Farmworkers pick our food. Shouldn’t we care about their health and coronavirus exposure?
COVID-19 is a pandemic and a terribly contagious airborne virus. It’s a killer and a destroyer of local economies, personal livelihoods and cherished social rituals.
But the disruptions to every day life caused by this damned plague is also forcing many of us to look in a figurative mirror to see our privileged faces. With eyes fully focused by crisis, our societal blemishes are being exposed in the harsh light of real time.
For generations we have tolerated that our food supply in California – our No. 1 industry – is fully dependent on undocumented labor and low-wage workers too often bereft of paid sick leave or health care or unemployment insurance or overtime benefits or wages robust enough to afford homes.
Now the coronavirus is here and these workers are needed in the fields, poultry plants and any place else food is produced for profit in California. These workers are deemed by our local governments as “essential” – they must work – even though they are not paid or treated as essential.
“Farmworkers can’t digitally pick an apple,” said Armando Elenes, secretary treasurer of the Unified Farm Workers of America.
In agricultural counties, such as Monterey County, shelter-in-place orders specifically exempt agricultural workers. They are expected to go to work but they are often not afforded the same rights and privileges as U.S.-born workers.
Why? Well, it starts with status. UC Davis estimates that up to 60 percent of California’s more than 400,000 agricultural workers are undocumented. The United Farm Workers of America estimates that only about 10,000 of all those workers are unionized.
What does that mean? It means that workers who don’t have the guaranteed protections of paid sick leave will go to work even if they are sick.
“If they feel sick, they are going to go to work,” Elenes said.
Farmworkers don’t call in sick
Farmworkers, undocumented or not, are generally eligible to receive some of the same wage and hour rights as all other workers. Elenes feels confident that unionized workers will get these rights. But remember: Only about 10,000 out of California’s 400,000 agricultural workers are unionized.
What does that mean? “The laws on the books are not the laws in the fields,” he said. If farmworkers dare ask for a day to go to the doctor, they get static, Elenes said.
“Some growers and contractors make it very difficult,” he said.
Are these workers being warned of keeping social distance on the job? Are they being warned to wash their hands? The UFW says that is unclear whether this is happening on non-union work sites based on their communication with farmworkers on the UFW Facebook page.
“We did a poll on our Facebook page and 90 percent of our respondents said they weren’t getting the right information on their job sites,” Elenes said. He added that, of course, the poll is not scientific. But Californians who would dismiss the possibility that sick farmworkers might sometimes be handling produce sold in stores do so at their own peril.
“The last person to touch your food before it goes to market is a farmworker,” he said.
Social distance in crop rows
Jamie Johannson, president of the California Farm Bureau Federation, said that communication is occurring. He said his organization is communicating with farmers in every county about the specific steps that need to be taken to mitigate the spread of the cornoavirus.
“We have begun those steps,” Johannson said.
Johannson said that farmers are being told to have farm workers operate in smaller groups “if possible.”
He said he and his colleagues take very seriously being classified as essential workers that need to continue through the state’s efforts to combat the coronavirus.
“If there is one thing we want to do is to bring calm and food to grocery store,” he said.
Johannson said that farmers are being told that they and the contractors who bring them workers are required to train workers in steps to mitigate the virus spread.
He also said he is confident that farm workers are told to stay home if they feel sick.
“We want them to rest assured there will be a job waiting for them when they get back.”
They pick the food we eat
Is that enough?
The food we eat has been harvested and shipped for generations by immigrant labor lacking basic rights. These workers are essential and have to work. But the rights they lack could compel some of them to go to work, sick or not. That would put them in direct contact with the food we eat.
Maybe it would take concern for our own health to finally be concerned for the health of the people who produce our food? We generally haven’t felt that concern before.
Every right that has been gained for farmworkers followed a prolonged fight against stiff resistance to secure.
In 2016, intensive lobbying earned farmworkers the right of overtime benefits enjoyed by all other hourly workers. Jim Cooper and Ken Cooley, both Sacramento-area Democrats and members of the state assembly, both voted no on farmworker overtime.
Only on Jan. 1 of this year did farmworkers become eligible to get overtime if they work nine hours in a day.
On Tuesday, the UFW issued an open letter to the agricultural industry asking for “state-required sick pay to 40 hours or more,” removing “caps on accruing sick pay,” ending the 90-day wait period many employers require before workers can claim sick time and ceasing to ask them for letters from doctors when field laborers use sick leave.
Farmworkers now gaining these basic rights would be ironic. They would be getting them because consumers feared the produce they eat may not be safe, not because they understood these workers lack basic rights.
Are all growers denying workers rights? No. In the Napa County, for example, the producers of Charles Krug wine have a unionized workforce. They provide health care and other benefits. The UFW praise them for how they treat their workers.
“Our staff is very important to us and we’re taking steps to insure their safety,” said Judd Wallenbrock, president and CEO C. Mondavi & Family Wines. The winery has 18 unionized farmworkers, Wallenbrock said.
But the relatively small numbers of unionized farmworkers in California makes the Mondavi workers the exception to the rule. This is where the failure of comprehensive immigration reform has come to roost. With it, more agricultural workers would have legal status. If they had legal status, they would have more rights. If they had more rights, they would have more access to health care. They would be healthier, invest in their communities more.
But no, we couldn’t do that for too many backward political reasons to cite here.
Coronavirus in the fields?
So what we have instead are some of our most vulnerable, desperate people producing our food.
What will that mean for us in the time of the coronavirus? There is no way to know that now.
But we are getting a glimpse of what it means for the workers.
“We have people who cannot afford to pay rent,” said Leticia Valencia, director of organizing for Faith in the Valley, the largest faith-based network of advocates in the Central Valley.
Valencia, a Merced County resident, said the lack of rights for food workers is evident in her family. She said her 64-year-old mother has worked at a Foster Farms poultry plant for nearly 30 years and still makes minimum wage.
“As public health officials continue to take precautions to ‘flatten the curve’ of the novel COVID-19 outbreak, I believe the biggest threat to the Valley’s well-being are companies who are so far choosing to protect their profits over their people and doing the bare minimum to protect their employees,” Valencia wrote in an open letter to Central Valley leaders this week.
“During this pandemic it is critical that everyone is putting the health of our families and community over profit. Companies should be doing everything they possibly can to protect all of their employees, and especially those who are at much higher risk. “
Usually, when advocates poor immigrants speak, they are ignored by the public and, quite frankly, most of the media.
We already ignored the threat of COVID-19 as it spread out of control from China to Europe. We are now enforcing sheltering in place because we were asleep when the virus still could have been contained.
And if we continue to ignore the plight of poorest workers who touch and handle our food? Then we can share the blame for whatever harm comes our way.
This story was originally published March 20, 2020 at 10:45 AM.
