Food & Faith Challenge: Farm Workers

You must treat foreigners with the same loving care—
remember, you were once foreigners in Egypt.
Reverently respect God, your God, serve him, hold tight to him,
back up your promises with the authority of his name.
He’s your praise! He’s your God!
He did all these tremendous, these staggering things
that you saw with your own eyes.

(Deuteronomy 10:19-21, The Message)

Welcome to week 5 of the Food & Faith Challenge. If you saw Food, Inc. recently, you got a taste of how farmers and farm workers are treated in our society. Today’s guest post is by Angie who blogs at Powered by Produce. She did a great job researching today’s topic, and we just couldn’t shorten it. Luckily you have all week to read it, ha ha. Before we get to the guest post, you may wish to check out these background resources:

Additional Resources

Simply in Season readings: “Our invisible neighbors” (2005 p. 302 / 2009 p. 317); “Providing our food and living in poverty” (2005 p. 258 / 2009 p. 270); “At risk: farmworkers and their kids” (2005 p. 124 / 2009 p. 126)

A video about Florida farmworkers vs. Taco Bell.

Farm Workers

by Angie

Individuals who toil on factory farms and in slaughterhouses engage in some of the most dangerous work in the nation to put meat, eggs, dairy, and produce on our tables.  According to the United Nations, the three most dangerous industries in the world are mining, construction, and agriculture. Occupational hazards for agricultural workers include the use of dangerous machinery, exposure to toxic pesticides and toxic animal waste, and difficult manual labor. All of which are exacerbated by the lack of government rights and protections afforded to farmworkers.

In the fields
Pesticides pose both short- and long-term risks to farmworkers and their families. Workers who mix, load, and apply pesticides are at risk of spills or splashes, while workers in the fields face exposure from drift in the air, or contact with pesticide residues on the crop or soil. Workers inadvertently take home pesticide residues on their hair, skin, or clothing and some even bring their children to work and leave the children to play in treated fields.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 10,000 – 20,000 farmworkers are poisoned on the job due to pesticide exposure. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that farmworkers suffer the highest rate of chemical-related illness of any occupational group.

Even low levels of pesticide exposure over time can lead to chronic health effects such as cancer, infertility, birth defects, or neurological damage. A 2002 study by the Cancer Registry of California found elevated rates of certain cancers amongst farmworkers: 59% higher rate of leukemia, 69% higher rate of stomach cancer, 63% higher rate of uterine cervix cancer, and 68% higher rate of uterine corpus cancer. A study by the University of Minnesota found that the offspring of pesticide appliers had a birth defect rate of 30 per 100,000 live births, whereas the general population rate was 18.3 per 100,000.

The exact number of workers affected each year by pesticides is unknown because agricultural injuries often go unreported. Many farmworkers do no seek medical attention for mild to moderate symptoms because of reluctance to take time off work (for fear of being let go), lack of transportation, or cost of medical care (the average farmworker’s annual family income is $12,500 – $14,499).

Even when they do seek treatment, many cases of pesticide-related illness are not recognized because the symptoms are common ailments (nausea, vomiting, dizziness, headache, skin rash, eye irritation). Often, workers do not know the name of the chemicals to which they were exposed and there are very few inexpensive, widely available, clinical diagnostic tests to correctly identify pesticide poisoning.

Farmworkers receive little to no information about the specific short- and long-term health risks associated with the products at their work site.

Other tasks leading to injuries include stooping to plant or pick row crops, working on ladders while holding sacks weighing 50 – 100 lbs, and sorting and packing vegetables at a rapid pace. Fractures due to falls, eye injuries from chemicals or debris ejected from machinery, lacerations from knives and machetes, strains, sprains, and repetitive motion injuries from bending, lifting, and sorting, as well as crush, contusion, and amputation injuries from working with farm equipment, are all common.

On the (factory) farm
Believe it or not, one of the chief health hazards in agriculture is the collection and disposal of the enormous amounts of waste produced by the thousands of animals confined in a single facility. Often, waste is stored in massive storage pits, or “manure lagoons,” having the capacity to hold 20-45 million gallons of waste!

Decomposing manure generates noxious gases such as hydrogen sulfide, methane, and ammonia, as well as harmful bacteria. Hydrogen sulfide can build up to toxic levels in manure pits and is deemed “a leading cause of sudden death in the workplace” by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).  There have been numerous cases where employees have asphyxiated from the gases. The problem is so great that NIOSH has even issued a publication titled Preventing Deaths of Farm Workers in Manure Pits.

Cases have been documented where several individuals have died while attempting to rescue a coworker from a manure pit. From a 2006 expose of the pork industry by Rolling Stone: “A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig sh*t to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker’s cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker’s older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker’s father dived in. They all died in pig sh*t.”

For those who don’t fall in, the toxic gases are so potent that as many as 70% of factory farm workers suffer from acute bronchitis and 25% develop chronic bronchitis. Others develop problems such as impaired respiratory function, occupational asthma, and/or organic dust syndrome (from the dried manure dust in the air).  New Yorker writer Michale Specter said of his visit to a chicken farm: “I was almost knocked off the ground by the overpowering smell of feces and ammonia. My eyes burned and so did my lungs, and I could neither see nor breathe.”

At the slaughterhouse
The injury rate in slaughterhouses is three times higher than the rate in a typical American factory. Every year, more than one-quarter of the meatpacking workers in this country (roughly 40,000 men & women) suffer an injury or work-related illness that requires medical attention beyond first aid. And there is evidence that the official numbers, reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are an underestimate and that thousands of injuries go unreported.

Lacerations are the most common injury, but meatpacking workers also suffer from tendinitis, back problems, shoulder problems, carpal tunnel syndrome, and trigger finger (a finger becomes frozen in a curled position). The rate of these cumulative trauma injuries is 33 times higher in the meatpacking industry than the national average for other industries. Slaughterhouse workers make a knife cut every 2 or 3 seconds, adding up to about 10,000 cuts during an 8 hour shift, placing repetitive pressure on the workers’ joints, tendons, and nerves.

The speed of the assembly line is an accurate determinant for the number of injuries at a slaughterhouse. Twenty years ago, plants slaughtered about 175 cows an hour. Today, meatpacking plants slaughter about 400 cows an hour. One former nurse in a meatpacking plant said, “I could always tell the line speed by the number of people with lacerations coming into my office.”

Workers desperate not to fall behind (and risk losing their job), are encouraged to take methamphetamine (often sold to them by their supervisors). The widespread use of “crank” in the meatpacking industry only makes an already very dangerous job even riskier.

Child Labor
Children and teens are part of the migrant and seasonal agricultural workforce. Young workers who are highly susceptible to injury, illnesses, and even death, because of their inexperience, are exposed to toxic pesticides, carry heavy loads, use knives and machetes, use unguarded machinery, and go without water and toilets.  And despite all these conditions, children working in agriculture have fewer protections than children working in all other industries!

The minimum age to be employed in a hazardous (e.g. working with toxic pesticides) agricultural job is 16, but in every other industry, the minimum age for performing hazardous work is 18.  For non-hazardous jobs (as defined by the Secretary of Labor), the minimum age in agriculture is 14, while in other industries it is 16.  However, in agriculture there are many more exceptions to the age requirement than in other industries, which result in children as young as 10 years old being put to work.

In agriculture, the only restriction on child work hours is that children under age 16 cannot work during school hours, but there is no limit on how early or late they can work or on the total number of hours they can work in a day or week.  As a result, children as young as 14 (and because of exceptions, some as young as 10) are forced to work long hours. Other industries have hours-of-work protections including: Children under 15 cannot work during school hours, before 7am, or after 7pm when school is in session (or after 9pm in summer).  They also cannot work more than 3 hours on a school day or more than 18 in a school week. On non-school days, no more than 8 hours per day or 40 per week.

Rights
The nation’s 2.5 million farmworkers are employed in one of the most hazardous industries in the US, yet in many states, their employers are not required to provide them with workers compensation insurance to protect them when they suffer job-related illness or injury. Even if they are eligible for benefits, employer threats of retaliation prevent many claims. Yes, this is illegal, but few cases are successfully prosecuted because: 1) Many workers would rather forego their claim than risk losing their job. 2) Only 25% of crop workers report being able to speak or read English well. This leads to a lack of understanding of their rights. 3) Undocumented workers are not eligible for federally funded legal services.

Farmworkers are wholly or partially excluded from many federal labor law protections. For example, they are not guaranteed the right to organize and bargain collectively, they are not entitled overtime pay, and they are only covered by 7 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards, even though far more of the hazards regulated by OSHA would also be relevant.

Because most agricultural workers are recent immigrants (78%), and many are illegal (53%), they can be fired and/or deported at any moment, without warning. They may have traveled long distances for this job, could have families to support, and are earning more than they could back home, so there is huge pressure not to complain, and not to report injuries.  From a purely economic point of view, injured workers are a drain. They are less productive, so getting rid of them makes sense when there are plenty of available replacements. This causes non-visible injuries (hand pain, back pain) to go unreported and untreated.

Unintended Effects
Agricultural workers have laborious, unpleasant, and often dangerous jobs. They are treated unjustly and paid unfairly. Those working with animals are constantly surrounded by filth, suffering, and death. These exhausted, discontented people become embittered and can often take out their frustrations on the animals.  One former slaughterhouse worker candidly describes his deliberate abuse of an animal (caution: what follows is graphic), “One time I took my knife – it’s sharp enough – and I sliced off the end of a hog’s nose, just like a piece of bologna. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it just sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt brine and ground it into his nose. Now that hog really went nuts, pushing its nose all over the place. I still had a bunch of salt in my hand – I was wearing a rubber glove – and I stuck the salt right up the hog’s [anus]. The poor hog didn’t know whether to sh*t or go blind.”  (For more about the cruelty and abuse in our factory farms, read these excerpts from Gail Eisnitz’s book Slaughterhouse, but be warned, they are graphic.) Disgruntled employees embedded in a culture of disrespect (to animals and humans) only become more disgruntled, fueling the vicious cycle.

How you can help
One of the many aspects of modern food production that is never included on the label is the treatment of those whose labor produced it. To truly stand up for those who are mistreated, silenced, harassed, intimidated, sickened, injured, and sometimes killed in factory farms and slaughterhouses, consider their suffering as an ingredient in most of the items in our supermarket. No matter how cheap the price tag may be, it is not worth the systematic exploitation of these people. Choose to support local, humane operations instead of unjust industrial giants.

This Week’s Challenge

Questions for Reflection (share your response below for any one of these for an entry in this week’s drawing)

• What are our responsibilities to farmworkers and others who are involved in the production of our food?
• How does choosing locally grown food play into this responsibility? If we do in fact buy all our produce from local, ethical resources, do we still have a responsibility to advocate for better conditions in the larger system? Or should our efforts be focused on creating a new kind of system? Or both?

Challenge to Action (post on your blog and add a link below to the specific post about this challenge or email me before Friday for an additional entry into this week’s drawing).

Create a list of positive steps you can take to work toward better treatment of farmworkers in the United States and a more humane system of food production.

The prize: This week’s drawing is again for an e-book, this time a Real Food Ingredient Guide from Kelly the Kitchen Kop. It’s a great reference for cutting through the confusing clutter about what is healthy and what is not, and also provides tips for eating healthy on a budget.