Blog #1 - What's Going On With: America's Farm Workers
What's Going On With: America’s Farm Workers
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| Strawberry picking by Mexican workers. (Photo by: Andia/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) |
Listening Date: September 8th, 2021
Overview Topics:
Politics, race, culture, farming, farmworkers, heat waves
Co-hosts:
Julio Ricardo Varela
Maria Hinojosa
Guests:
Norma Flores Lopez (Chief Programs Officer at Justice for Migrant Women)
Reyna Lopez
(Executive Director of Oregon’s largest farmworker union)
The “America’s Farmworkers” segment aired on September 7th, 2021, as a collaboration between Latino USA and In The Thick podcasts. In this episode the co-hosts Maria and Julio discussed the daily challenges farm workers face; like constant heat waves or wildfires, in addition to the low wages they receive, just to be able to bring food to the tables of the homes of families across our nation. In this context, there have been serious health consequences for the people working in the fields, raging from extreme dehydration to even the death of some farm workers.
Another thing that was mentioned during this episode titled “America’s Farmworkers” in the Latino USA podcast was that, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, the work conditions brought a lot of challenges for the farm workers and the government was not taking care for people in this job. The co-host Maria Hinojosa claims that “more than 600,000 farm workers were infected with the virus, according to researchers at Purdue University. Still farm workers and advocates step in where the government has fallen short, in terms of protecting farm workers and their physical and mental health” (00:32:51 – 00:33:08).
I really liked listening to a podcast on this topic because it really reflected
the concern and appreciation that people have for the hard and tiring job that
farm workers do. They commented on the personal experiences of guests Norma
Flores and Norma Lopez related to farm work. Norma herself related that she “grew
up as an immigrant farm worker” (00:14:54 – 00:18:30). In this podcast episode
the chat also included examples and news of other people who have died in the
fields due to working conditions. They highlighted the importance that those in
charge of these workers must ensure their safety and health during working
hours.
In my opinion there is nothing specific that I did not like about this
topic, I think they mentioned what was related to it correctly. Despite this, I
believe that they should have spoken and given more information about the
government's actions in favor of the protection of the integrity, health, and
rights of farm workers; although it was a subject that they talked about, I
think it would have been better to speak deeply about it.
A recent news article from The Guardian’s titled “‘We’re Not Animals, We’re Human Beings’: US FarmWorkers Labor in Deadly Heat with Few Protections”, written by Michael Sainato says that interviewed farm workers in Florida claim "it is really challenging to work in the heat, but the reality is we have to, we don’t really have a choice, we have to keep working even when it’s incredibly hot". When it's really hot, farmers are under pressure to keep working and pushing; but when the bosses know that people can't work anymore, they don't stop the work. The reason why I selected this specific news article was because its relation with the episode podcast "America's Farmers", they both talk about the same topic and also explaining that Washington recently declared emergency rules to protect farm workers from heat exposure after a farm worker died from heat exposure at a tree farm in Oregon. This farmer was a 38-year-old man named Sebastian Francisco Perez from Guatemala.
Most of the farm workers have been working through the heat all year without any federal protections and "According to CDC data, farm workers are 20 times more likely to die from heat-related causes than other workers" ("We're Not Animals, We're Human Beings"). In my opinion, is unfortunate that only a few States of all country are doing something about it, so this is an opportunity to share more information about it to make some changes.
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