Bird Flu Is Bad for Poultry and Dairy Cows. It’s Not a Dire Threat for Most of Us — Yet.

2024/05/03

Headlines are flying after the Department of Agriculture confirmed that the H5N1 bird flu virus has infected dairy cows around the country. Tests have detected the virus among cattle in nine states, mainly in Texas and New Mexico, and most recently in Colorado, said Nirav Shah, principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at a May 1 event held by the Council on Foreign Relations.

A menagerie of other animals have been infected by H5N1, and at least one person in Texas. But what scientists fear most is if the virus were to spread efficiently from person to person. That hasn’t happened and might not. Shah said the CDC considers the H5N1 outbreak “a low risk to the general public at this time.”

Viruses evolve and outbreaks can shift quickly. “As with any major outbreak, this is moving at the speed of a bullet train,” Shah said. “What we’ll be talking about is a snapshot of that fast-moving train.” What he means is that what’s known about the H5N1 bird flu today will undoubtedly change.

With that in mind, KFF Health News explains what you need to know now.

Q: Who gets the bird flu?

Mainly birds. Over the past few years, however, the H5N1 bird flu virus has increasingly jumped from birds into mammals around the world. The growing list of more than 50 species includes seals, goats, skunks, cats, and wild bush dogs at a zoo in the United Kingdom. At least 24,000 sea lions died in outbreaks of H5N1 bird flu in South America last year.

What makes the current outbreak in cattle unusual is that it’s spreading rapidly from cow to cow, whereas the other cases — except for the sea lion infections — appear limited. Researchers know this because genetic sequences of the H5N1 viruses drawn from cattle this year were nearly identical to one another.

The cattle outbreak is also concerning because the country has been caught off guard. Researchers examining the virus’s genomes suggest it originally spilled over from birds into cows late last year in Texas, and has since spread among many more cows than have been tested. “Our analyses show this has been circulating in cows for four months or so, under our noses,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Q: Is this the start of the next pandemic?

Not yet. But it’s a thought worth considering because a bird flu pandemic would be a nightmare. More than half of people infected by older strains of H5N1 bird flu viruses from 2003 to 2016 died. Even if death rates turn out to be less severe for the H5N1 strain currently circulating in cattle, repercussions could involve loads of sick people and hospitals too overwhelmed to handle other medical emergencies.

Although at least one person has been infected with H5N1 this year, the virus can’t lead to a pandemic in its current state. To achieve that horrible status, a pathogen needs to sicken many people on multiple continents. And to do that, the H5N1 virus would need to infect a ton of people. That won’t happen through occasional spillovers of the virus from farm animals into people. Rather, the virus must acquire mutations for it to spread from person to person, like the seasonal flu, as a respiratory infection transmitted largely through the air as people cough, sneeze, and breathe. As we learned in the depths of covid-19, airborne viruses are hard to stop.

That hasn’t happened yet. However, H5N1 viruses now have plenty of chances to evolve as they replicate within thousands of cows. Like all viruses, they mutate as they replicate, and mutations that improve the virus’s survival are passed to the next generation. And because cows are mammals, the viruses could be getting better at thriving within cells that are closer to ours than birds’.

The evolution of a pandemic-ready bird flu virus could be aided by a sort of superpower possessed by many viruses. Namely, they sometimes swap their genes with other strains in a process called reassortment. In a study published in 2009, Worobey and other researchers traced the origin of the H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic to events in which different viruses causing the swine flu, bird flu, and human flu mixed and matched their genes within pigs that they were simultaneously infecting. Pigs need not be involved this time around, Worobey warned.

Q: Will a pandemic start if a person drinks virus-contaminated milk?

Not yet. Cow’s milk, as well as powdered milk and infant formula, sold in stores is considered safe because the law requires all milk sold commercially to be pasteurized. That process of heating milk at high temperatures kills bacteria, viruses, and other teeny organisms. Tests have identified fragments of H5N1 viruses in milk from grocery stores but confirm that the virus bits are dead and, therefore, harmless.

Unpasteurized “raw” milk, however, has been shown to contain living H5N1 viruses, which is why the FDA and other health authorities strongly advise people not to drink it. Doing so could cause a person to become seriously ill or worse. But even then, a pandemic is unlikely to be sparked because the virus — in its current form — does not spread efficiently from person to person, as the seasonal flu does.

Q: What should be done?

A lot! Because of a lack of surveillance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other agencies have allowed the H5N1 bird flu to spread under the radar in cattle. To get a handle on the situation, the USDA recently ordered all lactating dairy cattle to be tested before farmers move them to other states, and the outcomes of the tests to be reported.

But just as restricting covid tests to international travelers in early 2020 allowed the coronavirus to spread undetected, testing only cows that move across state lines would miss plenty of cases.

Such limited testing won’t reveal how the virus is spreading among cattle — information desperately needed so farmers can stop it. A leading hypothesis is that viruses are being transferred from one cow to the next through the machines used to milk them.

To boost testing, Fred Gingrich, executive director of a nonprofit organization for farm veterinarians, the American Association of Bovine Practitioners, said the government should offer funds to cattle farmers who report cases so that they have an incentive to test. Barring that, he said, reporting just adds reputational damage atop financial loss.

“These outbreaks have a significant economic impact,” Gingrich said. “Farmers lose about 20% of their milk production in an outbreak because animals quit eating, produce less milk, and some of that milk is abnormal and then can’t be sold.”

The government has made the H5N1 tests free for farmers, Gingrich added, but they haven’t budgeted money for veterinarians who must sample the cows, transport samples, and file paperwork. “Tests are the least expensive part,” he said.

If testing on farms remains elusive, evolutionary virologists can still learn a lot by analyzing genomic sequences from H5N1 viruses sampled from cattle. The differences between sequences tell a story about where and when the current outbreak began, the path it travels, and whether the viruses are acquiring mutations that pose a threat to people. Yet this vital research has been hampered by the USDA’s slow and incomplete posting of genetic data, Worobey said.

The government should also help poultry farmers prevent H5N1 outbreaks since those kill many birds and pose a constant threat of spillover, said Maurice Pitesky, an avian disease specialist at the University of California-Davis.

Waterfowl like ducks and geese are the usual sources of outbreaks on poultry farms, and researchers can detect their proximity using remote sensing and other technologies. By zeroing in on zones of potential spillover, farmers can target their attention. That can mean routine surveillance to detect early signs of infections in poultry, using water cannons to shoo away migrating flocks, relocating farm animals, or temporarily ushering them into barns. “We should be spending on prevention,” Pitesky said.

Q: OK it’s not a pandemic, but what could happen to people who get this year’s H5N1 bird flu?

No one really knows. Only one person in Texas has been diagnosed with the disease this year, in April. This person worked closely with dairy cows, and had a mild case with an eye infection. The CDC found out about them because of its surveillance process. Clinics are supposed to alert state health departments when they diagnose farmworkers with the flu, using tests that detect influenza viruses, broadly. State health departments then confirm the test, and if it’s positive, they send a person’s sample to a CDC laboratory, where it is checked for the H5N1 virus, specifically. “Thus far we have received 23,” Shah said. “All but one of those was negative.”

State health department officials are also monitoring around 150 people, he said, who have spent time around cattle. They’re checking in with these farmworkers via phone calls, text messages, or in-person visits to see if they develop symptoms. And if that happens, they’ll be tested.

Another way to assess farmworkers would be to check their blood for antibodies against the H5N1 bird flu virus; a positive result would indicate they might have been unknowingly infected. But Shah said health officials are not yet doing this work.

“The fact that we’re four months in and haven’t done this isn’t a good sign,” Worobey said. “I’m not super worried about a pandemic at the moment, but we should start acting like we don’t want it to happen.”

© Kaiser Health News

 

Location, location, location

How geography acts as a structural determinant of health

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - RIVERSIDE

 

IMAGE: 

PHOTO SHOWS ANN CHENEY (LEFT) AND GABRIELA ORTIZ.

view more 

CREDIT: UC RIVERSIDE.

Riverside, Calif. -- In unincorporated communities in the United States-Mexico borderlands, historically and socially marginalized populations become invisible to the healthcare system, showing that geography acts as a structural determinant of health for low-income populations. So concludes a study by a University of California, Riverside, team that focused its attention on the borderland in Southern California, specifically, eastern Coachella Valley.

From September to December 2020, the team, led by Ann Cheney, an associate professor of social medicine, population, and public health in the School of Medicine, conducted interviews in collaboration with María Pozar, a community investigator and CEO of Conchita Servicios de la Comunidad, with 36 Latinx and Indigenous Mexican caregivers of children with asthma or respiratory distress. The researchers found communities in the “colonias” (unincorporated areas in the borderlands) lack basic critical infrastructure including healthcare access.

The U.S.-Mexico borderland is home to nearly 2.7 million Hispanic or Latinx individuals. The immigrant population in the colonias has limited English proficiency, health literacy levels, and income, and lower levels of formal education. Many are undocumented. 

“Our work shows the importance of geography in health and how geography acts as a structural determinant of health,” Cheney said. “For example, foreign-born caregivers who speak Spanish or Purépecha prefer to take their children across the U.S.-Mexico border for respiratory health care because physicians there provide them with a diagnosis and treatment plan that they perceive improves their children’s health.” 

The study, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, found the caregivers perceive U.S.-based physicians as not providing them with sufficient information since most physicians do not speak their language and do not adequately listen to or are dismissive of their concerns about their children’s respiratory health. The caregivers perceive Mexican-based physicians as providing them with a diagnosis and treatment plan, whereas U.S.-based physicians often prescribe medications and provide no concrete diagnosis.

“Further, only those with legal documentation status can cross the border, which contributes to disparities in children’s respiratory health,” Cheney said. “Thus, caregivers without legal status in the U.S. must access healthcare services in the U.S. for their children and receive, what these caregivers perceive, as suboptimal care.”

Cheney added she was surprised to learn that caregivers who did not have legal documentation status in the U.S. asked trusted family and friends to take their children across the border to receive healthcare services for childhood asthma and related conditions.

“Geography, meaning living in unincorporated communities, harms health,” she said. “Geography and the politics of place determines who can and cannot cross borders.”

Study participants discussed the distance they needed to travel to pediatric specialty care for the care and management of their children’s respiratory health problems. Some commented on the lack of interaction and communication with physicians during medical visits. Some participants commented on the lack of physicians’ knowledge about the connections between their children’s exposure to environmental hazards and poor respiratory health and allergic symptoms.

The research took place in four unincorporated rural communities — Mecca, Oasis, Thermal, and North Shore — in eastern Coachella Valley, along the northern section of the Salton Sea. People living in the colonias here are subject to the health effects of environmental hazards. Many are farmworkers living and working in the nearby agricultural fields. Most of the workforce lives in mobile parks and below the federal poverty line. 

“In addition to toxic water and dust from the Salton Sea, other environmental health hazards, such as agriculture pesticide exposure, waste processing facilities, and unauthorized waste dumps, also contribute to this community’s high incidence of poor respiratory health,” said Gabriela Ortiz, the first author of the research paper and a graduate student in anthropology who works with Cheney. “These communities are vulnerable to the policies and governing decisions around exposure to environmental hazards and infrastructure development. The absence of infrastructure and lack of healthcare infrastructure limits their access to primary care and specialty care services.”

Ortiz explained that anthropologists and social scientists have long argued that environmental injustices are a product of structural violence.

“This is indirect violence caused by social structures and institutions that prevent individuals from meeting their basic needs because of political economic domination and class-based exploitation,” she said. “Understanding the complex interplay between geography, borderlands, and health is essential for coming up with effective public health policy and interventions.”

The title of the research paper is “Seeking care across the US-Mexico border: The experiences of Latinx and Indigenous Mexican caregivers of children with asthma or respiratory distress.”

Cheney, Ortiz, and Pozar were joined in the study by Ashley Moran and Sophia Rodriquez of UCR.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities. 

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.

---

JOURNAL

Social Science & Medicine

DOI

10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.116736 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Seeking care across the US-Mexico border: The experiences of Latinx and Indigenous Mexican caregivers of children with asthma or respiratory distress

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

24-Apr-2024

Florida joins Texas in banning local heat protections for outdoor workers

Samantha Neely and Anthony Robledo, 

USA TODAY NETWORK
Mon, April 15, 2024

Florida will become the second state to stop local governments from requiring heat protection for outdoor workers after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 433.

The law, which DeSantis signed last week, goes into effect on July 1 and establishes multiple restrictions for city and county governments, including the ability to set heat exposure requirements not already required under state or federal law.

Republican Rep. Tiffany Esposito of Fort Myers, who sponsored the House version of the bill, told reporters that her husband has worked in South Florida’s construction sector for two decades and that she knows the industry takes worker safety seriously.


"This is very much a people-centric bill,” Esposito said. “If we want to talk about Floridians thriving, they do that by having good job opportunities. And if you want to talk about health and wellness, and you want to talk about how we can make sure that all Floridians are healthy, you do that by making sure that they have a good job. And in order to provide good jobs, we need to not put businesses out of business."

Around two million people in Florida work in outdoor jobs, from construction to agriculture, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. On average, the state's summer can reach up to 95 degrees, with the humidity and blazing sun making it feel well over 100 at times.
What is HB 433?

House Bill 433, referred to as the Employment Regulations Bill, says it seeks to "prohibit political subdivisions (city and county governments) from maintaining a minimum wage other than a state or federal minimum wage; prohibit political subdivisions from controlling, affecting, or awarding preferences based on the wages or employment benefits of entities doing business with the political subdivision; revise and provide applicability."

Regarding heat exposure protections, the bill's summary details it will prohibit political subdivisions from:

Requiring an employer, including an employer contracting with the political subdivision, to meet or provide heat exposure requirements not otherwise required under state or federal law.


Giving preference, or considering or seeking information, in a competitive solicitation to an employer based on the employer's heat exposure requirements.

The bill's analysis dives deeper into the decision to regulate heat exposure protections, saying the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has developed the best practices over the years. It adds that recognizing that preventing heat-related illnesses "requires education and close collaboration between employers and employees."

"Whereas local governments have started to adopt their own workplace heat exposure requirements, some of which apply only to specific industries, which ignore the individual responsibility of an employee to follow relevant guidelines and to protect himself or herself from heat-related illnesses, and rely on fines and penalties assessed on employers to fund the enforcement of such requirements," according to the bill.

Baltimore bridge collapse: Authorities recover fourth body from Key Bridge wreckage

What are Florida's statewide heat exposure protections?

Construction workers work in the heat of the midday sun in Daytona Beach, Florida, on Sept 14, 2021.

Despite outlining in its summary that counties and cities would have to adopt the state's stances on heat exposure protection, Florida does not have any statewide standard. However, the bill's text heavily supports OSHA's guidelines regarding the subject.

Florida is under federal OSHA jurisdiction, which covers most private-sector workers within the state. State and local government workers are not covered by federal OSHA.

OSHA has a “general duty clause" that requires employers to provide workplaces “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.” That includes heat-related hazards that are likely to cause death or serious bodily harm.

What does HB 433 mean for workers in Florida cities and counties?

Overall, the legislation would make any local heat protection measures "void and prohibited," within all 67 Florida counties.

In Miami-Dade County, this legislation would kill the county's proposal to require 10-minute breaks in the shade every two hours for any outdoor construction or farm workers. After negotiating for years, county commissioners had the item on their agenda up until the law was signed.

In a Friday press conference, DeSantis addressed the bill, saying "there was a lot of concern out of one county, Miami-Dade.

"And I don't think it was an issue in any other part of the state," he said. "I think they were pursuing something that was going to cause a lot of problems down there."

Luigi Guadarrama, political director of the Sierra Club Florida, said in a statement that the new law is the latest example of DeSantis failing the state’s environment, economy and workers.

“Instead of addressing the skyrocketing crisis of protecting our workforce, the governor chose to abandon millions of hard-working Floridians and leave our state more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change,” Guadarrama said. “He has consistently ignored the real issues affecting Florida's families to appease his donors and large corporations.”

How many heat-related deaths does Florida have a year?

Prince Ferguson cools off in the shade and drinks water after batting practice at Pompey Park on Wednesday, June 28, 2023, in Delray Beach, Florida.

From 2010 to 2020, the University of Florida recorded 215 heat-related deaths occurred in Florida, with the number of yearly deaths varying between 10 and 28.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, average annual heat-related deaths have risen 95% from 2010 to 2022, with about 1,200 people in the U.S. dying every year from them.

Florida is projected to experience more days of extreme heat this summer (when temperatures are at least 95 degrees), compared to averages over the last 30 years, according to the Florida Climate Center at Florida State University.
What other state ended local heat protection ordinances?

Texas halted the ability of city and county governments to mandate protections for outside workers last year with House Bill 2127.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill on June 13 and it went into effect on Sept. 1. The law ended safeguards like the city of Austin's 2010 ordinance mandating construction sites offer rest and water breaks for at least 10 minutes every four hours and the city of Dallas' similar ordinance in 2015.

San Antonio was considering a similar measure ahead of HB 2127's approval.

What states have heat protections in place?

Cleverson Gomez sweats through his shirt as he shovels dirt in Surprise, Arizona on July 26, 2023, when temperatures for the day hit 116 degrees. Arizona is among the states that experience extreme heat but do not have statewide heat protections for its outdoor workers.

Only five states offer statewide heat protections, with California being the first after four farm workers died of heat stroke in 2005.

The following states require employers to provide shade and water amidst soaring temperatures:

California


Colorado


Minnesota


Oregon


Washington

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Heat protections for outdoor workers banned in Florida with new law

DeSantis Signs Florida Bill Blocking Local Heat Safety Rules For Workers

Dave Jamieson, Alexander C. Kaufman
Mon, April 15, 2024 


Failed presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill late last week barring Florida localities from requiring employers to provide outdoor workers with access to water, rest and shade, outraging workplace safety advocates who say the new law will kill people.

Backed by the agricultural and construction industries, the controversial legislation is what’s known as a “preemption” law: It forbids cities and counties from pursuing their own ordinances on a particular subject, in this case protections from extreme heat.

The law effectively nullifies a proposal in Miami-Dade County that would require some employers to maintain a heat safety program and provide employees with water and shade on hot days. The county commission recently withdrew the proposal after the state legislation put its legality in doubt.

The preemption bill recently passed the Republican-controlled state House and Senate, along with a similar measure that prevents jurisdictions from requiring employers to pay livable wages on government-funded projects.

Unions and other progressive groups said blocking heat regulations would endanger farm and construction workers and anyone else who labors in one of the hottest states in the country.

“Someone is going to die as a result of this legislation,” Kim Smith, a telecommunications technician, told HuffPost last month.

Last year, Texas Republicans passed a similar preemption bill that blocked localities from implementing heat protections as well as other ordinances related to housing and labor. The legislation, known as Texas’ “death star bill,” appeared designed to thwart local laws in Austin and Dallas that guaranteed water breaks for workers.

The bill Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) just signed blocks jurisdictions like Miami-Dade County from implementing their own heat safety standards. SOPA Images via Getty Images

Florida Republicans pushing for the preemption law said they wanted to avoid a “patchwork” of local regulations around the state related to heat safety, arguing the matter was better left to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

But OSHA does not yet have a heat-specific safety rule, and proposals to create a uniform, statewide standard in Florida have gone nowhere over the years because of a lack of Republican support.

More than 430 workers have died due to environmental heat exposure since 2011, according to OSHA. But relatively few jurisdictions have laws in place that require employers to provide water, shade and heat safety training. Just three — California, Oregon and Washington — mandate heat breaks for outdoor workers. Minnesota has heat standards for indoor workers, while Colorado does for farmworkers.

“Overheating is one of the most common and most serious dangers in the workplace,” Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.), who recently co-authored a federal bill ordering OSHA to regulate heat exposure, told HuffPost. “Is requiring a glass of water and some shade too much to ask?”

Climate change is making heat waves both more intense and more frequent, raising fears that a growing number of workers could die if governments don’t implement safety measures.

A farmworker in Miami-Dade County died last July during what would become the hottest month ever recorded. The man’s family told NBC South Florida that he’d recently suffered symptoms consistent with heat stress. A farmworker in the county told HuffPost last month that the foreman at the plant nursery where he works prohibited even 30-second breaks in the blazing sun since this is the busiest growing season for exotic flora.

The Biden administration is currently crafting a federal heat safety standard through OSHA, but federal rules take years to develop, often face litigation and can be undermined by subsequent administrations. Former President Donald Trump could simply drop pursuit of the rule if he defeats Biden in their expected rematch in November.

 

Officials sued over farm chemicals near Latino schools

by Hailey Branson-Potts, Los Angeles Times

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

For Nelly Vaquera-Boggs, the plastic tarps that cover strawberry fields in Monterey County, California, when they are being fumigated with toxic chemicals offer little comfort—especially when those fields are close to schools.

The tarps, she said, sometimes come loose in the wind. They can get holes.

And in the small farm towns of the Pajaro Valley, where schoolyards often abut agricultural land, Vaquera-Boggs worries that—tarps or no tarps—those pesticides are drifting beyond the fields and endangering children.

"Teachers have been concerned about nearby application of pesticides and fumigants for decades," said Vaquera-Boggs, president of the Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers. "We live in an area that provides strawberries and a lot of the food that we consume, but we also still believe this can happen and our communities can be safe."

This month, the teachers union, which represents around 1,100 school employees, joined four environmental and social justice groups in suing Monterey County agriculture officials and state pesticide regulators, alleging they disregarded children's health by allowing several farms to use restricted pesticides in close proximity to three elementary and middle schools whose students are mostly Latino.

"It's environmental racism," said Yanely Martinez, a Greenfield City Council member and organizer for the group Safe Ag Safe Schools, one of the plaintiffs. "These are communities of people of color. These are the communities of farmworkers that are putting food on the table. The families are being silently killed."

The lawsuit, filed April 4 in Monterey County Superior Court, targets the Monterey County agricultural commissioner, Juan Hidalgo, and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation and its director, Julie Henderson.

The plaintiffs, which include the Center for Farmworker Families, the Monterey Bay Central Labor Council and Californians for Pesticide Reform, are being represented by the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice.

At issue are six permits—issued last summer by county agriculture officials under the purview of state regulators— that allowed the use of the fumigants chloropicrin and 1,3-dichloropropene (known as 1,3D) in fields near Ohlone Elementary School, Hall District Elementary School and Pajaro Middle School, which also have on-site daycare programs.

The plaintiffs allege county agriculture officials are too quick to rubber-stamp pesticide permits without properly considering alternatives.

"It's rarely the case where you see permits being denied. It's approval after approval," said Martinez, a mother of four who said she and other organizers have been repeatedly stonewalled by county officials who refuse to meet with them.

In a statement, the Monterey County agricultural commissioner's office said it "meticulously follows all federal and state regulations when issuing pesticide permits."

"We conduct regular field inspections to ensure compliance and promptly investigate any illnesses or concerns related to pesticide use that may arise in the community. Protecting agricultural workers, our neighborhoods, and the environment isn't just a job for us—it's our duty."

The state Department of Pesticide Regulation said in a statement that it continuously evaluates potential impacts of pesticide exposure on sensitive populations, including children. It did not directly comment on the lawsuit.

According to the department's annual report for pesticide use for 2021, the most recent year available, Monterey County ranked sixth among California's 58 counties for the amount of pesticides applied, with more than 9 million pounds used on 6.5 million acres.

State health officials have long reported that children in Monterey County are among the most likely in California to attend schools near fields treated with toxic pesticides.

The fumigants named in the suit are used to kill soil-borne pathogens and pests—namely, nematodes, the ubiquitous worms that can wreak havoc on plants including strawberries, which are the most lucrative crop in Monterey County, bringing in nearly $1 billion a year.

Chloropicrin—which was used as a tear gas during World War I—can severely irritate the eyes, throat and lungs, leading to coughing, choking and shortness of breath, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Federal health agencies have long considered 1,3D a likely carcinogen.

Both fumigants are designated in California as restricted materials, which require a county-issued permit for use because of their higher potential for harming human health compared with other pesticides.

The lawsuit does not name specific incidences of children, school employees or other adults being sickened by the fumigants.

Norm Groot, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau, dismissed the lawsuit as the work of activist organizations that do not understand that, "without agricultural chemicals in situations where we are growing crops very sensitive to pests and diseases, we won't have food."

Groot said the fumigants in this case are injected into the soil, which is then placed under a plastic tarp that remains over the field for seven to 10 days until the chemicals have dissipated. There is "no transmission into the atmosphere of any of these chemicals," Groot said.

Six farms, each of which obtained permits to fumigate, also are named in the lawsuit.

A manager for one of them, Bay View Farms LLC, said the fumigation process is "really heavily regulated and inspected by not just the county, but also the state."

Bay View Farms, he said, grows strawberries on about 45 acres near Ohlone Elementary. It got a permit last August to use chloropicrin and 1,3D. The manager, who spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity to discuss pending litigation, said that every three years the Bay View crop is rotated with another company that grows vegetables.

"We do it when the students are not at school," he said of fumigating. "We don't want to do anything to kids."

Greg Loarie, an attorney for Earthjustice, said it has long been "nearly impossible" for members of the public to learn exactly when fumigants are going to be applied so they can take precautions, like avoiding being outside near the fields. The permits are valid for at least several months and are not easily accessible for inspection since they are not posted online and require a public records request to view.

"Parents and teachers certainly have a right to know when toxic pesticides are being sprayed right next to their schools, and this process needs to be public and needs to be meaningful," he said.

"What we really want, at the end of the day, is we want the poisoning to stop. We want someone to be addressing the fact that cumulative exposure to these pesticides, year after year, is poisoning our kids."

2024 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

California state and county officials falling short in evaluating use of agricultural pesticides

A 32-Hour Workweek Is Ours for the Taking

The fight for shorter hours can unify workers everywhere.

By Sarah Jaffe

April 3, 2024

Source: In These Times



The United Auto Workers won many of their demands in their groundbreaking, six-week strike in 2023, but one of them — despite not making it into their new contracts with the Big Three automakers — has the potential to radically shift organized labor’s priorities and unify an often fractious movement in ways not seen in decades.

The demand is for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay. From the beginning of the strike, the audacious proposal captured public attention beyond the usual labor watchers because it upends decades-old expectations of what unions should want, signaling the working class has priorities beyond simply holding onto jobs.

The autoworkers had struck at General Motors in 2019, but despite plenty of energy from the rank and file, a doomed leadership led a lackluster action to a contract that was half-heartedly accepted. Before that, it had been decades of concessions. But in early 2023, democratic reforms in the union swept a new leadership team, under President Shawn Fain, into power with the slogan ​“No Corruption. No Concessions. No Tiers.” Two-tier status had been a central grievance since the UAW accepted a lower tier for new hires during rampant deindustrialization. At the time, they were told the lower tier was necessary to keep jobs at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler (now owned by Stellantis). But the companies came screaming back to profitability, and workers on the lower tier were still making less for the same work than their more-senior colleagues.

At that time, mass layoffs or concessions weren’t the only ideas floating around, just the ones that won out politically. Economist Dean Baker suggested in articles during the Great Recession that the government subsidize companies to shorten the workweek, spreading the work among more workers and hiring, rather than firing, during the recession. The Obama administration didn’t bite, unions largely didn’t get on board, and we got a long, slow recovery.

The Covid crisis put the issue of working time back on the table. Many ​“essential” workers — including a wide swath of manufacturing employees— worked forced overtime and risked their lives and health. Across the country and the world, they decided enough was enough.

“It really made people reflect on what’s important in life,” Fain told me in January. Workers were deciding, he said, that working 12-hour days, seven days a week, cobbling together multiple jobs to scrape by ​“is not a life.” And so the shorter hours demand made its way from grumbling workers to the UAW’s strike demands to major headlines (“Why a four-day workweek is on the table for automakers,” among so many others).

It was ​“like a bolt out of nowhere,” said Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist of work at Boston College who has researched and advocated for shorter hours for decades. ​“It legitimated [the demand] hugely.” Suddenly, New York Times editorial board member Binyamin Appelbaum was endorsing the call and urging President Joe Biden to act on it for workers across industries. ​“Americans spend too much time on the job,” Appelbaum wrote. ​“A shorter workweek would be better for our health, better for our families and better for our employers.”

Fain told me that, initially, the UAW was ​“laughed at, basically, when we put it out there.” Ford CEO Jim Farley complained to CNN that ​“if we had done that [four-day week]. … We would have gone bankrupt many years ago. … We’d have to close plants and most people would lose their jobs.”

In other words, it’s not a complete shock that the 32-hour week was not in the contracts the union won. But Fain doesn’t see it as a mere bargaining chip. Rather, it’s the start of a long-term strategy for the union, one he hopes the rest of labor will pick up: ​“I really felt it was imperative to get the dialogue going again, to try to fight for a shorter workweek and get the public thinking along those lines.”






Work-life balance was on the autoworkers’ minds as the union prepared for bargaining — long hours, overtime (whether voluntary or forced) and the ongoing mental health crisis.

“The ability for an autoworker to provide for a family or even oneself has been more and more difficult,” Charles Mitchell, a veteran Stellantis worker in Detroit, told The Guardian. ​“All the while companies are becoming more profitable and making shareholders richer while forcing mandatory 60– to 70-hour workweeks in assembly plants.”

“Our work lives and the conditions in this nation, in this world, are what lead to a lot of these mental health issues,” Fain said. ​“Jobs should bring dignity to people.” Too many people, he said, labor constantly, with no time off for their families or friends or ​“just pursuing things that you love doing.” People lose hope, he said, when all they do is work.

When he’s talking to high school students at the union’s training center, he talks about the fact that work is a process of selling your time: ​“The greatest resource that we have on this earth is a human being’s time.” The right wing, he noted, talks about a ​“right to life” when they’re talking about abortion, but that isn’t the kind of right to life he means. ​“That’s a right to birth. They don’t give a damn about life,” he continued. What he wants is ​“a real right to life, valuing a human being’s time, valuing their health and not just when they’re born, but after they’re born and when they get old and are too old to work, too young to die.”

ESSENTIALLY EXPOSED BY COVID


The AFL-CIO adopted a resolution two years ago reasserting that shorter hours should be a priority for the federation that represents 12.5 million workers and they would ​“aggressively take up the fight for a shorter workweek and earlier retirement.”

Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, introduced that resolution on behalf of his 200,000-member union. When we spoke after the new year, he told me, ​“The collective bargaining process gives unions an opportunity to raise this question up. There are other ways too, such as legislation, working with allies, taking it to the streets and so on.”

Just as Fain found lessons in Covid, Dimondstein noted the global pandemic brought us new language about postal workers and so many other working people, one that perhaps unintentionally inspired a new militancy on the shop floor: ​“We are essential, we are key and we deserve better.”

Schor, too, saw that new common sense everywhere. When her book The Overworked American first came out in 1991, the conversation was very different, but now, she said, it seems people think, ​“It’s too much. What’s happened to us, the people in this country? We’ve been asked to do something that’s not fair. People are exhausted.”

During the pandemic, as I have written many times, workers realized their bosses didn’t care if they died. ​“We lost a lot of members that went to work and caught Covid and died, and one worker dying, that’s one too many,” Fain told me. ​“But meanwhile, the leadership of the Big Three, they’re working from home for two and three years.”

Pushed not just to keep working but to do so for longer hours in more dangerous conditions, many workers began to push back. Even before the pandemic, Donna Jo Marks, a worker at Nabisco’s plant in Portland, Ore., explained, they’d worked 12 days on, then two days off. But once Covid hit, she said, ​“Sometimes we would work 28 days straight and everyone above us thought, ​‘Oh, well, you guys are getting compensated for it,’ — but at what cost?” For a little while, they got $2 an hour extra hazard pay, she said, but that stopped after a few months. ​“It just was an ugly time and people were tired and it wasn’t safe.”

ILLUSTRATION BY HOWARD BARRY


Marks and her coworkers were part of the earlier pandemic strike wave, in which formally and informally organized workers went on strike against the Covid-induced speedup of work. At Nabisco, they struck for more than five weeks and won some concessions on working time, and then, Marks explained, the state legislature passed a bill further restricting the use of forced overtime for bakery workers. Nurses, teachers, warehouse workers, farmworkers and retail workers all took action around safety and the intensification of work. Demanding safety precautions, Florida farmworker Oscar Otzoy told me in 2020, ​“We’re seen as essential workers, but we’re not taken into account with the same urgency and the same sense of protections that other workers have. And so we think that it’s time for that to happen, for them to be able to see us.”

Employers might talk about workers being part of the family, Fain noted, but their own families were hardly risking their lives on the assembly line. To him, it dramatized the class difference in America: ​“The wealthy class, the billionaire class, they have a different set of rules for themselves. And then they expect everybody else to follow another set of rules that they exploit. And we’ve been conditioned as a society to think that’s OK.”

Autoworkers, Fain continued, had worked so-called alternate work schedules for years, working two days on, two days off — but those days on were 12-hour shifts, and the days off didn’t line up with the schedules of families and friends. Workers felt like zombies, without enough rest and recreation. And so they brought up scheduling questions again and again when Fain was campaigning and preparing to bargain with the Big Three.

Fain recalled visiting the union’s education center in Michigan’s Black Lake, reading old Solidarity magazines from the UAW’s early days in the 1930s and 1940s. ​“Our leadership back then was talking about a 32-hour workweek, a 30-hour workweek, and it basically goes back to mastering technology, not letting technology master us.”

When Dimondstein addressed the AFL-CIO convention in 2022 and introduced the shorter workweek resolution, he began the narrative in 1791, when Philadelphia carpenters struck for the 10-hour day. He then spoke about the beginnings of the movement for the eight-hour day and the Haymarket leaders ​“murdered by the government for their audacity to demand ​‘eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will.’” May Day, he noted, the international workers’ holiday, came from that particular struggle. But after landing the 40-hour week, Dimondstein noted, ​“the labor movement largely abandoned the fight for the shorter workweek.”

“It shouldn’t have stopped at eight hours,” he told me in January.

1933

BUSTING THROUGH THE ​“AFFIRMATION TRAP”

The UAW’s strike this year was a notable shift in strategy for the union, back to a militancy that challenges management’s control over the work process and products. In the ​“Treaty of Detroit,” the landmark contract that the UAW won from General Motors in 1950, the union made a major decision not to contest so-called management rights. The union restricted its struggles to the size of its slice of the proceeds of workers’ labor, rather than fighting to control the workplace itself. The fight for shorter hours was one of many issues that fell by the wayside in this all-too-brief period of detente.

Fain didn’t directly take aim at the Treaty of Detroit when we spoke, but he did note the philosophy of ​“working together” with management had been a failure: ​“It’s a way for the company to make workers think they care about them. And meanwhile, they continue to cut jobs and make life harder on the workers.”

There are far fewer members in the UAW than there were at the height of its power, and more UAW members who aren’t autoworkers at all — the union represents, for example, 48,000 graduate workers and other academics in the University of California system. But the union’s strategy this year was designed to make the most of smaller numbers, holding a rolling strike across the Big Three, taking workers at facilities out on a schedule designed to maximize impact and respond to offers at the bargaining table.

It was a gamble that required more than just militancy to succeed. In order for the ​“Stand-Up Strike” to work, the union had to find a way around what Joshua Clover, in his book Riot. Strike. Riot., calls the ​“affirmation trap” — when organized labor ​“is locked into the position of affirming its own exploitation under the guise of survival.”

The trap is a side effect of deindustrialization under the philosophy of cooperation with management. When companies want to shut plants down anyway, the strike has less power: How do you strike to keep a plant going? Without the leverage that the strike provides, workers end up begging for their jobs and making concessions. But bringing the shorter workweek back into the discussion changes the equation: Rather than importuning the boss to keep everything the same, the shorter workweek reopens the question of workers’ value outside of the plant, suggesting that ​“less work” might be a goal that workers could embrace too, as long as they get a say in how that work is divided. And rolling strikes concentrated the workers’ power right where and when it would hurt the most. (As a side effect, the UAW did manage to keep a plant open, the Belvidere plant in Illinois, and won the right to strike against future plant closures.)


Fain shrugged off the Ford CEO’s suggestion that a shorter workweek would cause more plant closures: ​“They’re not going to close a plant because we want a 32-hour workweek. They’re not going to close a plant because we bargained a good contract. They’re going to close the plant because some greedy son of a bitch at the top wants more and they want to do it to somebody else, and they want to exploit them for even less.”

There’s also, of course, the question of technology: Can companies, in fact, replace workers with robots or ChatGPT? This past year was the year that artificial intelligence hype hit the mainstream, but working people across industries have been fighting against the machine since the era of the Luddites. Dimondstein recalled his early days in the postal service, with the introduction of automated equipment like barcodes for sorting mail: ​“I was on a machine of about 18 to 20 people, a mechanized piece of equipment called the letter-sorting machine. And we were replaced by optical character readers where two people could sort at least as much mail, if not more mail, as the 18 or 20 of us.”

Workers don’t want to go back to the old days, Dimondstein continued, but the real question is, ​“Who is automation going to serve? We aren’t going to stop the march of technology, but we just don’t want it to serve the profits of Wall Street and the CEOs and these corporations. We want it to make life better for working people.” Automation, he said, could be used to free up time, to pay workers to work less and have more leisure. ​“There’s the old saying, we’re living to work rather than working to live.”

So far it’s been just the opposite. Postal workers and autoworkers alike work longer hours and forced overtime, and their jobs are harder. But the new common sense around work could help to change that. Other strikes in 2023 — the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild, for example — also centered artificial intelligence in their demands.

In Juliet Schor’s research as part of a coalition including researchers from Boston College, Cambridge University and Oxford University and the organization 4 Day Week Global, she continues to find that a four-day workweek brings results to companies around the world that are ​“off the charts.” Few of the companies are in manufacturing and none are anywhere on the scale of the Big Three, but workers report being happier, more rested and healthier. Some of the companies in their trial program are now coming up on two years and nearly all, she said, are succeeding.

Legislators are starting to take notice. Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA) first introduced a bill in Congress in 2021 to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act, reducing the standard workweek to 32 hours from 40 (meaning all workers who are not overtime exempt would get overtime pay after 32 hours), and he reintroduced it in 2023; Sen. Bernie Sanders has also endorsed the idea. Bills have been introduced in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, New York and Maryland (where a bill was withdrawn to be reworked).

But opposition to those bills is a reminder that if workers want a shorter workweek, they’ll probably have to fight for it. And that’s precisely why the UAW’s strike demand was significant. The union put shorter hours front and center and hasn’t turned away from the issue as it turns, now, to organizing nonunion auto plants across the country, mostly in the South.

Shorter hours can be a unifying demand across plants, across the Big Three and the foreign automakers, where issues might vary but time off can provide a constant. It can link workers across industries and countries, as Schor’s research shows: automakers with postal workers, architects with brewers, legal aid attorneys with graduate students. Dimondstein noted the demand also cuts across political viewpoints.

Around the world, Fain said, workers are waking up to the fact that capitalist priorities are not serving the rest of us, and the shorter workweek can be a demand that the organization of work serve workers’ interests for a change: ​“It’s not just a UAW issue, it’s not just a union issue, it’s a working class issue. That’s why I think our campaign resonated globally. You have the concentration of wealth going into the hands of fewer and fewer people, and something’s got to give.”

The postal workers are still finalizing their demands as they head into negotiations this year, but Dimondstein said, ​“There will be some discussions [about shorter hours] going forward because I think we all have to do our part to take up this demand. It’s not going to be changed overnight, but the more we, as the labor movement, unite around core demands like this on all fronts — from collective bargaining to legislation to the streets — then the better chance we’ll have of really concretely winning.”

Cesar Chavez family members endorse Biden for president


Images of Cesar Chavez are seen as thousands of supporters turn out at the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument in Keene, California on October 8, 2012. 

File Photo by Phil McCarten/UPI | License Photo

March 29 (UPI) -- The family of iconic civil rights and labor leader Cesar Chavez on Friday endorsed President Joe Biden in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

The iconic Hispanic labor leader's sons, Fernando and Paul Chavez, told CBS News they would endorse Biden, who already employs Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the granddaughter of the late labor leader, as his campaign manager.

"The bonds of affection and respect for a president who by his character and actions consistently reflects the genuine legacy of my father, Cesar Chavez," Paul Chavez said.

The announcement comes ahead of Kennedy's event at Union Station on Saturday, where the independent candidate highlights historical ties between his late father, late President John F. Kennedy, and Chavez.

Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., in one well-known gathering in 1967 with Chavez called the labor leader "one of the heroic figures of our times."

An announcement about the Kennedy event invites those who are interested to "celebrate the life and legacy of Cesar Chavez, a good friend of RFK and RFK, Jr.

"Cesar was a legendary organizer of farmworkers and voters, who exercised their citizen power. Today, we have an opportunity to take back our government with people power."

Courting Latino voters will be a key for Biden winning re-election. The president opened a national program last week in Arizona to specifically target Hispanic voters.

UTOPIAN SOCIALISM

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

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

 • Refinery29

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.

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.