Beto V, heard the ambulance stop at the Colonial Motel where he quarantined himself through his employer, approaching police sirens.It’s his first clue that a fellow farmer had died of COVID-19.
Beto, who used an abbreviated edition of his call for retaliation concerns, confined to a one-story hotel room under the direction of Leodegario Chávez Alvarado, leader of the domestic team and driving force who died on July 7 in the midst of an epidemic in the agricultural sector of the city of Santa.Maria, where the fields of strawberries, lettuce and celery stretch for miles.
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Beto contracted the same virus and worked for the same agricultural labor contractor, Alco Harvesting.He said he felt abandoned and ignored once the hotel door closed him.You don’t forget to have anyone in control check it out.
“Aha left us, ” Beto, Prectically nothing month was left to us. They took us food but didn’t talk to us on the phone, not ‘how are you’ or anything. No one would know what we were.”
A month-old survey through CalMatters and The Salinas Californian revealed reports of six epidemics among staff of seven corporations employing guest staff in four counties in the state, making more than 350 sick.Without strict state or federal guidelines, some counties have difficulty detecting or containing epidemics.
Santa Barbara County’s director of public health, Van Do-Reynoso, said he did not report the outbreak at Alco Harvesting until the state firm guilty of regulating the office’s protection informed him of Chávez Alvarado’s death later in the week.
Only then did his epidemiology team see the pattern: a handful of positive effects of the same direction.Some had written to Alco Harvesting’s parent company, Bonipak; others have left the “employer” box empty in their documents.
By the time his team learned that there was an epidemic, the virus had already begun to spread.
Alco Harvesting’s still-active outbreak has trapped 91 workers, the largest epidemic among a single company that hounds can verify to date. In general, counties describe an epidemic as at least 3 other people who were in contact in the same place.
Many of those paintings for three of the five largest guest staff employers in California.Federal documents show that they are opting for products from some of the biggest names in the United States: Trader Joe’s, Sunkist and Albertsons store brand, Signature Farms, among them.
Albertsons owns grocery stores such as Lucky, Safeway and Vons.
Cal/OSHA, the state-owned company that regulates security, is investigating the staff deaths of 3 guest staff employers in California, adding Alco Harvesting, Chávez Alvarado’s employer.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been in the area of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But it’s not the first time It has no reports to date to suggest that COVID-19 can be stuck through food, however, federal company officials have suggested to the public that they wash food and use hygiene practices anyway.
“We’ve had a lot of questions about the potential threat of virus food and so far there’s no evidence that this is happening,” said Erin DiCaprio, food virologist at the University of California, Davis.
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The ability of Californians to eat ripe red strawberries, crisp celery hearts, and new leafy vegetables depends on guest farm staff being so close to homes that they are one step away from infection.
However, unlike other collective life institutions, such as retirement homes, neither federal nor state officials have issued security needs or express reports for the protection of guest workers.
California employs one in 10 guest employees in the United States this year.Although that guest staff represents only about 5% of all agricultural staff in the state, they are especially vulnerable to the virus because they live in confined spaces and would possibly face systemic problems.tension that helps keep them quiet.
Agricultural industry leaders say they are doing everything they can to protect workers, but say that superior regulation and chronic housing shortages in California have left their hands tied to housing.
Do-Reynoso’s message to other countries is bleak: epidemics among guest staff are “inevitable.”
“When you have an overcrowded living condition, when you have a population that might not have access to physical care services, prevention services, social support, when you have a population that may be socially isolated,” Do-Reynoso said, “everything turns the best typhoon into a pandemic.”
Alco hired Beto in Mexico, who according to the company’s painting order began painting in March, a few days before the state shelter in order, the company took him to Santa Maria to pick lettuce six hours a day, six days a week.
Every day, Beto and the rest of the staff gave up before dawn to move to the fields, once there, they walked slowly in the lines for hours, cutting the header at its base and cutting the outer sheets for packaging.
At night, he and the other 320 employees went to sleep at a hotel, an average of five other people in line with the room, according to documents filed through Alco with the US Department of Labor.But it’s not the first time
More than a week after Chávez Alvarado’s death, Beto commented on a Digital Time report posted on Facebook about the outbreak.History reports that 14 staff members were quarantined at the Colonial Motel.It’s wrong, Beto wrote, more than 30 farmworkers have been quarantined next to him.
Beto said he shot during the day and told reporters that he had been arrested for his colleague’s drug and alcohol paraphernalia and had asked him to leave his 40th birthday.Upon leaving, Beto said the official who expelled him told him not to run.your mouth on Facebook.
Alco Harvesting CEO Jeremy MacKenzie said in an email that he cannot comment on express disciplinary action and that the company “respects and respects all legislation that establishes freedom of expression and that we comply with all local, state and federal COVID-19 guidelines.””
Beto returned to his home in Baja California, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border 17 days after he went into quarantine and days after his symptoms disappeared.
Guests are afraid to speak
Guest staff like Beto arrive in the United States on H-2A visas, which are similar to those of their employers.Upon entering the country, they are transported, housed and fed through their employer.
During the pandemic, some employers ordered staff not to leave their homes after work, further minimizing their contacts with the outside world.Most are hired in Mexico; many don’t speak English.A growing number of other people speak only indigenous languages such as triqui, purépecha or Mixteco, making them even more isolated.
This would possibly leave guest staff undecided or afraid to speak.
While the number of guests recruited through California employers has increased exponentially, from less than 2000 in 2011 to more than 21,300 by 2020, according to July data, the number of H-2A employer hard work violations nationwide has also increased.according to a recent NBC poll.
Even without the strength dynamics inherent in the H-2A program, agriculture is at risk.
Agricultural staff were 3 times more likely to get COVID-19 than staff in any other industry, according to a report from the California Institute of Rural Studies (CIRS) based on Monterey County’s knowledge last June.CiSR and co-founder Don Villarejo said the proportion is most likely true state-round, a statement backed by Norm Groot, executive director of the Monterey County Agricultural Office.
(The story continues below)
Farm staff face the biggest threat of infection at work, but at home, said Dr. Ed Moreno, Monterey County Health Officer.
In apartments, motels and hard-working camps where California guests sleep an average of five by room, according to research by federal records, “a resident is an epidemic because of the option that it will spread as what we see,” Reynoso said.
Advocates of agriculture said that many agricultural manufacturers and marketers had taken steps to combat the spread of the virus in the fields, such as more hand-washing stations, transporting staff in small equipment, and requiring them to wear masks to work, such as through Cal/OSHA Organizations like the California Strawberry Commission have worked to succeed in people who do not speak English, transmitting classified advertisements on Spanish-language radio stations in Spanish and Aboriginal languages, explaining the importance of social estrangement and hand washing, and others, such as the Central California Producers and Carriers Association, have intensified with short-term quarantine housing for domestic agricultural staff and visitors who are HIV positive.
However, said Jamie Johansson, president of the California Agricultural Bureau, employers are paralyzed when it comes to hosting guests in rural California.
“Lack of employment has been a chronic challenge in many Communities in California, and this has become more complicated as more and more farmers have started using the H-2A program,” Johansson said.”Regulations in many California communities make it difficult to build new housing, especially new employee housing.State law has also created obstacles to new H-2A housing jobs.
“The inability or long-term reluctance of public establishments to act on these disorders has contributed to the disruptions we are seeing today.”
State MP Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) agreed.
“We want to do much more as a state when we provide farming communities with housing solutions,” Rivas said.”We want to reduce critical overpopulation in our communities.
“But,” he said, “you believe that the federal program deserves to provide rules on how such staff deserve to be accommodated that reflects the demanding workforce situations required in this pandemic.”
Julia, an Alco Harvesting domestic worker who worked in Santa Barbara with Chávez Alvarado, said in the days leading up to Chávez Alvarado’s quarantine that he appeared ill, even feverish. At that time, like Julia, Chávez Alvarado thinks that the virus is not a genuine threat, “that it would not be that close,” Julia said, “that it would not get too close.”
CalMatters and The Californian accepted Julia through her sister’s call because she feared reprisals.
Then Chávez Alvarado died.
“According to HIPPA’s laws, we know to this day what happened between him and the clinic’s fitness professionals,” wrote MacKenzie of Alco Harvesting.
Eight days later, four Alco Harvesting staff members called a loose local medical clinic the same day, said Dennis Apel, a volunteer who is helping run the clinic.All said several guest employees of Chávez Alvarado’s team had tested positive, but their superiors ordered the paintings if they showed symptoms, he said.
“We are aware that symptomatic workers are working,” said MacKenzie, who answered questions about asymptomatic workers continuing to work.
“Any worker who has symptoms of COVID-19 is quarantined and examined as soon as possible,” MacKenzie said, adding that the company had hired medical experts to oversee coronavirus testing and prevention the day after Chávez Alvarado’s death.
Julia, one of the workers who called the Apel clinic.
After seeing Chavez Alvarado go from being a colorful, prankster to dying in a matter of weeks, Julia now believed in the virus.I had tested negative, but was afraid of paintings along the 4 H-2A staff who knew I had tested positive for COVID.19.His superiors, he said, had told them, “If you have no squaxes, go to work” – “If you have no symptoms, go to the painting.”
And that’s what they did, Julia said, “And they went to work.”
Congressman Jimmy Panetta (D-Carmel Valley), whose district is the fertile Salinas Valley, said the pandemic had “highlighted many inequalities that exist in our country” for farmworkers.
Panetta demanded more PPE, testing, education and transportation, as a federal investment for more housing for agricultural workers.The vice presidential candidate, Senator Kamala Harris (D-California) and Congresswoman Rivas, joined Panetta in asking for greater protections for agricultural workers.
“It’s the best time for Congress to provide protections to all the must-have personnel who bear the brunt of the threat by running every day to remain Americans and who help keep food on the table for so many communities in California and across the country.Harris said in an email.
Joint investigation through CalMatters and Salinas in California into H-2A employers and a review of federal public records of at least six outbreaks in 4 California penthouse counties: Monterey, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Fresno.
To employ others and temporarily take them to the United States for work, corporations like Alco Harvesting will have to register documents called H-2A agricultural demining orders with the federal government.Journalists reviewed those records as far as the highest concentrations of guest staff were located.and interviewed staff, activists and public fitness departments in 10 counties to identify and verify outbreaks.
The outbreaks involve seven other employers, adding 3 of California’s five largest guest staff employers: Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, Elkhorn Packing and Royal Oak Ag Services, who together employ one in six guest employees in California this year.
Employers in coronavirus outbreaks:
Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, Elkhorn Packing, Venegas Farming, Royal Oak Ag Services, Maga’a Labor Services and Wawona Packing did not respond to requests for comment by email and phone.
Santa Barbara and Ventura counties showed the extent of outbreaks within their borders, while Fresno County showed at least 3 positive cases among Wawona Packing employees, officials may not tell if H-2A staff were involved.points of an outbreak in the country, however, he said in an email that the company had responded to outbreaks in H-2A households.
Representatives from the United Farm Workers and California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), who had spoken with the staff involved, said they had been informed by several other people of the Elkhorn outbreak in Monterey County.
“No fewer than nine employees have become ill,” said Cynthia Rice, CRLA’s director of litigation, defense and education.”A successful team, I don’t know too far.”
A spokesman for Sunkist Growers said in a statement that manufacturers delivering fruit to their packaging plants “must comply with state and federal laws” and suggested that “the state establish cellular and fast-controlled sites in all agricultural areas.”
Spokesmen for Trader Joe’s and Albertsons declined to comment.
A spokesperson for Cal/OSHA, the state firm regulating office security, said he investigates COVID-19-related deaths among Staff at Alco Harvesting, Elkhorn Packing and Venegas Farming, all of whom employ H-2A staff.
Overall, CalMatters and The Californian demonstrated that more than 350 employees of H-2A employers have been in disrepair with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.Although some would possibly be domestic employees, this total represents just under 2% of the total.number of guest employees in the state, but the actual number is probably much higher, they say researchers and fitness professionals.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 40% of other people with COVID-19 will be asymptomatic and many do not know they have the virus.
“The big challenge is that you don’t know who’s infected,” said Dr. Max Cuevas, general manager of Salinas Valley Health Clinic, a chain of clinics on the Central Coast serving low-income farmers.”The other people”.They are exposed to other people who would possibly become infected.”
The environment of the paintings, the predisposition to certain diseases (such as diabetes or disease of the center) among Latinos, the lack of physical attention and overcrowded housing mean that agricultural staff are much more likely to contract COVID-19 and suffer complications, Cuevas said.
Counties also say they have contacted farmworkers.
Tom Fuller, an environmental conditioning specialist at the Fresno County Department of Public Health, said he found disorders that sought to obtain employer or non-public data from the farm staff who tested positive for the virus, even though he doesn’t ask questions about immigration status…
“Employees are quite reluctant to identify their employer,” Fuller said.”They’ll tell us they paint in a safe factory and when we call that factory they say, ‘Oh, this is a hard labor force, they don’t paint here, they paint for a contractor.’
Some employers have wonderful moments to involve outbreaks among guest workers.
John said he was one of 16 guest workers from Wawona Packing who tested positive for the virus (Fresno County officials showed there had been cases among Wawona Packing workers, but did not reveal the number of other people inflamed and did not know if there were any H-2A workers.) The stone fruit company promptly ordered him quarantined, along with the other five men with whom he shared an apartment in a small town in Fresno County.Subsequently, the men were moved to personal rooms.
During the approximately 3 weeks he was quarantined, John had two days of paid leave for ill health, as required by federal law and the California pandemic.He showed no symptoms.
“Almost everything we needed was provided to us,” said John, who agreed to speak of his delight on the condition that he be known by his grandfather’s name.He was worried that he wouldn’t be rehired if he was made public that he was talking to the press.
Federal law sets a limit on the overcrowding of H-2A homes.Nationally, an average of 7.6 guest employees sleep in a room, according to a federal records investigation.In California, H-2A staff tend to live about five more people.consistent with the room.
That didn’t replace the pandemic.
Once the pandemic began, the Ministry of Labour gave staff greater flexibility to move staff to new housing sites “according to the fitness of agricultural staff,” even though they had not yet been inspected, an DOL spokesperson said in an email.types of employee visas, Trump’s management has encouraged employers to continue applying for H-2A employee visas, raising the importance of “the economy and food security.”
And the state Department of Housing and Community Development, which certifies the structural suitability of H-2A homes with more than five residents, does not have the power to request COVID-related precautions, spokeswoman Alicia Murillo said.
In Oregon and Washington, state agencies respectively banned bunk beds for H-2A staff and forced employers to separate H-2A staff into groups that live, paint, and together.Meanwhile, the California Department of Public Health has been silent about the guest staff’s home.
Of the 10 counties CalMatters and The Salinas Californian contacted, only Santa Barbara told reporters that it envisaged in particular protecting H-2A personnel from additional outbreaks.
Ventura County has released a letter stating that it is reviewing inspections of guest workers’ homes.
In mid-July, Do-Reynoso of Santa Barbara said his team was contemplating 3 public physical fitness orders to prevent him from additional H-2A outbreaks by requiring staff to live and paint in small, solid groups, which employers notify the Minister.ministry of all positive bodies and for employers to adhere to state rules or face sanctions.
None had been at the time of publication.
This story has been updated to explain that Julia and Leodegario Chavez Alvarado are domestic employees and that some in poor physical condition, others would possibly be domestic employees.Van Do-Reynoso is the director of public aptitude for Santa Barbara County.
This article is part of the California Divide Project, a collaboration between newsrooms that examine the source of income inequality and economic survival in California.Kate Cimini is a journalist for The Californian who covers agriculture, housing and health issues.or send an email to [email protected] to local journalism.