By Oliver Wells
A pick-up truck crashed into a farmworker bus in Florida on May 14, killing 8 farmworkers and injuring at least 40. The driver of the pick-up truck was arrested shortly afterward on charges of driving under the influence-manslaughter.
More than 50 farmworkers were onboard the bus on their way to work in a watermelon patch in Dunnellon, Florida. About 44 of them were Mexican nationals, including the 8 deceased, who had come to work in the US on temporary visas.
Roughly 70% of workers in the agricultural sector in the US are foreign-born, where they work in the most dangerous and among the least-regulated sectors in the economy. The National Labor Relations Act, for example, excludes farm workers from its regulations. The primary source of injury for agricultural workers is vehicle-related, and in 2022, nearly half of all job-related deaths were caused by vehicle crashes.
The company which ran the overturned bus pays drivers $14.77 an hour and requires the drivers to work the farms in addition to busing the other workers to and from the fields.
New federal regulations set to take effect later this month require vehicles transporting temp visa farmworkers to have seat belts. The Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association, an agricultural capitalist organization, has denounced this measure as “impractical,” arguing that fitting buses with seat belts will be too expensive and that there’s no way to ensure the workers will not simply unbuckle themselves. The Association has instead focused the blame of crashes on individual drivers.
Over 500 people attended a vigil for the workers on the site of the crash a few days later.
In an interview with AP, the daughter of the deceased farmworker Manuel Pérez Ríos said, “He went to seek a better life for me, for my mother, a week ago, and now they say my dad is dead.”
