Investigate Midwest (https://investigatemidwest.org/category/labor/)
Some states have enforced rules to prevent COVID-19's spread among farmworkers, but the federal government hasn't done so, leaving many workers unprotected, advocates said.
The pounds of chicken available to consumers on a per capita basis has increased more than 500 percent since 1909, according to USDA data.
Tens of thousands of agricultural workers have been denied wages by their employers — a violation of labor laws — over the past two decades, according to Department of Labor data.
The federal government struggles to evaluate forced labor allegations in the seafood industry, according to a Government Accountability Office report released this month.
The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting conducted an eight-month review of health studies, government data and interviews with researchers, undocumented residents and community leaders on the aftermath of the 2018 raid in Mt. Pleasant, finding that families and the community remain traumatized by the events, long after the attention by national media and local support waned.
The lax inspection process led to an incident in summer 2018 where workers lived in a former jail, a motel with bed bugs and a house with a leaking toilet.
During an incident in Kennett, Missouri, in summer 2018, H-2A workers labored through high temperatures while denied breakfast and with little access to water. Their legal status was supposed to protect them.
Over the last four decades, many hundreds of employees have been killed or seriously injured without follow-up investigations by OSHA because small farms are exempt from agency scrutiny.
What’s more, because the exemption applies to all OSHA activities, agency inspectors also are barred from checking for hazards before injuries or deaths occur, and from responding to employee complaints about unsafe conditions.
For the second time in recent months, the U.S. Department of Labor has extracted penalties from a California farm business blamed for the deadly crash of a vehicle transporting migrant field workers to their jobs.
Having continued insurance for health care from job to job is one of many unique health challenges migrant farmworkers face because of the workers’ frequent movement from state to state without portable health insurance, which leads to a lack of insurance coverage, inconsistent professional medical care and confusion about health care services in the area where they are working.