CA Failed To Keep Farm, Food Workers Safe During The Pandemic: Study

CALIFORNIA — Using data from California's workplace safety regulators, researchers found that food and farm employers endangered their workers during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

The report from the California Institute for Rural Studies said that these employers routinely failed to require and provide workers with face masks, did not enforce physical distancing and failed to notify workers when COVID-19 outbreaks occurred.

Researchers analyzed Cal/OSHA inspections from April 2020 through December 2021. In that time period, food production employers had four times more citations and fines for violating COVID-19 guidelines than employers in all other industries combined in California, according to the report.

Fines for such citations remain low or unresolved, the report also found.

"...We reported that they [bosses] did not give us face masks, in other words, we asked them for face masks, and [bosses] just laughed," a 40-year-old California farmworker only identified as Eliseo, told researchers.

The implications of neglecting COVID-19 rules had a significant impact on food production workers, who are largely BIPOC and immigrants, researchers wrote. Many of these workers are typically seasonal, contingent and receive low-wages, according to the analysis.

"Decades-long systemic failures, entrenched food production cultures that sacrifice worker health and safety for profits, and industry state compromises are all implicated in the disproportionate burdens of harm documented in this report," researchers wrote.

Authors of the report urged the state to consider reforms to occupational health and safety systems for such workers.

"...state agencies must be more transparent with their own data to support long-overdue radical changes to their institutional and operational cultures," the report concluded.

The report named 36 agricultural workplaces that use contractors. Brutocao Vineyards, in Hopland, was named in the report as Cal/OSHA fined the vineyard $3,710 for failing to provide face masks to three workers and neglecting physical distancing rules.

In an interview with CalMatters, Len Brutocao, director of vineyard operations, blamed his workers.

“We provided the masks, and they just didn’t wear them,” he said in an interview, adding that the company has since increased training and stressed wearing masks.

Food workers have the lowest median wage than any other workforce, Suzanne Adely, co-director of the Los Angeles-based Food Chain Workers Alliance, told CalMatters.

The institute made the following recommendations to the state:

- Strengthen protections for workers and bolster COVID-19 paid sick leave.

- Create a new state and federal occupational health and safety agency that will prioritize the needs and concerns of BIPOC and immigrant workers with a special division dedicated to food production workers.

- Hire and train more regionally-based and culturally and linguistically competent staff under Cal/OSHA and related state agencies.

- Increase health inspectors and inspections.

- Make Cal/OSHA and related local, state and federal agency data transparent and publicly accessible.

- Collaborate with food production workers and their allies on policy decisions, procedural designs and in data analysis to more effectively address and prevent occupational health and safety issues.

-Give food production workers a professional status, livable salaries, safe, hygienic and respectful working conditions.