DAILY TRIFECTA: The Truth About Immigrant Labor
It's an ever-thinner line between migrant and slave
TITLE: Jiaai Zeng Died Weeks After Starting Work at an Oklahoma Marijuana Farm. His Family Wants Answers.
https://www.propublica.org/article/marijuana-oklahoma-china-immigration-safety-workers
EXCERPT: Cannabis farms have boomed in states that have passed medical and recreational marijuana laws. But when voters in Oklahoma approved a law allowing the cultivation of medical marijuana in 2018, legislators didn’t develop corresponding regulations to protect employees. Oklahoma’s historically weak labor enforcement system leaves the protection of workers largely to the federal government. And the U.S. Department of Labor has limited oversight because marijuana is illegal at the national level.
As a result, workers who are already isolated by language and culture have found themselves largely at the mercy of their employers, often criminals who rely on Chinese immigrant labor. As ProPublica and The Frontier have reported, Chinese mafias — some with suspected ties to the Chinese government — have taken advantage of state-level legalization to dominate a nationwide black market for marijuana.
During raids, inspections and investigations at more than a thousand farms over the past five years, Oklahoma law enforcement officers, fire marshals, federal labor inspectors and other officials have encountered a litany of abuses: bosses threaten and beat workers, sexually assault them, steal their wages, confiscate their IDs, restrict their movements and force them to work in dangerous heat with noxious chemicals and pesticides. Wrongdoing is rampant at many Chinese-owned farms, where immigrants are often so fearful of their employers and the authorities that they do not cooperate with investigations, according to law enforcement officials, court cases, human rights advocates and workers.
The mistreatment and squalid conditions are the hallmarks of human trafficking, said Craig Williams, the chief agent of the marijuana and human trafficking sections of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.
“It’s hard to convey what it’s like until you’re standing there, looking at the people, looking at the environment, smelling the environment, seeing what they’re living in,” Williams said. “Your heart goes out to them like, ‘This is just wrong.’”
While problems are particularly bad in Oklahoma, studies and media reports have detailed similar risks nationwide to laborers, many of them recent arrivals who crossed the Mexican border illegally. Exploitation of Chinese immigrants pervades the marijuana underworld from California to New Mexico to Maine, according to interviews and court cases.
And even overseas, authorities have found patterns of mistreatment at Chinese-run marijuana sites from Chile to Ireland.
“These are people living in a situation of semi-slavery,” said a police official in Spain, a center of illegal marijuana cultivation in Europe, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for safety reasons. “They are locked up 24 hours a day. They don’t know what country they live in. They don’t have contact with the outside world.”
During raids in 2021 on cannabis plantations hidden in warehouses near Barcelona, Spain, police freed 10 immigrants from Fujian whom gangsters had forced to work to pay off smuggling debts of up to $35,000. The drug traffickers locked the workers in the dirty, windowless buildings, making them sleep on mattresses on the floor. Some of the victims spent up to a year in captivity, police said.
“Everyone has a different story, but the bottom line is that they have not escaped the darkness of China,” said Ju Ma, a Chinese human rights advocate who runs a migrant shelter in New York that has aided marijuana workers.
In the Zeng case, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics are investigating. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner recently concluded that the cause of the farmworker’s death was pneumonia.
“They are making so much money in the marijuana industry, but they are treating the workers like slaves,” Westin Zeng said. “I want to find out everything that happened and get justice for my family.”
TITLE: The “greenhouse effect”: How an oft-touted climate solution threatens agricultural workers
https://apnews.com/article/climate-greenhouses-agriculture-extreme-heat-c6d3473fa98e71317bbd66b64068e628
EXCERPT: Between 2010 and 2019, nursery and greenhouse operations nearly doubled their hiring of H-2A agricultural visa holders, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. But without some legally-binding protections, their ability to speak up about working conditions becomes harder.
There are no federal heat protections in the U.S. for agricultural workers, nor are there federal guidelines specifically requiring greenhouses to measure temperatures and humidity, though the Biden administration recently proposed a rule for workplaces to address heat.
California’s branch of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recently approved regulations for indoor heat, and several other states have their own rules on heat illness prevention. But enforcement of them can be tricky: for instance, workers are entitled to a 10 to 15-minute break, but that may be too short for them to properly shed and don their gear and so they may stay inside to ensure they’re back to work on time.
When [Mendoza worked in a greenhouse, it would take about 10 minutes to walk from her work station to a shaded area for a break, then another two to three minutes to shed her work clothes and plastic covers on her shoes. By then, her break was over. “So what we would normally do is not go outside,” she said. “Sometimes we would take our breaks inside the greenhouse... and only go outside for lunch.”
OSHA only has in their database two formal complaints about heat stress specifically in greenhouses, one in 2005 and one in 2017. That may reflect workers’ concerns about retaliation if they report life-threatening workplace conditions, said Abigail Kerfoot, senior staff attorney at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, a migrants’ rights organization. She pointed to what she calls “structural issues” with temporary visas and subcontracting of migrant labor in the United States.
Kerfoot said she has seen attempts by greenhouse employers to “distance” themselves “from responsibility for its workers through the use of subcontracting arrangements,” which essentially means they’re not directly responsible for their workers.
Between 2012 and 2022, 418 people died from work-related exposure to heat across industries, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
There is little research documenting the working conditions of greenhouse workers. Many of the studies that do exist are in countries outside of the U.S.
TITLE: The people who feed America are going hungry
https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/farmworker-hunger-crisis-climate-inflation-grocery-costs/
EXCERPT: The 2.4 million or so farmworkers who are the backbone of America’s agricultural industry earn among the lowest wages in the country. The average American household spends more than $1,000 a month on groceries, an almost unimaginable sum for families bringing home as little as $20,000 a year, especially when food prices have jumped more than 25 percent since 2019. Grappling with these escalating costs is not a challenge limited to farmworkers, of course — the Department of Agriculture says getting enough to eat is a financial struggle for more than 44 million people. But farmworkers are particularly vulnerable because they are largely invisible in the American political system.
“When we talk about supply chains and food prices going up, we are not thinking about the people who are producing that food, or getting it off the fields and onto our plates,” said Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli.
Xiuhtecutli works with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition to protect farmworkers from the occupational risks and exploitation they face. Few people beyond the workers themselves recognize that hunger is a problem for the community, he said — or that it’s exacerbated by climate change. The diminished yields that can follow periods of extreme heat and the disruptions caused by floods, hurricanes, and the like inevitably lead to less work, further exacerbating the crisis.
There isn’t a lot of aid available, either. Enrolling in federal assistance programs is out of the question for the roughly 40 percent of farmworkers without work authorization or for those who fear reprisals or sanctions. Even those who are entitled to such help may be reluctant to seek it. In lieu of these resources, a rising number of advocacy organizations are filling the gaps left by government programs by way of food pantries, collaborative food systems, and community gardens across America.
“Even though [farmworkers] are doing this job with food, they still have little access to it,” said Xiuhtecutli. “And now they have to choose between paying rent, paying gas to and from work, and utilities, or any of those things. And food? It’s not at the top of that list.”