten, most recently raising more than $4 million in aid for farmworkers affected by the pandemic.

“I think what's important to notice is that farmworkers have been historically left out of a lot of protections that I think many people take for granted,” says López. “They don't have the right to organize, don’t have guaranteed overtime pay, the benefit of retirement, and those that are undocumented are particularly vulnerable. They're doing everything to be able to help this country, but in the end they will not have any sort of benefits, or any retirement plan.”

Also considered by experts to be highly vulnerable are the many women and girls working in agriculture, whose jobs are low-paid, dangerous and isolated, putting them at risk of sexual abuse, including sexual harassment and exploitation, by bosses, crew leaders and co-workers. López tells us this is an issue that has only been exacerbated by the pandemic, as female farmworkers and migrants have been stuck at home in small communities and often subject to domestic abuse.

For many farmworkers working in rural areas, it has also been a challenge to book appointments to receive a coronavirus vaccination. For those who are able to prove residency, challenges such as access to broadband, language assistance, transportation and proximity all pose barriers to these essential workers, who aren’t able to access essential services.

“These are the kinds of issues that we try to flag for many top political leaders—you know, as they’re putting policies together, asking them to recognize that there are people that are being left out and those that are being left out are particularly vulnerable,” says López.

For many undocumented workers, their top priority remains establishing a direct pathway to citizenship. A vision for that pathway seems to be getting increasingly clear. Just a few days ago, the House passed the Farm Workforce Modernization Act with bipartisan support, providing seasonal workers with a program to earn legal status if they are continually employed in the agriculture sector.

“We’re behind the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, behind the American Dream and Promise Act, and we know that our larger undocumented community needs that pathway to citizenship,” says López.

Washington Supreme Court: Farmworkers to get overtime pay

SEATTLE — A divided Washington Supreme Court ruled Thursday the state’s dairy workers are entitled to overtime pay if they work more than 40 hours a week, a decision expected to apply to the rest of the agriculture industry.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

For the past 60 years, state law — like federal law — has exempted farmworkers from classes of workers who are entitled to overtime pay, but in a 5-4 ruling the court found that unconstitutional. The majority said the Washington state Constitution grants workers in dangerous industries a fundamental right to health and safety protections, including overtime, which is intended to discourage employers from forcing employees to work excessive hours.

The ruling applied directly only to the dairy industry, but its reasoning covers all of the 200,000-plus farmworkers in the state's $10.6 billion agriculture industry, said Lori Isley, an attorney with the non-profit Columbia Legal Services who represented the dairy workers.

“Since 1983, the Washington Supreme Court has recognized that all farm work is very dangerous work, so it's very easy to see how this will extend to all farmworkers,” Isley said. “We are so happy to see the law in our state moving forward in this direction.”

The decision makes Washington the first state to grant farmworkers overtime protections through the courts. California is phasing in some overtime protections, while New York this year began requiring overtime pay when farmworkers work more than 60 hours in a week. Maryland and Minnesota also offer overtime protections to farmworkers.

The ruling could provide a template for extending overtime in other states, said Charlotte Garden, a Seattle University Law School professor who worked on a friend-of-the-court brief in the case.

“(President) Trump’s remake of the federal judiciary means that federal courts are likely to be hostile to workers for the foreseeable future,” she wrote in an instant message. “That means that in many states, workers and their advocates are going to be looking to state courts to vindicate their rights. The law in this case is obviously WA-specific, but it could still inspire new litigation strategies both inside and outside WA.”

The dissenting justices said there was no right to overtime under Washington law.

Dairies and other agriculture industry groups warned the ruling will mean vastly increased labour costs and that it could prompt more to turn to robotics, especially in the dairy industry. They can’t simply pass on higher costs to consumers because they often compete in national or global markets for their products, they argued.

Washington's farms already have some of the nation's highest labour costs, thanks in part to its high minimum wage and to the nature of the crops grown, including fruit and hops, which require intensive hand-picking.

The industry warned that applying overtime protections would leave farms with three options: limiting their harvest and leaving crops to rot, absorbing the extra labour costs, or hiring additional workers to avoid incurring overtime expenses.

The last option is untenable, since there's already a shortage of agriculture workers, the Washington State Tree Fruit Association and the Hop Growers of Washington said in a friend-of-the-court brief.

Giving the workers OT protections would also have the perverse effect of cutting workers' earnings by limiting them to 40 hours or forcing them to find additional work from a second employer — which means they'd be working longer hours without OT anyway, the organizations argued.

Dan Wood, executive director of the Washington State Dairy Federation, noted that some farms already pay $18 to $20 an hour for all hours worked — paying time-and-a-half would boost that to about $27 to $30 for hours above 40 per week.

“My phone’s been ringing off the hook,” Wood said Thursday. “You can’t operate with those costs. The political climate in Washington is far less favourable to agriculture than the natural climate.”

The court majority found the Legislature had no reasonable basis for excluding agriculture workers from the protections. The justices said agriculture work generally is dangerous, with workers exposed to diseases from animals, physical strain, and pesticides and other chemicals that can increase the risk of neurological conditions and cancer. In 2015, the injury rate for Washington’s dairy industry was nearly one-fifth higher than that of the agricultural sector.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Steven González also noted what he described as the racist origins of the overtime exemption for farmworkers. In the South, a feudal-like state replaced slavery, with Black workers continuing to toil on white-owned farms. When federal lawmakers passed major labour reforms in the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made compromises to win the support of Southern Democrats, exempting farmworkers from such protections and preserving the racial hierarchy.

Many states, including Washington, subsequently based their labour laws on the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.

Latinos account for 99% of Washington's farmworkers.

“Excluding farmworkers from health and safety protections cannot be justified by an assertion that the agricultural industry, and society’s general welfare, depends on a caste system that is repugnant to our nation’s best self,” González wrote.

The ruling came in a 2016 lawsuit that two workers, Jose Martinez-Cuevas and Patricia Aguilar, brought on behalf of 300 workers against DeRuyter Brothers Dairy in Outlook, southeast of Yakima. The dairy's milking facilities were operated around the clock, and workers were required to stay until all cows were milked and to help clean the barn.

The dairy paid $600,000 to settle most of the claims, including that it failed to provide meal and rest breaks, but the workers' argument that they were entitled to OT had not been resolved. The dairy has been sold to another operator.

The majority did not say whether the workers would be able to collect back pay; that issue is expected to be addressed in future litigation.

Gene Johnson, The Associated Press

Farmworkers Face Food Insecurity While Helping Feed Others

By Sam Eaton
December 22, 2021

Mano a Mano - a nonprofit family center - has become a lifeline for many of central Oregon's agricultural workers.

More than two million farms scattered across the United States provide produce, dairy and meat that end up on our dinner plates, but the people working long hours in the fields to harvest it all are struggling to feed their own families.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. In 2020 nearly 14 million households in the U.S. - around 10.5% - were food insecure, according to the USDA's most recent report, and among those are farmworkers.

Since the beginning of the pandemic more than half of the farmworkers in Washington state have faced challenges accessing food according to recent research by the University of Washington. Another study shows 45% of Latino farmworkers in California's central valley reported food insecurity in 2020.

Ana Peña with the nonprofit Mano a Mano Family Center, says the problem is just as bad in central Oregon.

Peña is a community health worker for Mano a Mano, which means hand in hand. She says the center's food bank has become a lifeline for many of central Oregon's agricultural workers.

"Especially during summer, we'll have maseca coming in, and maseca is awesome for our tortillas, tamales, all those goodies," Peña said.

Providing traditional foods for Latino farmworkers is one thing, but Peña says for many of her clients who live and work in remote rural areas without access to transportation, just getting to the food bank is a challenge. So the food bank goes to them.

A recent tri-state COVID-19 farmworker study revealed that fewer than a quarter of farmworkers in Washington state were able to access food banks because of their limited operations and overlap with work hours.

"They also earn an incredibly low wage where even though they're harvesting the food we all eat they can't afford those same foods themselves," Peña said. "So we're making sure that they have the same opportunities as other folks to have enough food for themselves and their families."

Because of shutdowns from this winter's flooding and the seasonal nature of farm work, many of the agricultural workers in this complex can’t find work right now.

Cristina Carrio is from Guatemala. She says she works seasonally on berry farms, and she's waiting for the season to start up again.

Carrio says it's been difficult to keep her three children fed and the electric and gas bills paid. Mano a Mano food boxes mean she’ll be able to make traditional posole and tamales for Christmas.

The farmworkers are essential workers, but long hours, remote locations and low pay make the group especially vulnerable to food insecurity.

The hunger farmworkers experience may be even worse than the numbers suggest. Oregon State University sociology professor Mark Edwards has researched food insecurity in the western U.S. for two decades. He says most official data on farmworker food insecurity comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which presents its own set of challenges.

"So a federal survey is conducted, and you can imagine that farm workers are, as a group, not going to trust this group, especially if they are here without documents and they're living busy lives, not necessarily in places that are easy to find by surveyors," Edwards said. "And so, they are underrepresented in the surveys, I'm sure, so we don't have excellent data that describes this."

Edwards says the best data often come from nonprofit organizations like Mano a Mano.

"The people who are out serving among these workers and asking questions and telling the story of what it is that they are experiencing," Edwards said.

With each box delivery, Peña and her team learn more about the challenges farmworkers are facing. One man says he isn't able to work because of leukemia. Another is hoping to hear soon about a winter job at a mill. For all of them, these food boxes will mean the difference between skipping meals and eating well.

"People are struggling and especially now during this pandemic, and it's made a lot of people become homeless," Peña said. "A lot of people are having to ask for a food box for the first time in their lives after working like 20, 40 years."

Pride is a huge barrier. Peña says farmworkers are used to working for the food they provide for their families, and because of their mixed legal status or their fear of jeopardizing their path to citizenship, few apply for government food stamps. This means for many farmworker nonprofits like Mano a Mano are their only safety net.

"For us, farm workers have the utmost respect from our organization because, you know, we're just giving back to them what they give to us," Peña said.

Peña says the pandemic has taught everyone how essential these workers are. She just hopes that lesson will translate into real change - safer work conditions, fair pay and not letting farmworkers go hungry while working to keep food on everyone else's plates.

Mired in silence

Health of Southern California’s farmworkers needs to be a priority, says UC Riverside study

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - RIVERSIDE

 

IMAGE: ANN CHENEY (SECOND FROM LEFT) IS SEEN HERE WITH PROMOTORAS, SPANISH-SPEAKING COMMUNITY HEALTH WORKERS. view more 

CREDIT: UC RIVERSIDE.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- A University of California, Riverside, study performed in the Eastern Coachella Valley, one of California’s top agricultural production regions, has found that farmworkers there lack information and the means to advocate for improved public health even when they are aware of being exposed to health risks stemming from working and living in rural farmlands.

About 76% of the 2.4 million farmworkers in the United States are immigrants, most of whom are from Mexico. In Inland Southern California, where the Eastern Coachella Valley, or EVC, is located, not much research has been done on Latinx farmworkers’ health concerns and barriers to care.

“Agricultural production demands in the U.S. impose a heavy burden on Latinx immigrant farmworkers, which shapes their health and informs their decisions about their living conditions,” said Ann Cheney, an associate professor of social medicine, population, and public health in the School of Medicine and lead author of the study that appears in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. “The health of these workers and their families should be a national priority.”

Cheney and her team used a community-based participatory research approach. They conducted nine in-home meetings in 2017-2018, with the help of “promotoras,” Spanish-speaking community health workers, to gather information on the health concerns of rural residents of the EVC as well as the barriers they face in accessing healthcare services. The majority of the 82 participants in the study were Mexican immigrants, women, and low-income. Nearly 60% of participants worked in agriculture. Many resided close to farmlands and were regularly exposed to pesticides, chemicals, agricultural runoff, and mosquitoes.

In the interviews, participants discussed health concerns related to agricultural labor, such as heat-related illness, musculoskeletal ailments and injuries, skin disorders, respiratory illness, and trauma. They expressed their concerns about environmental exposures related to agriculture and the nearby Salton Sea, a land-locked highly saline lakebed, and offered solutions to improve the health of their communities.

Respiratory illness in the ECV is disproportionately high, affecting about 20% of children living along the Salton Sea. Study participants said they were aware of the negative effects of the Salton Sea on their health. 

“Farm work exposes laborers to heat, cold, and ultraviolet rays, increasing the risk to health,” Cheney said. “Farmworkers have more exposure to pesticides than non-agricultural workers, which can increase risk for skin disease, vision problems, and respiratory-associated illness.”

Cheney added that the kind of work the farmworkers do — picking of crops, heavy lifting, and standing or kneeling for long periods — can cause injuries and chronic pain. 

“The fast-paced, high-risk working environment can affect mental health,” she said. 

The study found many farmworkers stay quiet when it comes to unsafe workplace conditions and injuries because they fear losing their jobs. Many farmworkers lack health insurance and have little access to medical facilities, sick pay, and transportation. Most are not fluent English. Indeed, the situation of rural farmworkers has not changed significantly since the farm labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez brought attention in the 1960s to the poor living and working conditions endured by farm workers.

“Much of the lack of change is tied to structural level inequities produced by macro-level processes, neoliberal economic and political policies, that extend beyond what individuals or communities can do and reflect the values of governments,” Cheney said. “An example is NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994. What we know is NAFTA compromised the financial stability of small-scale farms in Mexico, the primary occupation in many rural regions of Mexico. Some estimates suggest more than 3 million people involved in agricultural labor lost their jobs and their livelihood.”

Cheney explained that the EVC is home to a large population of Purépecha, an indigenous group from Michoacán Mexico. 

“Living in the valley and working in the fields, they make up an incredibly vulnerable community as many cannot speak Spanish or English,” she said. “They speak their native indigenous language of Purépecha and are undocumented. They choose farm labor because they don’t need language or technical skills to be pickers. This, though, is the lowest ranking position in agricultural labor and least paid.”

According to Cheney, structural level interventions — interventions that change the political and economic landscape — are needed to effect positive change in the lives of farm workers.

“We need to move away from neoliberal policies that privilege those already in positions of power, open the border between US and Mexico so that those crossing the border are not labelled as ‘illegal’ and have the opportunity to find stable employment, access educational and social opportunities for themselves and their families,” she said. “Such an approach also aligns with the thinking of NAFTA — open the borders for trade to eliminate tariffs. We, too, should open the border for human migration to eliminate inequities.”

Cheney was joined in the study by Tatiana Barrera and Katheryn Rodriguez of UCR; and Ana María Jaramillo López of the College of the Northern Border, Tijuana, Mexico.

The research was funded by the Research Program on Migration and Health.

The title of the research paper is “The Intersection of Workplace and Environment Exposure on Health in Latinx Farm Working Communities in Rural Inland Southern California.”

The University of California, Riverside is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment is more than 26,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual impact of more than $2.7 billion on the U.S. economy. To learn more, visit www.ucr.edu.

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JOURNAL

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

DOI

10.3390/ijerph191912940 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The Intersection of Workplace and Environmental Exposure on Health in Latinx Farm Working Communities in Rural Inland Southern California