For These Workers, Getting Covid Means Getting Fired
By Bloomberg News
As coronavirus cases explode at U.S. farms and food factories, the foreign migrants who pick fruit, clean seafood and sort vegetables are getting trapped in tightly packed bunkhouses where illness spreads like wildfire. Often, they can’t leave — unless they’re willing to risk deportation.
In Oxnard, a small city just outside Los Angeles, a COVID-19 outbreak raced through a dormitory where farmworkers slept seven to a room. By early July, 198 out of its 215 residents tested positive. About 100 miles north, in Santa Maria, California, at least 85 people were infected at group housing facilities within a few weeks. And in Coldwater, Michigan, close to 70 guest workers caught the virus at a barracks on a produce farm.
Down in Crowley, Louisiana, Reyna Alvarez fell ill too. A 36-year-old mother of three from a village in northwest Mexico, she was working at a crawfish processing plant when the virus swept through two dorms that housed about a hundred people. She left to get treatment at a nearby hospital. When she was recovered and ready to return to work, she found out she’d been fired for the transgression and reported to immigration authorities.
“We all got sick, a hundred workers, and they didn’t do anything for us,” Alvarez said from her home outside of Los Mochis in Mexico’s Sinaloa state. It started with just one employee falling ill, but she was left in the same housing as everyone else, with communal kitchens and bathrooms. The infections spread rapidly, Alvarez said. “They said no one could go in or out,” except for work.
“We were like living dead, like zombies in the plant.”
Many of the migrants getting sick are part of the federal government’s guest-worker program that grants temporary visas for seasonal jobs.
Documented guest workers have filled all the requirements the U.S. mandates for entry. Yet, so much of their lives are in the shadows. They have little leverage to press for safety measures since their legal immigration status depends on their employer — they can’t just quit and take a new job with less dangerous conditions. They often come to the country in debt to employment brokers and then work isolated in rural communities where they don’t know anyone and don’t speak the language. Many of them are employed by independent labor contractors rather than farm operators, muddying accountability.
Farm visas, known as H-2As, mandate that employers provide housing. Even in normal times, it’s not much of a perk: conditions are often cramped and facilities meager. Now, the bunkhouses are turning into petri dishes for disease.
It’s not just farm workers. Employees on H-2B visas, issued for temporary non-agricultural work, are also at risk. Though the Labor Department doesn’t require housing for these contracts, employers or labor contractors often provide accommodations, sometimes deducting rent from workers’ pay.
For both sets of workers, there isn’t usually much alternative housing available in rural communities for an onslaught of poorly paid seasonal workers who don’t have personal transportation available to and from work. And when housing is part of their compensation, they have little ability to shell out rent money from their low wages.
These are some of the most vulnerable populations in the U.S., and yet it would be almost impossible to feed the country without them. That’s grown increasingly true over the past decade as more of the often back-breaking labor critical to food production has shifted to these workers. The U.S. last year issued 205,000 H-2A visas for seasonal farm workers, up from 60,000 a decade earlier. There were 98,000 H-2B visas for seasonal workers in food processing and other occupations, up from 45,000 in 2009.