farm workers

At the Guardian, reporters Oliver Laughland and Mae Ryan report on working conditions inside Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel. Right away, the article notes that while the presidential candidate tours the country selling his job-creating skills, workers in his hotel say they get paid about $3 less an hour than many of Las Vegas’ unionized hotel workers, who also enjoy better health and retirement benefits. They write: Earlier this month, following a protracted dispute with Trump and his co-owner, casino billionaire Phil Ruffin, the National Labor Relations Board officially certified a union for…
At Vox, Sarah Kliff writes about the side of medical errors we rarely hear about — the doctors and nurses who make such errors and the mental health toll of living with that responsibility. In an article that explores whether health care workers are getting the support they need to deal with such experiences, Kliff begins with the story of nurse Kim Hiatt: Kim Hiatt had worked as a nurse for 24 years when she made her first medical error: She gave a frail infant 10 times the recommended dosage of a medication. The baby died five days later. Hiatt's mistake was an unnecessary tragedy. But what…
At NPR, reporter Howard Berkes writes about the failure of federal laws to protect workers who are left out of the workers’ compensation system. He begins his story with Kevin Schiller, a building engineer for Macy’s department stores for more than two decades. While working in a storage room in a Macy’s in Denton, Texas, a mannequin fell from 12 feet above, hitting Schiller and forcing him to hit his head on a shelf and then the concrete floor. Berkes writes: Schiller has hardly worked since, given persistent headaches, memory loss, disorientation and extreme sensitivity to bright light and…
At Reveal, reporter Will Evans investigates discrimination within temporary staffing agencies, finding a pattern of racial, sexist and otherwise discriminatory hiring practices. He begins his story with Alabama-based Automation Personnel Services Inc., writing: When its clients wanted to hire temp workers based on race, sex or age, Automation was happy to oblige, according to dozens of former employees. Often, the practice was blatant. A manager at a Georgia manufacturing plant asked Christie Ragland not to send him “any black thugs,” she said. Ragland, a former Automation office manager…
As world leaders are gathered in Paris to discuss international efforts to combat climate change, Michelle Chen writes that workers in the Global South will “need to build livelihoods that can mitigate ecological crisis — and leap ahead of the dominant fossil-fuel based economies, which historically have both controlled and stifled their development.” Reporting for The Nation, Chen starts her article with a report from the New Delhi-based Just Jobs Network, which notes that climate-driven migration has the potential to drive down wages and working conditions in urban areas. Chen writes: But…
At the Minneapolis Star Tribune, reporter Jeffrey Meitrodt authored an outstanding four-part series on one of the nation’s deadliest occupations: farm work. In “Tragic Harvest,” Meitrodt chronicles the impact of lax farmworker safety rules and the rise in worker fatalities in Minnesota. He begins his series with the story of farmworker Richard Rosetter: Richard Rosetter stood inside his 28-foot grain bin and smashed a shovel into the thick layer of ice that covered his corn. He was in a foul mood. His wife and a neighbor were pestering him, upset that he was working by himself, with no…
More than 1.5 million US farmworkers will be better protected in the years ahead because of a new regulations issued this week by the EPA. The agency’s Worker Protection Standard (WPS) addresses the hazards related to pesticide exposure for farmworkers. The WPS was initially adopted by EPA in 1992, but considered inadequate by many affected workers and public health experts. “In my experience as a farmworker, I have seen many people affected by exposure to chemicals,” explained Miguel, who provided comments to EPA during the agency’s rulemaking process. “I have heard of [people needing] liver…
Paid sick leave, new rights for temp workers, and extending OSHA protections to public sector employees were among the many victories that unfolded at the state and local levels in the last 12 months and that we highlight in this year’s edition of “The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety.” In California, a number of new worker safety laws went into effect. Among them, a new law that holds companies responsible if they contract with staffing agencies that engage in wage theft and fail to maintain workers’ compensation insurance. California health care workers gained new protections…
Thousands of foreign workers in the U.S. — workers here legally through a visa program that allows employers to import workers from abroad — are abused, imprisoned and exploited. And the government does little to stop it, according to an investigation by BuzzFeed News. Reporters Jessica Garrison and Ken Besinger and data editor Jeremy Singer-Vine began their investigation with the story of Marisela Valdez and Isy Gonzalez, two H-2 visa workers who peeled crawfish at L.T. West Inc. in Louisiana, where they say their employer took away their passports, sexually harassed them, forced them to…
Even though farmworkers face serious hazards on the job and work in one of the most dangerous industries in the country, most young farmworkers in a recent study rated their work safety climate as “poor.” In fact, more than a third of those surveyed said their managers were only interested in getting the job done as quickly as possible. Recently published in the American Journal of Public Health, the study was designed to capture perceptions of work safety climates on North Carolina farms that employ children and teens and the association with occupational safety and injuries. In partnering…
A recent agreement between striking farmworkers and big agribusiness in Baja California could be the “most significant achievement by a farm labor movement in recent Mexican history,” reports Richard Marosi in the Los Angeles Times. Among the settlement details, daily wages for workers will go up by as much as 50 percent and workers will receive the required government benefits often denied by their employers. Marosi reports: “This is a watershed moment,” said Sara Lara, a farm labor researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In decades of studying farm issues, Lara said she…
Family-friendly policies in the workplace are a good thing, but as Claire Cain Miller writes in The New York Times, there’s also a risk that such policies end up hurting the very workers they’re intended to help. Miller starts off her piece with international examples of family-friendly policies, such as a law in Chile that requires employers provide child care for working mothers and a policy in Spain that gives the parents of young children the option of working part time. The unintended results of each example? All women — whether they have children or not — get paid less and face fewer…
Factory farms in the US---the confinements that house millions of beef cattle, dairy cows, hogs and poultry--- generate enough manure to fill the 102-story Empire State Building each and every day. That's more than 13 times the sewage produced by the US population. This factoid and many others are presented in Factory Farm Nation 2015, a report released this week by Food & Water Watch (FWW). The report describes the dominance of factory farms in US agriculture and its affect on the physical, economic, and social environment. It provides examples of consolidation within the beef, pork,…
Americans increasingly want to know that their steaks were humanely raised or their produce was organically grown, but what about the people who picked that produce or cared for those cows? Where’s the concern for the workers behind our food? Reporter Stephen Lurie explored that question in an article published last week in Vox. He writes: Organic and environmentally sustainable certifications lead consumers to supposedly wholesome products, but they hold no guarantees about the wholesomeness of the companies that produce those goods. Sitting down to a farm-to-table meal at a chic restaurant…
In a joint investigation from the Texas Tribune and Houston Chronicle, reporters looked into workplace safety at oil refineries 10 years after an explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, left 15 workers dead and injured another 180. Unfortunately, reporters found that “though no single incident has matched the 2005 devastation, a two-month investigation finds the industry’s overall death toll barely slowed.” In the four-part series, reporters chronicle what went wrong at the Texas City refinery, explore the aftermath and talk with survivors, and analyze data showing where and how…
Workplace suicides took a sharp upward turn in 2008, with workers in the protective services, such as police officers and firefighters, at greatest risk, a new study finds. Researchers say the findings point to the workplace as a prime location for reaching those at risk with potentially life-saving information and help. According to the study, which was published this month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1,719 people died by suicide in U.S. workplaces between 2003 and 2010, with an overall rate of 1.5 per 1 million workers. Workplace suicide rates had been on the decrease,…
The same day that NPR and ProPublica published their investigation into the dismantling of the workers’ compensation system, OSHA released its own report, “Adding Inequality to Injury: The Cost of Failing to Protect Workers on the Job.” The agency writes that the failure of employers to prevent millions of work-related injuries and illnesses each year coupled with changes to workers’ compensation systems is exacerbating income inequality and pushing many workers into poverty. The report states: For many injured workers and their families, a workplace injury creates a trap which leaves them…
Our local grocery store chain, H.E.B., sells packaged poultry under the private label “Natural Chicken.” It’s meant to appeal to customers who want to know that the chicken they intend to eat was treated more humanely than your typical chicken. The package label on H.E.B.’s Natural Chicken says: No cages ever!! Unlimited access to feed, water, and freedom of movement No additives or preservatives Always vegetarian fed No added growth stimulants or hormones No antibiotics Raised cage free I stood in the refrigerator aisle and stared at the package for a while. I thought about the label and…
by Amy Liebman, MPA, MA Pesticide drift from a pear orchard sickened 20 farmworkers laboring in a neighboring cherry orchard in April 2014, in Washington State, according to a new Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Interestingly, and critically, the exposure came to light because a newspaper reporter tipped off the Washington Department of Agriculture, who then contacted the Washington Department of Health. Where were the clinician reports? Off-drift pesticide poisonings are serious occupational hazards that can be prevented; this…
With agriculture ranked one of the most dangerous industries in the country, many Americans might be surprised to know that it’s still perfectly legal for farms to officially employ children. For years, advocates have been working to address this gaping loophole in the nation’s child labor laws, often citing children’s increased vulnerability to workplace-related injury, illness and exploitation. A new study confirms those concerns, underscoring the need to better protect the children and youth working in American fields. Published in the February issue of the American Journal of Public…