- Farms rely heavily on foreign-born and undocumented workers for harvesting and picking crops.
- Changes in immigration policy and enforcement have made it difficult for farmers to find workers.
- Without access to labor, crops go to waste, leading to farmers giving away their produce.
- Farm workers are among the lowest paid workers and often face dangerous working conditions.
- Farm workers have historically been excluded from labor protections, including child labor laws.
- Children as young as 12 are legally allowed to work in agriculture, often in dangerous conditions.
- Farm workers suffer fatal on-the-job injuries at a higher rate than police officers and construction workers.

- Agricultural workers suffer fatal on-the-job injuries at a higher rate than police officers and construction workers.
- Farm workers face exposure to extreme heat, dangerous machinery, unsafe air quality, and abusive employers.
- Labor laws for agricultural workers are difficult to enforce, with understaffed agencies and minimal consequences for violations.
- The H-2A visa program, meant to provide temporary legal status for migrant workers, often leads to poor living conditions and exploitation.
- Cases of modern-day slavery and human trafficking have been uncovered in the agricultural industry.

- Farm workers have been organizing to improve conditions in the agricultural industry.
- The Coalition of Immokalee Workers launched a campaign to improve conditions in tomato fields in Immokalee, Florida.
- Taco Bell became the first big buyer to sign on to the CIW's Fair Food Program, agreeing to pay an extra penny per pound for tomatoes, with the money going to workers.
- More than a dozen restaurant chains and retailers, including McDonald's, Chipotle, Trader Joe's, and Walmart, have signed on to the Fair Food Program.
- The program has raised wages for tens of thousands of workers and is expanding to other crops and states.
- It is important to protect farm workers by enforcing labor laws and providing a potential path to citizenship.
- Farm workers deserve recognition and support for their contributions to the country.
- The Farming Simulator 2023 video game satirically highlights the ignored aspect of hired farm workers and the challenges they face.

- Farms heavily rely on foreign-born and undocumented workers for harvesting crops.
- Changes in immigration policy have made it difficult for farmers to find workers, leading to wasted crops.
- Farm workers face low wages, dangerous working conditions, and lack of labor protections.
- Children as young as 12 are legally allowed to work in agriculture, often in unsafe conditions.
- Farm workers suffer from high rates of fatal on-the-job injuries.
- Labor laws for agricultural workers are difficult to enforce, leading to exploitation and human trafficking.
- The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has launched a campaign to improve conditions in the agricultural industry.
- The Fair Food Program, signed by major restaurant chains and retailers, has raised wages for workers.
- It is important to enforce labor laws and provide a potential path to citizenship for farm workers.
- The Farming Simulator 2023 video game satirically highlights the challenges faced by hired farm workers.

John Oliver discusses the conditions farmworkers face, how we’ve failed to protect them, and the Jolly Green Giant’s body hair. 

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-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Our main story tonight 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.

Agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and a lot of exciting machinery.

And oh boy, Let me tell you about spraying a field with the double application rate and dynamic working with.

You know, I have great news for that guy who's never cultivated a field before.

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 to farming what Call of Duty is to war.

It looks similar, but if you were ever called upon to do the real thing, you would be categorically fucked.

Now, that farmer looks pretty much like the stereotypical 1 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 1 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.

Are most of them Latino guys, or are they...

These guys, citizens, residents, they all are legal.

a few minutes later, Meyers allowed us to resume the interview.

The legal documentation that has been presented to me is that they are illegal.

I've got to 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 1 job referral and 0 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.

RONAN FARROW, PBS NEWSHOUR CORRESPONDENT, The New

York Times NewsHour, reporting on the protests.

6000 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 TikTok.

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

So instead of throwing it away, he gave it away.

Okay, that third girl is clearly torn there 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 Giant's happy trail under a microscope.

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, 000 to $25, 000 a year, and they're often subjected to dangerous environments.

During 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.

1 of the most difficult things is just to come to a realization how little you mean to the people that you are working for.

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.

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.

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 exploitative, 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 created 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.

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.

1 representative even warned during 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.

Now, since then, The labor force has changed.

Black 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 1.

The child labor law in the US is pretty good, except when it comes to agriculture.

US law allows children to work in agriculture at far younger ages for unlimited hours outside of school in much more dangerous conditions than any other sector.

So a child can work perfectly legally for any farmer at age 12.

A child couldn't work serving the food that he can work 10, 12, 14 hours picking.

And look, I am not saying that working in a restaurant isn't tough.

Anyone who 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 hired children working in fields all across America picking our food.

Because, well, 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 this 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.

I 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.

You don't really think about a childhood.

Like, I've never really thought that a child is really supposed to...

A 12-year-old is supposed to have fun, exactly.

I always thought that you were supposed to work.

Although, while a 12-year-old under no circumstances 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.

You are a hormonal ticking time bomb at that age.

Honestly, the closest thing to a 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 wanna get a smoothie or whatever.

CROWD LAUGHS The lack of laws 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 1 thing to look up at a tall building and shudder, 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 Schoenborn Orchard today.

The voice on tape, Travis Schoenborn, the son of farm owners David and Valerie Schoenborn.

He was angry at 1 of the workers and let it be known in front of others.

pack his goddamn shit and get the fuck out of here while he still can.

He is not fucking with me or my mother at all.

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 if I'd have gone with the more accurate description, he lost his fucking shit 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.

So I don't know why he called them the N-word.

I just want to give you a chance to be clear and respond.

You hear him referring to people as fucking niggas.

I mean, well, clearly there are 9, 000 things there, but here is just 1 of them.

I bet you heard her say, they were Mexican, so I'm not sure why he called them the N-word and thought, wow, that is the wildest shit anybody in this marriage is going to say in the next 15 seconds.

Also, 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 1 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 4 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, there 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 1 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 2 farm workers in Idaho drowned in pits of cow manure at dairy operations, OSHA imposed fines of just $5, 000 for each of the men's deaths, which is nothing!

If an employee drowns 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' passports, charged them if they wanted to quit their jobs, or threatened 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 who she is?

that we're talking about is an epidemic in the fields.

Dolores Huerta, go have your UFW go picket the grower if all these cases have been going on.

If our growers know there's a problem, we're gonna 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.

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 1 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 H-2A visa program.

It allows migrant workers to legally enter the country, temporarily, for agricultural work.

For years, employers shied 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 H-2A has been ramped up considerably.

In fact, the number of H-2A positions has increased more than sevenfold in the past 17 years.

Basically, the program's 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.

And in principle, H-to-A 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 1 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 H-2A 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.

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 4 of my coworkers and I had to sleep outside.

We felt like we were on the border of death.

No 1 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.

A DOL investigation a few years back found that 1 labor contractor housed H-to-A workers in an old county jail that had recently serviced 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 H-2A workers on Georgia farms.

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.

individuals allegedly sold to another man in Indiana for

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 fucking slavery.

This case is ongoing, but the indictment asserts that this was a massive operation, which sought visas for over 71, 000 foreign workers to harvest onions and other crops.

And the government says that at least 2 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.

Department of Justice charging 24 individuals is part of what it calls Operation Blooming Onion.

Just pull 1 out for the social media person at Outback Steakhouse who saw Blooming Onion trending on Twitter and thought their job got easier for 2 seconds before realizing it actually just got a lot fucking 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 0 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.

Those are some massive brands that you can now surprisingly feel kind of okay about in this 1 very narrow way.

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 1 issue, they have my full Florida tomato-specific support.

Which is frankly more than I can say for Wendy's, Kroger and Publix, who amazingly, have yet to sign on, so fuck 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.

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 and 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 H-to-A program and ensure that its participants, and ideally, all farm workers, have a potential path to citizenship.

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Farmworkers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)