Helen Zivar
According to the Labor Department’s January 2023 report, some 2,116,000 farm workers have been employed in the U.S. in 2022 and have produced $165 billion dollars’ worth of agricultural products in 2022 (U.S. Dept. Of Agriculture, Nov. 2023). The number of farm workers is estimated to be much higher, as the number of undocumented workers is not always reported by the companies. For example, the US Department of Agriculture estimated that between 2018 and 2020, 41% of all crop workers nationwide lacked legal work authorization. Local newspapers’ investigations showed as much as 90% of the dairy farm workforce in some states, including Wisconsin and Vermont, are estimated to be undocumented. The report gives some details of the hardship that farm workers across the country are facing, in general, and the horrible working conditions of migrant workers, especially migrant children that reveal intense stratification of the working class in the U.S. with immigrant workers lacking rights, receiving low pay, regular abuse, and high rates of work-related injuries.
As “Civil Eats” investigations reveal, federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) protections don’t apply to 96% of the animal farm operations because of the exemptions for farms that have 10 or fewer workers, even though they work in some of the most dangerous occupations. For example, Civil Eats investigation revealed that over 85% of the deaths related to animal production are not reported to OSHA and the agency sees only a sliver of the total injuries and fatalities associated with that work.
Many farm workers, especially migrant children, experience dehumanization, mistreatment, verbal abuse, and extreme exploitation, because the Federal child labor lawsallows children as young as 12 to work in fields with their parents, a person standing in place of their parent, or with the written consent of their parents. Many farm workers are immigrant children and youth. In the last year alone, more than 130,000 unaccompanied minors have entered the U.S. by themselves. Children could be released from border detention centers to whoever agrees to sponsor them and Department of Health and Human Services, responsible for tracking these children, in fact loses track of many of them. As NY Times reports (published Feb.25, 2023), the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children over the last two years. Many of the children are sponsored by people who make them work long hours as cheap labor. Children such as 13-year-old Jose Vasquez, who works 12-hour shifts, six days a week, at a commercial egg farm in Michigan, or Paco Calvo who has been working 12-hour days on dairy farms in Vermont since he arrived in 2019 at age 14. In an interview with NY Times Calvo said that he crushed his hand in an industrial milking machine in the first months of doing this work. Vasquez told the newspaper “Children often understand that they will have to work, but do not grasp the unrelenting grind that awaits them. I didn’t get how expensive everything was…I’d like to go to school, but then how would I pay rent?”
