Farmworkers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

foreign [Music] concerns farming Farms are where we get our food our metaphors about fascism and they are even the subject of surprisingly popular video games like this I've played Farming Simulator a whole new world was revealed to me agriculture animal husbandry Forestry and a lot of exciting Machinery never cultivated a field before and oh boy let me tell you about spraying a field with the double application rate and dynamic working with that's something else believe me farming is easy mastering it is a challenge and there's always time to relax you know and great news for that guy who's never cultivated a field before you still haven't you haven't grown a vegetable you haven't sprayed anything with a double rate of anything and you haven't even really watched any Barnyard animals go to pound town that game is too farming what Call of Duty is to war it looks similar but if you were ever caught upon to do the real thing you would be categorically now that farmer looks pretty much like the stereotypical one in most people's minds a white guy in overalls on a tractor it's a Trope drawn straight from children's picture books where Farmers always seem to be a white man with some straw in his mouth who's holding an adorable little piglet that while the book skips over it he does eventually kill and eat but while some farmers do indeed look like that many of the people doing some of the hardest work on farms hired farmed laborers do not there are roughly one and a half million hired Farm Workers in the U.S mostly crop workers and government estimates indicate that most of those are foreign born and among them the majority are undocumented and this has been an Open Secret for years now just watch this interview with a farm owner from 2009 quickly take a turn how many guys do you employ I have 22 full-time employees and most of them Latino guys or are they 100 these guys citizens residents they all are legal how do you know that cut the camera we talked off camera and a few minutes later Myers allowed us to resume the interview the legal documentation that has been printed they're they're illegal oh oh they are are they I gotta say that is not a particularly convincing bit of misdirection there cover-wise it's about as effective as a camouflage outfit that just says not a guy on it the truth is Farms depend heavily on foreign-born workers to do harvesting and picking as many crops are too delicate to be mechanized that is why most fruits and vegetables are still harvested by hand and by and large American citizens have shown very little interest in doing that in fact when Washington State spent thousands on an advertising campaign to find U.S Farm Workers in 2021 it resulted in one job referral and zero hires but over the past decade and a half changes in Immigration policy and enforcement have made it much more difficult for Farmers to find workers forcing some extreme choices 6 000 people showed up on a Saturday for the chance to pick some free veggies the farmer whose family owns the field had been Sleepless for days and getting ever more agitated on Tick Tock I need this video to go out and for people to see it and understand the ramifications of what's going on at the border and the lack of Labor that we have in this country agitated that he couldn't hire enough people to pick the asparagus crop some hundred and eighty thousand dollars worth so instead of throwing it away he gave it away do you guys like eating this between a child's natural hatred of asparagus and their natural love of disagreeing with siblings also I'm a little embarrassed to admit I didn't know that's what a field of asparagus looks like you're telling me it doesn't grow together in a nice little Bunch it just sticks out of the ground individually like a big field of body hair tell me that doesn't look like you put the jolly green Giants happy trail under a microscope I'm mad the point is without access to labor crops just rot in the field it's probably why Farm Workers were categorized as essential by the Department of Homeland Security during the pandemic and yet while we claim they're essential we sure don't treat them like it Farm Workers are among our lowest paid workers making on average in the range of 20 to 25 000 a year and they're often subjected to dangerous environments join the California wildfire season you may have seen videos of Farm Workers toiling in the foreground of a raging fire and even when their workplace isn't actively burning to the ground they will tell you their work can sometimes feel pretty dehumanizing one of the most difficult things is just to go to a realization how little you mean to the people that that you are working for they don't officially start getting paid until your first bucket is filled if you fall behind you have to run to try and catch up a lot of people can't stand it because it's so hot sometimes you could feel the breeze from the pesticide they were spraying over there it felt good I thought he's pretty brutal although appreciating the cooling air from the pesticides is some legendary glass half full thinking sure it's hard work but the poison Breeze is nice so it kind of balances out the way our farm labor system works is deeply exploited but the thing is that is very much by Design so tonight let's talk about Farm Workers the conditions they face how we fail to protect them and what we can do going forward and let's start by acknowledging the history of farm work in America has always been rooted in exploitation from its origins in slavery to its later Evolution into sharecropping but what you might not know is that during the New Deal as laws were finally passed to establish some Bedrock labor protections Farm Workers were repeatedly and specifically excluded from them so for instance the 1935 law which protected employees rights to join unions explicitly stated that the term employee shall not include any individual employed as an agricultural laborer and the 1938 law which is a federal minimum wage and overtime again carved out an exception so those Provisions shall not apply to anyone employed in agriculture which is pretty insulting isn't it it's like announcing your company's new anti-sexual harassment policy but clarifying that none of it protects Jeff is exempt so slap his ass twist his nips we don't care it is open season on Jeff and make no mistake the reasons for that were explicitly racist one representative even warned joint debate on the minimum wage bill that you cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis and get away with it that representative it was actually Tucker Carlson it turns out he's a Highlander now since then the labor force has changed Black America Americans left the sharecropping system during the Great Migration and Farmers increasingly came to rely on laborers from Mexico and other Central American nations and over the years leaders like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta formed the United Farm Workers and won some significant gains the federal minimum wage was expanded to include Farm Workers in 1978 and some states do now provide at least some access to overtime pay and collective bargaining but the fact is Farm Workers are still excluded from a lot of basic labor protections including this major one the child labor law in the U.S is pretty good except when it comes to Agriculture and then it has a big gay people U.S law allows children to work in agriculture at far younger ages for unlimited hours outside of school in much more dangerous conditions than any others so a child can work perfectly legally for any Farmer at age 12 that child couldn't work serving the food that he can work 10 12 18 hours picking yeah and that is absurd and look I am not saying that working in a restaurant isn't tough anyone thinks otherwise should be forced to serve an imperfect omelet to James Corden but it's clearly not the same thing is it and this exception isn't just to let kids work on their own family's Farms there are higher children working in fields all across America picking our food because what most jobs are off limits to kids under 14. agricultural employers may even hire children younger than 12 to work on small farms with written parental consent and they should probably go without saying but this work can be dangerous for kids just listen to this girl who started working in tobacco Fields when she was only 12 describe her first day on the job that felt really lightheaded and dizzy and I wanted to go get a cup of water and I could not see to where the truck was that contained the water and I was looking for my mom and I couldn't find my mom eventually I just fell you don't really think about a childhood like I've never really thought that a child is really supposed to at 12 year olds is supposed to have fun exactly I always thought that you were supposed to work that is terrible although while a 12 year olds under no circumstance it should be fainting in a field I will say it is a bit of a stretch to say that a 12 year old is supposed to have fun because fundamentally they are still 12. this is just around the corner for me you are a hormonal ticking time bomb at that age honestly the closest thing to fund that is available to you at 12 is going to the mall by yourself for the first time to just kind of walk around I guess since you don't really have any money except for like a smoothie or something if you want to get a smoothie or whatever the lack of applying to Farm Workers has left them facing truly dangerous conditions agricultural workers suffer fatal on-the-job injuries at a rate far higher than police officers and more than twice the rate of construction workers which is wild because it's one thing to look up at a tall building and shutter thinking about the physical risk it must have taken to put a pane of glass up that high but it feels ridiculous to feel the same way about a beet and goat cheese salad Farm Workers face exposure to extreme heat dangerous Machinery unsafe air quality and impromptu pesticide showers and some Farm owners can be abusive employers just take this story from a few years ago it's quiet but cloudy at EDS Sean Barn Orchard today hello but not on this day apart it was hot it's a tower the voice on tape Travis schoenborn the son of farm owners David and Valerie schoenborn he was angry at one of the workers and let it be known in front of others tell him well he still can the other at all holy that was about 95 bleeps and Trust local news to always find a diplomatic way to describe things he was angry and let it be known in front of others sure that's not technically untrue but I'd have gone with the more accurate description he lost his at an apple farm a farmer remembered that his parents owned and they had a truly special response when confronted with that video they blame the migrant worker alleged victim in this case and accuse him of threatening Valerie and being obscene what did he do to threaten you he called me a name in Spanish I'm not repeating it there was no outright apology instead this first of all they weren't black they were Mexicans so I don't know why he called them the n-word I just want to give you a chance to be to be clear and respond yeah you hear him referring to people as Nick but I know okay okay okay here's the thing I mean well clearly there are 9 000 things there but here is just one of them I bet you heard her say they were Mexicans so I'm not sure why he called them the n-word and thought wow that is the wildest anybody in this marriage is going to say in the next 15 seconds and then you were dead wrong what's I just want to point out the inconsistency between having a problem with saying a vague unknown word in Spanish and having no problem at all saying an extremely specific one in English I won't repeat this Spanish word because it's offensive but if you talk to my husband he'll say the N word in about Force seconds anyway I raised my son better than to use slurs incorrectly now in that particular case a worker caught that tirade on video and gave it to migrant legal aid and the son later pled guilty to of all things disturbing the peace but even that pathetic level of accountability is extremely rare and look clearly not all farmers are abusive employers but to the extent that any want to be that can be shockingly little to stop them because even when labor laws do apply to agricultural workers There is almost no way to enforce them take California the most productive agricultural state in the nation the agency responsible for monitoring workplace safety there is so understaffed that it currently has roughly one field inspector available for every 90 000 workers with only a handful of those inspectors speaking any language other than English and even when there are consequences they can be laughable after two Farm Workers in Idaho drowned in pits of cow manure at Dairy operations OSHA in post finds of just five thousand dollars for each of the men's debts which is nothing if an employee drowned in the universally agreed upon worst thing to drown in that should cost their employer a lot more than a fifth of a Hyundai Sonata and that's not even getting into the fact that some Farms limit their liability by using so-called Farm labor contractors who hire workers and then contract them out and who've been found to be the worst violators of federal employment law in agriculture some of them have confiscated workers passport charge them if they wanted to quit their jobs or threaten them with deportation so at every turn this is an environment where vulnerable workers can understandably feel reluctant to come forward take sexual harassment and assault which Farm Workers say is a big problem and yet just watch how this head of a farm owners trade group responds when asked about it you know Dolores Huerta you know she had yes okay can I read you something she said oh please I'd like to hear her comment okay she says that this sexual harassment that we're talking about is an epidemic in the fields doloreswerter bring me those cases go have your ufw go uh go pick at the grower if all these cases have been going on if our Growers know there's a problem we're going to deal with it why didn't you go to the grower and tell me that because well we were feared for their jobs and their lives no that's a poor excuse yeah is it though is it because I've got to say I can believe that people aren't bringing harassment cases to Growers if they're acting anything like he just did after all merely hearing the name Dolores Huerta sent him into a visible rage so I have to imagine that off camera he's even more of a teddy bear and at this point you might be thinking well perhaps one way to help workers would be to remove their fear of deportation and create a system where they can come into this country legally well we actually did that but unfortunately the way we did it left massive gaps for Bad actors to operate in back in 1986 we created what's known as the h2a Visa program it allows migrant workers to legally enter the country temporarily for agricultural work for years employers showed away from using it because it was cheaper and easier to Simply hire undocumented workers but as it's become harder to find them the use of h2a has been ramped up considerably in fact the number of h2a positions has increased more than seven fold in the past 17 years basically the programs been around since the 80s was on the back burner until a few years ago and now it's extremely popular think of it as the Kieran Culkin of the Agricultural world in principle people h2a does sound good and more Farm Workers get temporary legal status which you would assume would make them feel safer but sadly that just hasn't been the case for one thing like many work visas these are tied to your employer so if you lose your job you also lose your right to be in the country causing a massive power imbalance and given that imbalance it is no surprise that many employers feel comfortable skirting the protections that workers are supposed to receive for instance under the law employers must provide housing for their h2a workers but in practice the conditions can be far below what the program requires as this man quickly found out the house where we lived where Manuel brought us to was very old it had spiders cockroaches and the bathrooms didn't work the house was gross it was very dirty you could clearly tell that the house was abandoned for a long time and Manuel brought us there the house didn't have heat and the temperature hit 6 degrees Celsius and four of my co-workers and I had to sleep outside we felt like we were on the border of death that is horrific no one would see that and say that is a good place for people to live they maybe say that's a nice spot for ghosts to throw up but that's it and that's not a one-off a DOL investigation a few years back found that one labor contractor house h2a workers in an old County Jail that have recently served to the community's Halloween haunted house this is the kitchen which you can see still had fake blood on the refrigerators and the floor and workers clearly shouldn't be forced to sleep around a bunch of spooky decorations even people who work at Spirit Halloween don't sleep in the store except of course for Dennis but he's made it very clear that that is a sex thing but poor living accommodations are just the tip of the iceberg here in 2021 the doj launched a massive indictment involving the treatment of H2O workers on Georgia farms and the details are appalling prosecutors calling it modern day slavery in the fields of Southern Georgia years worth of damning horrific allegations victims allegedly forced to live in cramped dirty trailers with raw sewage leaking into the trailers threatened them with deportation and detained them in a Work Camp surrounded by an electric fence and in 2018 30 individuals allegedly sold to another man in Indiana for twenty one thousand four hundred and eighty one dollars wow you know at times some people can be quick to play the this is slavery card whether you're a teenager asked to mow the lawn or an office worker who has to come in on Sunday but as frustrating as those situations can be neither involves being sold in bulk to a man in Indiana because that is actual slavery this case is ongoing but the indictment asserts that this was a massive operation we sought visas for over 71 000 foreign workers to harvest onions and other crops and the government says that at least two died as a result of the workplace conditions there and while I'm glad that action was eventually taken I will say for a list of charges this Sinister the name they chose could have used some work a new 54-page indictment by the U.S Department of Justice charging 24 individuals is part of what it calls operation blooming onion personal Outback Steakhouse who saw blooming onion trending on Twitter and thought their job got easier for two seconds before realizing that actually just got a lot harder and at this point I've told you about everything from child labor to workers drowning in manure to this sale of human beings so you're hopefully wondering how do we fix this well Farm Workers have been organizing to address some of these issues for years now take what happened in Immokalee Florida as recently as a decade ago the Tomato Fields there were being called Ground Zero for modern day slavery but a group called The Coalition of Immokalee workers launched a campaign to improve conditions pressuring not just Farmers but the big name businesses that relied on their produce in 2005 Taco Bell became the first big buyer to sign on to the ciw's fair food program buyers agree to pay an extra penny per pound for tomato money that goes to workers and buyers only do business with participating Florida Farmers more than a dozen restaurant chains and retailers have signed on including McDonald's chipotle Trader Joe's and last year Walmart which sells 20 percent of America's tomatoes wow those are some massive brands that you can now surprisingly feel kind of okay about in this one very narrow way is Walmart a good company overall it's not up for me to say but let's say no it's absolutely terrible but is it a good company regarding the tomatoes it sells from Florida specifically sure on that one issue they have my full Florida tomato specific support which is frankly more than I can say for Wendy's Kroger and publics who amazingly have yet to sign on so them under the fair food program signatories agreed to purchase only from Growers who implemented a human rights-based code of conduct on their Farms it also covers a 24 7 complaint line for workers and perhaps most importantly an independent regulatory body that conducts audits in which they interview at least half the workforce and it's been a success the vast majority of tomato Harvesters in Florida have joined the program raising wages for tens of thousands of workers and the program is now expanding into other crops in other states but it clearly shouldn't just be on Farm Workers to fight for a decent life we need to make sure that they are at least protected by the same labor laws that the rest of us enjoy and make sure that those laws are actually enforced and I would argue that we also need to retool the h2a program and ensure that it's participants and ideally all Farm Workers have a potential path to citizenship because after working so hard to feed this country frankly they deserve one after all you made me a citizen and I haven't fed you once I know I know that you think I have but that's Jamie Oliver and we are different people look Farm Workers provide this country with our most basic necessity and in return We act like they either don't matter or don't exist the message that we have sent to them has consistently been you don't count until we fix our broken system the very least that we can do is fix our Farming Simulator game so that everyone is forced to have a much more accurate sense of what the people who grow their food are actually up against welcome to the new Farming Simulator 2023 all your favorite features are back beautiful Vistas tough working tractors and of course animal husbandry but this year we're also expanding to include the parts of farming most people don't like to think about hired Farm Workers we're bringing Cutting Edge graphics and gameplay to the most ignored aspect of Agriculture you'll be able to choose between hiring undocumented workers with no protections against abuse or the a legal version of that you can customize their clothes their hair even choose from a surprising range of Ages from older to younger to Dear God how on Earth is this legal we've also got a brand new assortment of maps from Midwestern fields to vast asparagus taints to literally the middle of a raging wildfire and if your workers need a pet talk you can help them out with our new motivational mini game warm up your odds of getting caught are practically zero oh you can also use our new housing tool to design h2a compliant-ish housing for your workers the less you spend the more you save and all of this is to put food on the table of people who will never once think about how it got there just remember the real secret to mastering farming is being the master of other people wait not that I guess kind of that Farming Simulator 2023 rated not okay for anyone

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 4,048,812

Keywords:

Id: 41vETgarh_8

Length: 25min 1sec (1501 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 16 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/traumalt]

Was that Nick Offerman narrating on the Farming Sim bit at the end?

[u/mc_hammerandsickle]

just wanted to add, it's not just that Wendys, Publix, and Kroger haven't agreed to join the Fair Food Agreement, they outright refuse to

in college, i worked closely with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and they have been trying to get these companies to join the program for years

this was almost a decade ago and they still refuse to join

fuck them and fuck anyone who supports them even after learning this information

[u/Spanky_McJiggles]

There was a push in New York in recent years to update archaic overtime rules in regard to farm labor. From what I remember, OT didn't start until like 80 hours worked, and the legislature was trying to bump that down to a still very high 60 hours.

Let me tell you, you would've thought they were trying to outlaw farms in the Empire State with how the farm owners were acting.

It really is a whole industry built on the back of worker exploitation that is tough to change because of how highly the public regards the idea of farmers. (Not the actual farmers/laborers themselves, just the bumper sticker ideology of "no farmers, no society!")

[u/Shamcgui]

Literally, the minute I just got done watching the show, this pops up on my feed. John? Is that you john? Isn't it way past your bedtime? LOL

[u/Thefishlord]

I might be misremembering the book but wasn’t animal farm like demonstrably about communism Not fascism ?

[u/BoogsterSU2]

can't wait for the release of Farming Simulator 23!

[u/Rosstin316]

My wife and I went fruit picking at a local farm in New Hampshire last fall and we made note of how all the employees of their little general store were folksy white people and every single employee working the field was black or brown.

[u/Loyalist_Pig]

I would love to know the behind the scenes on the Farming Simulator bit. I assume it was in collaboration with the actual Farming Simulator devs right?

[u/Porrick]

I didn't expect to see Farming Simulator burned so savagely, but here it is.