Labor Practices
The practices and people behind food production.
There are about 2.5 million farm workers in the United States annually.
Who are these farm workers?
77% of them are Hispanic
61% are of Mexican descent
69% are male
⅓ are 35 years old or younger
⅔ are citizens or legal residents of the U.S.
Many farm workers come to the United States on a visa called the H-2A visa. This is a federal program that lets immigrant workers temporarily come to the U.S. to make up for labor shortages. In 2019, the H-2A guest worker program brought in about 258,000 workers.
The H-2A visa program can be a great opportunity for workers:
It can open a lot of doors for workers from other countries. It helps them get to the U.S. legally and guarantees transportation, housing, and food.
However, conventional agriculture involves a lot of hazardous work environments.
People who work in agriculture are much closer to a lot of chemicals.
Long-term exposure to these products can cause lung diseases, skin diseases, and cancers.
Large machinery is also dangerous to work with. Working in agriculture is just dangerous, fundamentally.
On top of these built-in risks, agricultural workers are often taken advantage of. Agricultural workers aren’t the only people impacted by this trend. The food service and retail sector is also riddled with unjust working conditions. One common example is wage theft.
But agricultural workers are impacted more often than workers in other sectors. And the huge number of agricultural workers who are brought in from abroad on H-2A visas are more dependent on their employers than most workers.
In some instances, employers exploit this by threatening to deport immigrant employees if they don’t accept poor working conditions.
Click on a photo below to hear agricultural workers tell their own stories:
This discrimination adds to the racial discrimination many migrant workers face who come to the United States from countries like Mexico, South Africa, Guatemala, and Jamaica.
On top of that, limited government funding means that farms aren’t inspected regularly–so it can be difficult to stop employers from doing these things.
Images by agus raharjo, Vectorstall, and Nikol Kokešová from the Noun Project
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