PRODUCE WORKERS
The diverse agricultural fields of the United States employ an estimated 2.4 million people each year.[1] Despite the pivotal role these workers play in the stability of the U.S. food system, many of these adults and even children work in unsafe conditions every day in exchange for a salary below the national poverty level. This injustice stems from the fact that many farms focus on maximizing profits at the expense of their employees’ health, safety, and quality of life. Furthermore, U.S. labor laws that are designed to protect farm workers are poorly written and minimally enforced—enabling employers to exploit workers with little or no threat of penalty.
About the Workers
The vast majority of field workers are Latinx and Indigenous people living in rural low-income communities. Approximately 75% of field workers were born in Mexico or Central America and have either attained U.S. citizenship, entered the H-2A guest worker visa program, or remain undocumented.[2] Many of the farm workers from Mexico are Indigenous; there are about 165,000 Indigenous Mexican farm workers in California.[3] Although exact numbers are not known, it is estimated that undocumented workers represent about half of the U.S. farm labor work force.[4]
Many of the workers are actively recruited by labor contractors who promise them a good job and a better quality of life. These labor contractors charge workers a high recruitment fee, causing them to be indebted before their work contract begins. For many workers, this recruitment fee may be their entire life savings or more. Motivated by the need to financially support their family, workers pay the fees and accept the terms of employment.
When they arrive in the U.S., workers often find the job to be different from what was promised. Lower wages and shorter job duration are common discrepancies between the contract they have signed and the work they are offered. Regardless of whether the discrepancies were intentional or inadvertent, both the farm owner and the labor contractor successfully avoid legal responsibility by blaming each other.
The reality of the situation is that some contractors operate under the table by paying cash wages less than the minimum wage, which is illegal.
Workers who speak out against their employers may face illegal threats of wage deductions, bans from future employment, the withholding of passports, verbal and physical abuse, or deportation in the case of undocumented and guest workers.[5, 6, 7] Whether it’s due to a lack of labor laws or a lack of enforcement, state and federal labor agencies often fail to protect agricultural workers from these injustices.
Nature of the Work
Agriculture is thoroughly dependent on physically demanding manual labor. Pruning plants, harvesting, and packaging crops require bending and reaching for hours on end. An average workday can be anywhere from eight to fourteen hours depending on the requirements set by the landowner or labor contractor.
The harvest period for each crop is determined by the season and geographic location of the farm. Consequently, many of the workers are migrant, traveling from region to region following the seasonal harvests. However, undocumented workers have great difficulty migrating due to the constant threat of deportation.
Today, workers struggle with many of the same concerns that were endured by previous generations of field workers. Although not perfect, unions can offer improved job security and possibly provide additional benefits. However, the industry has been largely successful in suppressing workers’ efforts to organize and bargain collectively.
Health and Safety Hazards
According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA), agriculture consistently ranks as one of the most hazardous industries in the United States.[8] Agricultural workers experience increased rates of respiratory diseases, noise-induced hearing loss, skin disorders, certain cancers, exposure to toxic chemicals, and heat-related illnesses.[9] There are few effective regulations in place to protect workers from these hazards. Most of the laws lack the personnel for enforcement or carry negligible penalties. In many instances, workers are afraid to report health and safety violations due to the threat of losing their jobs, or in the case of undocumented and guest workers, the threat of deportation.
Heat Exposure
One of the most rampant hazards faced by field workers is prolonged exposure to heat. Farm workers are approximately 35 times more likely to die of heat-related illnesses than other workers.[10] In many parts of the country, periods of peak harvest coincide with some of the most extreme weather of the region. It is not uncommon for adults and children to work several hours in temperatures exceeding 90 or 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Under these conditions, access to drinking water and shade is absolutely essential to avoid the potentially fatal effects of heat illness.[11]
California is the only state with a comprehensive heat illness prevention program, but it has yet to prove its effectiveness.[12] United Farm Workers stated that at least 28 farm workers died as a result of heat exposure during the first six years of the program, which began in 2005. California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OSHA), however, only counted fewer than half of those deaths as heat-related.[13] Furthermore, nearly 40% of the farms inspected in 2017 were in violation of the state’s heat regulations.[14]
One of the victims of this negligence was 17-year-old Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez. In 2008, Maria worked in the grape fields of Stockton, California, pruning the vines and picking the fruit. She died of heat stroke after working a nine-hour shift in 95-degree F heat. Maria was two months pregnant at the time of her death. Two years before her death, Cal-OSHA had fined Maria’s employer, Merced Farm Labor, for not providing adequate drinking water during workers’ shifts.[15]
Agricultural Chemicals
An equally concerning issue is the fact that workers in the field are regularly exposed to a large variety of toxic agricultural chemicals. Each year, 10,000–20,000 U.S. agricultural workers are clinically diagnosed with agricultural chemical poisoning.[16] Long-term exposure to agricultural chemicals is associated with severe health effects such as cancer, neurological disorders including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as infertility and reproductive complications.[17, 18, 19, 20]
Whether it’s due to budget constraints or pressure from chemical manufacturers, federal agencies continue to permit the use of agricultural chemicals that expose workers to serious known health risks. The EPA recently rolled back worker protections from agricultural chemicals, which included changing the minimum area that must be free of all people during certain agricultural chemical application from 100 feet away from the person applying the chemicals to 25 feet away.[21, 22]
Child Labor
Agriculture is the most dangerous industry for youth in the United States. A report by the Government Accountability Office found that between 2003 and 2016, more than half of all work-related deaths among children were in agriculture.[23] Despite this fact, current U.S. law allows children as young as 12 to work in the fields.[24] Child labor advocates say that it is common to find children even younger than 12 working in the fields. An investigation in Michigan found children as young as five years old harvesting blueberries in the fields of Adkin Blue Ribbon Packing Company, a former supplier of Wal-Mart.[25]
It is unfortunate that many times when stories of child labor make it into the news the root of the problem is never truly addressed. Children who work in the fields are doing so out of necessity, as their parents are not being paid a living wage.
Quality of Life
Most agricultural workers have an extremely poor quality of life. Although they work an average of 45 hours a week, farm workers in the U.S. earn an average of about $17,500 to $20,000 per year. One third of farm workers’ families have a combined income below the national poverty level. In addition, only 13% of workers are covered by employer-provided health insurance.[2]
Women who work in agriculture suffer from institutionalized gender discrimination and acts of sexual violence. In a 2012 report on sexual abuse against migrant farm workers, Human Rights Watch found that nearly all of the 52 women they surveyed had experienced sexual violence or harassment in the fields or knew someone who had.[26] Many employers do not have policies in place to deter supervisors and other employees from participating in acts of harassment. In fear of losing their jobs, the targeted women resign themselves to living under these degrading conditions.
After a long day, most workers go home to run-down housing structures that are unsanitary and often unsafe. They struggle to provide adequate nutrition for themselves and their children. In many cases, workers are unable to afford the very foods they labor to produce. Considering that the average field worker has an eighth-grade education, the children of field workers have little hope of going to college or even finishing high school.[2] The vast majority of families will never have the opportunity to break this cycle of poverty.
The children of agricultural workers in California used to face an additional roadblock to their education due to the so-called “50-mile rule.” This regulation mandates that, in order to be eligible for state-subsidized housing again each season, farm workers must leave their housing at the end of the agricultural season and move at least 50 miles away. This meant that farm workers’ children were taken out of school in the middle of the school year, which caused them to fall behind in their learning.[27] In 2018, F.E.P. and The Center for Farmworker Families, along with others, successfully led an effort to change this regulation. There is now an exemption to the “50-mile rule” that allows farm worker families with children in K–12 schools to remain in their housing so they can finish the school year.
Wildfires
With wildfires raging across the west coast of the U.S. annually, farm workers’ already hazardous working conditions become even more dangerous. Some agricultural workers are forced to continue to work in mandatory evacuation zones.[28] In 2020, the Sonoma County Agricultural Commissioner issued special permits that allowed even wineries to have workers pick grapes in mandatory evacuation zones.[29] Farm workers are often not provided face masks to protect their lungs from the smoke and ash, which leads workers to experience symptoms like coughing, difficulty breathing, dizziness, and headaches.[28, 30, 31] Health threats like COVID-19 and heat waves compound the challenges of working in the smoke.
It is common for farm workers to have limited access to emergency information about the wildfires. Even when counties put out emergency information over social media, it is often not in the languages many farm workers speak, such as Spanish and Indigenous languages from Mexico and Central America.[31] Farm workers also frequently do not have access to good Wi-Fi.[31]
Farm workers may even face retaliation for refusing to work in dangerous conditions due to wildfires. A farm worker in his seventies from Jalisco, Mexico named Adan Meza said that when he did not come to work during the 2019 Kincaid fire due to fears for his safety, his employer withheld work from him for a while afterwards.[32]
“If you’re working and killing yourself, they’re happy,” Adan said.[32]
Coronavirus
Agricultural workers are at high risk for COVID-19 transmission. Farm workers in Monterey County, California, for instance, accounted for 39% of the county’s total positive cases in the first four months of the pandemic.[33] Even though agricultural laborers are designated “essential workers” during the pandemic, they lack adequate protection from the virus. Social distancing in the fields is challenging, and the absence of living wages means workers often live in crowded homes and carpool to work.[4, 34]
A worker at Grimmway, the largest carrot producer in the world, reported that at one point two-thirds of his co-workers were out sick with coronavirus during his shift.[33] Cases also frequently go undetected because many farm workers cannot afford to miss work and are not provided paid sick leave.[33]
On top of all this, produce companies have been failing to provide protection to their workers. In the first few months of the pandemic, Primex Farms, a dried fruit and nut company in California, offered no masks or gloves to its workers while they worked in close proximity at an assembly line. When the company finally began offering cloth masks, it charged workers $8 for each one. Primex has denied selling masks to employees.[34]
Many farm workers, especially those who are immigrants, do not report unsafe working conditions or request personal protective equipment (PPE) because they fear retaliation from their employers.[35] When workers at Primex went on strike in response to the lack of protection from the virus at work, the company retaliated by firing more than 40 workers without warning.[34]
A farm worker named Juan Martinez Vasquez reported that in addition to not providing sufficient PPE, his employers did not even mention the pandemic to the workers when it began.[36]
Gervacio Peña Lopez, a Mixteco farm worker and the executive director of Movimiento Cultural de la Unión Indígena in Sonoma County, California, described the hardship farm workers face during this time: “Our people take a lot of risks because they need to make money, but there’s more competition. People who lost jobs in other industries are coming to work here. Children of farmworkers are coming to work with their parents because there’s no school and the workers can’t afford childcare. Employers are reducing our hours so they don’t have to pay overtime. So, we are afraid to complain.”[36]
Research by the Centers for Disease Control points to the disproportionate impact that the pandemic has had on farm workers and Brown, Black, and Indigenous people overall due to structural racism. While only about 37% of agricultural and food production workers (in the 31 U.S. states that reported data) were Latinx, about 73% of the confirmed COVID-19 cases in agricultural and food production workers were among Latinx workers.[37]
When the U.S. government passed legislation to provide financial relief to people during the economic crisis of the pandemic, it left undocumented restaurant and farm workers out of the recovery plan. This left more than 2 million people working in the country’s food system, whose lives are already at risk on a daily basis due to lack of workplace protections from the virus, even more vulnerable.[36]
Due to the seasonal nature of agricultural work, most field workers save money from the warmer months to prepare for a wintertime of scarcer work opportunities; however, the pandemic has left many without enough work during the warmer season, leading many farm workers and their families without enough to cover basic necessities like rent, food, and bills in the colder months.[38]
Farm workers also face barriers when it comes to vaccination against COVID-19, such as lack of transport to reach vaccination sites, inability to take time off work, lack of access to the internet to sign up for vaccine appointments, and language barriers.[39]
H-2A guest workers are especially vulnerable to COVID-19 because of the systemic harm that they face under the H-2A program. Because the U.S. government requires H-2A workers to live in housing provided by their employers, they are almost always forced to sleep in spaces with other workers, often in bunk beds. They also must share cooking facilities and bathrooms.[40]
During the pandemic, employers have not been required to house workers in a way that would allow H-2A workers to social distance or quarantine. As a result, employers have allowed the virus to rapidly infect H-2A workers. For instance, in Yakima Valley, Washington, almost all of the COVID-19 cases reported among farm workers by November 2020 were from eight outbreaks among H-2A workers.[40]
On top of that, employers do not have to provide health insurance to H-2A workers, meaning that if they fall ill and cannot work, the H-2A visa conditions require them to leave the country – putting their families at risk of contracting the virus.[40]
As a result of their employer’s complete disregard for their safety, two H-2A workers at Gebbers Farms died from the virus.[41]
According to a worker there named Ernesto Dimas, Gebbers sent its employees into the fields to work even if they were showing COVID-19 symptoms. “You could hear coughing everywhere,” Ernesto said. More than 200 workers there developed symptoms of the virus, including the farm workers who passed away, Juan Carlos Santiago Rincon and Earl Edwards.[41]
The workers were sleeping in shared housing on bunk beds, something that local Washington state disease experts recommended against because of the COVID-19 risk. The state discounted their advice and allowed both beds of farms’ H-2A housing bunks to be used during the pandemic, putting workers at risk in order to protect the interests of the produce companies.[40]
Wafla, one of the U.S.’s largest H-2A labor contractors, also did not want the number of H-2A workers reduced in order to make social distancing in their housing easier, likely because Wafla makes money based on the number of H-2A workers who are brought into the country.[40]
In the case of both H-2A and non-H-2A farm workers, the pandemic has laid bare how their health and safety are being sacrificed in the name of profit.
Hope for a Brighter Future
As consumers become increasingly aware of the plight of farm workers, the hope is that more farms will respond to consumer demands and treat their workers with the dignity and respect they deserve.
Food Empowerment Project (F.E.P.) hopes for an increase in the number of farms taking action for the farm workers and is very happy that there is a growing number of programs dedicated to empowering field workers to become farmers. Many of these workers are first- or second-generation farmers from the U.S. and Mexico. With an emphasis on community-based agriculture, the programs build on the workers’ current knowledge and skills by teaching them the principles of organic farming and business management. After completing the program, workers are invited to lease communal land from the organization and sell their crops at the local farmers’ markets.
These training programs provide workers with an opportunity for a better quality of life. When workers are empowered to become farmers, they are no longer reliant on employers who jeopardize their health and safety and pay them poverty-level wages. Although these programs can only accommodate a small number of workers each year, they are an important step in the right direction. Comprehensive federal reform is still desperately needed to protect all field workers from known safety hazards and to promote equality in the workplace.
Our Responsibility
F.E.P. encourages a vegan lifestyle based on compassion and respect for all forms of life. It is vital that our compassion and respect extend not only to the non-human animals who are so horribly mistreated but also to the workers who provide us with the fruits and vegetables that sustain us.
Since everyone needs produce in order to be healthy, one cannot remove produce from their diet in order to not participate in the injustices committed against farm workers. However, we can promote social justice and equality by supporting farms that value and respect their workers. The list below also reflects some other things we can do given that finding ethically sourced produce is not that easy.
What You Can Do
- Lend your voice: Echo the needs of farm workers by supporting farm worker-led boycotts, corporate campaigns, and efforts to change legislation. Boycotts called by farm workers themselves include the Wendy’s/Publix and Driscoll’s boycotts.
- Buy from ethical farms: Actively seek products from ethical farms. Ethical farms provide a safe and healthy work environment, exclude child labor, and pay their workers a living wage. One program making headway in the movement for ethical produce is the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ (CIW) Fair Food Program, which facilitates partnerships between produce workers, farmers, and food companies to ensure just wages and working conditions for farm workers.[42]
- Buy organic: Buy organically grown food whenever possible. Purchasing organic produce helps reduce the number of workers exposed to harmful agricultural chemicals, although this does not mean that the workers are treated better.
- Donate: Donate to our annual school supply drive for the children of farm workers.
*Please note: Although Food Empowerment Project is linking to other organizations, we do not necessarily endorse the entire content of their website or mission.
Food Empowerment Project would like to thank El Comité de Apoyo a Los Trabajadores Agrícolas (CATA), Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA), and Michael Smith, attorney, for their support and time in reviewing this section.
Last Updated: March 2022