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Hey, Gene. You want some milk.
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You know what? Sure.
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Yep. What the fuck is that the dairy industry is hella
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dirty guys. Immigrant farm workers are being treated super unfairly and
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to better understand what's going on.
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We have Melissa Sanchez on the line from Propublica.
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Hi, how are you doing?
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Good, good. And yourself?
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Welcome. Thank you for having me.
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Thank you for coming on.
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So we wanted to ask you,
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how did you first uncover this story?
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Sure. So sort of by chance I was connected with an
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immigrant rights advocate in Michigan who told me about a fire in
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a house for immigrant dairy workers in the western part of that
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state and two men from Southern Mexico died in that fire.
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And what, what really drew me to it and what drew
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this advocate to it was the fact that because dairy workers work
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not seasonally like migrant crop labor.
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The state's OSHA didn't investigate what happened or if the employer
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could have been responsible and that case sort of sucked me into
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this world of dairy workers and all the cracks that they fall
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through in state and federal protections.
01:14
Melissa, how many immigrants are working in the dairy business?
01:17
So it's, it's hard to say that number.
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But the, a lot of industry groups have said that at
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least half of the workers on dairy farms are immigrants.
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What we've seen in Wisconsin is a lot more than that.
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I'd say it's easily in the tens of thousands nationwide.
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And they're largely from Mexico increasingly from Central America,
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places like Nicaragua and Guatemala.
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And we've, we've heard of cases or met people from Ecuador
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or from Eastern Europe and even from South Africa,
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are they treated worse than farm workers?
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I think it's, it's all,
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it's all case by case,
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you know, we've talked to workers who feel like they're treated
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well and they're respected by their bosses and others who are called
01:55
racial slurs on a daily basis and who they get hurt when
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they get hurt and they get hurt very often.
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They're just ignored and they're fired and they're evicted from,
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from their homes. I think what makes dairy work different from
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other kinds of farm work?
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What we might normally think of like people in the fields is
02:12
that a lot of these federal and state protections just don't apply
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dairy farm owners can operate with a lot less scrutiny.
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So OSHA isn't often like in their business,
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like standards that exist for,
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for housing that employers often provide their workers doesn't get checked in
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the same way that it does for other kinds of farm work
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the people get injured all the time and workers' comp laws don't
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always apply to small farms and a lot of dairy farms are
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small. And what this means is when workers get hurt,
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they're just discarded and they can get fired and evicted and no
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medical treatment. And of course,
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the threat of deportation just hangs over everything.
02:49
Melissa, what can we do to not support these businesses,
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exploiting laborers. I wish,
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I wish I had a good answer because I think about this
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all the time when I'm at the grocery store getting my $8
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a gallon milk for my kids.
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There's labels for, you know,
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whole milk and there's labels for like free range eggs,
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but the same thing doesn't exist for,
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for, for the labor part of,
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so not a whole lot unless you like know a farm and
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you, and you talked to the workers,
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which is unreasonable for most of us.
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I will know that it doesn't have to be this way.
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And in Vermont, there's advocacy,
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there's a group called Migrant Justice that works with,
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with dairy workers and with farmers and they try to get like
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the milk buyers to the table to increase the,
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the price that they'll pay per gallon of milk and pass it
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on to workers. And there's,
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there's standards that come with that housing work conditions,
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et cetera, but that's only in Vermont,
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so big companies like Ben and Jerry's have signed on to that
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But for the rest of us who aren't there,
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there isn't a whole lot.
03:51
Well, thank you so much,
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Melissa. We really appreciate,
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you know, you sharing your insight and where can people
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find you propublica.org/dairy? Perfect.
04:02
Thank you so much for coming on.
04:04
Thanks for having me.
04:05
Thank you. Have a good one.
Series