Work protections don’t go home with all farm crews
Migrants: Temporary Salinas workers on H-2A visas often live in overcrowded conditions
When Jesus Francisco Meza Uriarte and Dian Alejandro BienazulAtondo step into the van that will take them to a spinach field in Salinas each morning, it stinks of bleach. The van has been sanitized between rides to kill any lingering bits of the COVID-19 virus.
They ride to work, sitting at least 6 feet apart, and spend about four hours harvesting, a much shorter shift than usual. While they work, the two men said they stay at least two arm lengths apart, holding their arms out to demonstrate. Their crew is kept small to encourage spreading out.
Meza Uriarte and BienazulAtondo are H-2A farmworkers, which means they are temporary workers in the U.S. on a visa to plant, harvest and pack the produce people are buying in record numbers during the pandemic. More than 257,000 people worked in the U.S. on an H-2A visa in 2017. Now, these workers have been deemed essential by county, state and federal government regulations.
But while they are taking precautions in the fields, many H-2A farmworkers live in unsanitary, overcrowded conditions, the perfect recipe for an outbreak during a pandemic.
“Ag workers are uniquely vulnerable to this virus because of the close proximity they often work and live,” said California Assemblymember Robert Rivas, a Democrat representing the Salinas and Pajaro valleys. “Farmworkers can’t often take the necessary steps to protect themselves.”
An April survey by the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, a migrant workers’ rights organization based in the U.S. and Mexico, found that 45% of H-2A workers faced overcrowded and unsanitary housing conditions, such as a lack of functioning bathrooms or rat and bedbug infestations.
“They’re essential enough to bring here but not essential enough to protect,” said Mary Bauer, general counsel of the migrant workers’ group.
As the nation works to flatten the curve, lawmakers and the agriculture industry hustle to get ahead of the virus while moving produce out of the field and into grocery stores. Industry leaders fear there could be an outbreak among their employees.
“COVID-19 is a health crisis. But it could also lead to a food security crisis if proper measures are not taken,” wrote Shenggen Fan, a chair professor
at China Agricultural University and the former director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute.
While lawmakers, the agricultural industry and advocates agree on the risks facing farmworkers, one of the biggest obstacles is finding affordable housing for H-2A workers in a state experiencing a housing crisis.
“This crisis is shining the light on how important the farmworker is to our country,” said Soren Bjorn, president of Driscoll’s of the Americas, a multibilliondollar berry company based in Watsonville. “They have not always been treated with the kind of respect you see for farmworkers today, and when this is over, I hope society at large does not forget about the contribution the farmworkers
have made during this.”
The ground floor of the Salinas motel where Meza Uriarte and BienazulAtondo stay is full of workers like them, from rural parts of the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Their employers ferried them across the border in late March, weeks early to get ahead of the Trump administration’s closure of the U.S.’ southern border, which employers feared might impact H-2A workers.
While some things have changed at work because of the coronavirus, at the motel, which routinely houses H-2A workers, little has. Their roommate, Juan Ahumada, from rural Sinaloa as well, said workers still sleep three or four to a room, depending on space.
Ahumada, Meza Uriarte and BienazulAtondo are essential
to putting food on the tables of people sheltering in place, but it also means they must sleep in close quarters and show up to work — two things medical experts are urging people to avoid if possible to limit transmission.
Salinas is particularly vulnerable to an outbreak. According to a SmartAsset analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau data from 2017 and 2018, Salinas ranks third among cities in the U.S. where the fewest people can work from home.
That makes farmwork uniquely dangerous right now. If one worker contracts the coronavirus, it could whip through a crew living or working together.
Monterey County, home to a $8.5 billion agricultural industry, was the first county in the U.S. to create an agricultural agreement protecting employees in the field. In the last week of March, seven agencies signed off on additional worker protections, including training on staying safe at home, mandatory handwashing, added bathrooms and increased distance in the field. Other counties followed suit, adopting portions of the agreement, and Cal/OSHA recently released its own version.
But several H-2A workers said the training they were given consisted of being handed bleach for their motel rooms and a flyer stating they should wash their
hands frequently and stay 6 feet apart.
“That’s the problem with these guidelines,” said Lucas Zucker, policy director for the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy. “They are ultimately suggestions. I think they can make a big difference, but there’s no proactive enforcement portion.”
There are no formal penalties for farmworker employers that flout best practices, endangering the lives of workers for the sake of harvesting more crops. Industry leaders noted, however, that the penalty would be the loss of their workforce.
If they don’t take precautions, “there will be consequences, and that will be that their workers will get sick,” said Monterey County Agricultural Commissioner Henry Gonzales. “When they lose their workers, that is a financial consequence to them.”
Driscoll’s Bjorn said it would be impossible for his company — which controlled one-third of the $6 billion U.S. berry market in 2017 — to monitor every one of the hundreds of growers and contractors around the world that work for them.
“There’s always somebody that wants to take a shortcut . ... We take responsibility for everything that happens in our supply chain,” said Bjorn. “We can’t see everything … but in the end, it is our accountability,
and we can’t shy away from that.”
Should Driscoll’s find one of its independent growers or contractors ignoring safety protocols without warrant, Bjorn said they would be dropped from the program.
Zucker has particular concerns about strawberry season, a financially fruitful season for field laborers who are fast and skilled.
Bjorn said Driscoll’s has purchased an additional 350 wash stations in Ventura County and is telling workers that if they lack equipment, it will purchase it for them. Still, he said, there is only so much employers could do about housing.
“There’s not enough affordable housing in California,” said Bjorn, whose firm is exploring building its own H-2A housing along the coast to help spread workers out. “I think that’s why this population is at a pretty high risk if it does not follow all of the guidelines. And that’s the very real fear. If you do get an outbreak, it becomes a mini-New York.” Kate Cimini is a journalist for The Salinas Californian. This article is part of The California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequality and economic survival in California. David Rodriguez contributed to this report.