America's Food Workers Neglected

“We’re in a country where people want our labor but don’t care about our lives. Our human rights have been denied, but our work is being deemed essential. The injustice of the system is laid bare,” explained Enrique Balcazar, an organizer with Migrant Justice.

Vice-President Pence called US farm and other food workers “heroic Americans” for doing “vital” work amid the coronavirus pandemic and said the government would “work tirelessly” to ensure their workplace safety. Earlier in the month, the Department of Homeland Security had classified workers pulling onions, collecting eggs, processing beef and others as “essential”, and part of the “critical infrastructure workforce” that has a “special responsibility to maintain a normal work schedule”.

America's  2.4 million farmworkers, 148,000 processing workers and other food chain workers are imperative to our economy, collective health and basic survival. They support the national interest. Danger to food workers is a danger for us all. And some of them are starting to die while working to feed us.

Relief measures recognizing their importance haven’t been offered. Congress’s $2tn pandemic stimulus package specifically excludes food workers, leaving them without basic safety equipment like masks and hand sanitizer, benefits like healthcare and childcare, protections like physical distancing, and hazard pay. Food workers have also been left out of state aid.  The lowest-paid workers at the frontlines of battle are left with no support.

Protections are urgently needed. While Americans have been instructed to maintain 6ft from others, food workers labor shoulder-to-shoulder in the country’s mega-processing plants. Farmworkers pack into buses to and from orange groves and other harvest sites. They share cramped rooms, even beds, with strangers, and lack ventilation or access to sanitation. “The company isn’t doing anything to give workers space. We’re close to each other all the time,” a Tyson poultry worker in Arkansas stated. She’s a member of Venceremos, a group of poultry workers petitioning companies to provide sick leave.

Yet for many food workers, absence from work due to illness risks termination. And these workers have high rates of hypertension and respiratory impairments – conditions linked to severe Covid-19 disease – because of their proximity to chemicals known to be lung irritants. Essential food workers are paid minimum wages while enduring perilous conditions. They face an agonizing choice: stay home without income for rent or go to work and risk infection.

“The worker community is afraid. Farmers are worried. No one is going to be able to replace us when workers get sick,” Pedro, a Vermont dairy worker.

 Gerardo Reyes, a leader of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a tomato picker-led organization that’s calling on the state of Florida for emergency provisions for farmworkers. The Coalition is based in Immokalee, a town of 25,000 farmworkers with no hospitals, a situation that Reyes describes as “dry tinder in the path of the wildfire that is Covid-19”.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/14/will-we-have-food-coronavirus-pandemic