Housing horrors
Homes with broken windows, doors, walls, stoves, water heaters, heaters, roofs and cabinets. Sewage in showers and on the ground outside. Rooms with no windows and soft, spongy floors. Filthy wall-towall rugs. Thriving populations of bedbugs, mice and rats.
Charles Dickens writing about Victorian-age squalor? John Steinbeck chronicling the horrors of the Great Depression? Nope, that’s Wendy Liberatore, reporter for the Times Union, describing the deplorable housing conditions found by advocates for dairy workers on modern-day New York farms.
How is this possible in a state that prides itself on humanity and compassion? A state that, generally speaking, is among the most prosperous places on the planet? It certainly isn’t acceptable, and no person with a heart and empathy would argue that it is. Yet somehow unsanitary, dangerous and inhumane conditions are the reality faced by too many dairy workers across New York.
To comment:
Again, how is that possible? Well, most of those workers are migrants, including many who are undocumented, which helps explain how such conditions persist. While American citizens presumably would speak out against or walk away from such abuse, undocumented workers live in fear. Complain to their bosses and they might be fired. Speak to authorities and they might be deported. Suffering in silence is the safest bet.
It doesn’t help that the housing is often located on isolated, rural land — out of sight and out of mind. Nor does it help that housing inhabited by dairy workers exists within what can only be described as a massive legal loophole. As one advocate noted, there are six statutes on farmworker housing yet none of them applies to dairy housing. The people who produce our milk and cheese fall through cracks wider than the Grand Canyon.
Of course, there are many farms whose owners offer housing that’s as neat, clean and sanitary as their own. These farmers recognize the humanity in migrant workers, treat them with the dignity and respect we all deserve, and understand that people who work so hard deserve, at the very least, a comfortable, clean space to rest their weary bodies when their labor is done.
But we shouldn’t pretend this is a small-scale problem. Nearly all dairy workers live in farm-provided housing, and in one survey 58 percent said their homes were infested by bugs while 32 percent complained of poor ventilation. That’s a stain on the entire dairy industry — one, we might add, that has often benefited from public subsidies.
Don’t pass this off as just a farming problem, though. It’s a stain on the rest of us, too. Responsible people of good conscience can’t ignore the reality behind their milk, cheese and yogurt. Federal, state and even local governments must pass new laws, closing the dairy-farm loophole, and do more to inspect and improve living conditions on dairy farms.
Decent housing is a human right. Truth be told, it is the very least our society ought to provide to the hardworking people who produce our food. Showers sullied by sewage, rat-infested homes and the like should exist only in fiction, not in the reality of today’s New York.