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Farmworkers face coronavirus risk: ‘You can’t pick strawberries over Zoom’
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoYou don't catch anything from a strawberry. This job is fundamentally no different from others, and way safer than for instance fast-food-window worker.
- sjg007 7y agoThese farm workers live in bunk houses basically and are trucked in on school buses. Most of them are migrant laborers or undocumented immigrants. Those conditions are not safe.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoNothing to do with the title - strawberries aren't the risk. Hopefully masks are there when travelling? And an isolated cohort in a bunkhouse has some benefits. Of course it only takes one.
- forgotmyhnacc 7y agoConsider reading the article instead of making a snap judgement based on the title.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoConsider a title that's meaningful. Anyway nitpicking aside, folks all over are still going to work. So you can 'shelter in place' and get your Amazon delivery or groceries delivered or whatever. If they're young and confident, or really need the money, bless them. As for the useful part of my comment, have you used a drive-thru? Did you see the close quarters and unmasked/ungloved employees there? Meeting a customer a minute for 8 hours? Picking produce at least puts you in an enormous field away from crowded city conditions with a small cohort of people. Its risky, but likely no riskier than 100 other jobs.
- borkt 7y agoMy wife works with 14 H2As who serve only one property for 9 months a year in about the best possible situation and it is definitely true that they live in bunk houses, but for better or worse you find this everywhere in the world, even singapore[1]. In 10 years of working in the ag industry though, every place she has worked they have always been documented, whether FLC or H2A. The majority I've worked with while helping out during harvest are looking for some order and steady pay to send home while avoiding cartel chaos in Michiocan; they are all upstanding individuals, some who even had professional jobs back home, for example one is a dentist. It is very uncommon in our experience to find undocumented workers in these regulated environments, though you will still find plenty at the even city sponsored "day laborer" centers, or working for the crews that end up selling their fruit on street corners in cities. From what we have hears, 20-30 years ago there was a much larger truly undocumented immigrant issue. [1] https://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/hidden-slums-singapore-revealed-021739643.html https://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/hidden-slums-...
- stainforth 7y ago"It's bad, but think how much worse it could be"
- danans 7y ago> but for better or worse you find this everywhere in the world, even singapore[1] What relevance does that have to whether or not these workers should get reasonable protection from coronavirus risks, and treatment if they get sick?
- bluGill 7y agoNote that big farmers tend to be careful about illegal labor. When you have millions of dollars in land, you stand to lose a lot if some prosecuter is looking for an example. Smaller guys don't have as much to lose and can appear sympathetic against the big government so they are more likely to risk it.
- grey-area 7y agoDon't do that then. Maybe we should pay more for strawberries and treat workers better?
- tw04 7y agoThere's a big difference between "the job can't be done safely" and "the way the job was done previously wouldn't be safe if they continue doing it that way". There's literally no step in "picking strawberries" that can't be done while maintaining social distancing. It will increase the cost of labor, and force humans to be treated like... humans. But farming isn't inherently unsafe re: coronavirus.
- anoonmoose 7y agoYou say "increase the cost of labor" like it's nothing. Fact is, industries like this couldn't be operated on the up and up in the US- people wouldn't buy the product at the price it'd need to be sold for. I'm not saying this to justify the current conditions, I'm just pointing out that it's this or an eradication of the industry. edit: an eradication I'm totally fine with.
- grey-area 7y agoWhat price do you think strawberries would be with better conditions? I think the market would support double the price, there would just be lower sales.
- gridlockd 7y agoWith strawberries, you'd think that the retail market price is already pretty close to the price that yields maximum profits. However, the wholesale price may be far lower than that, because of oligopsony.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y agoIf the industry can't survive by following the rules then the leaders of that industry who profited from illicit behaviors should go to prison for decades and their assets should be sold off to pay damages to the effected. The industry can correct itself or die off. If no one wants a product at a humane price then the industry should go extinct in a functioning society.
- bluGill 7y agoFor context, housing is not something they are required to take. The they can live in a tent which is what they were doing 70 years ago when the farmers felt sorry for them living in a tent and built a bunk house for them to live in if they wanted. Bad as a bunkhouse is, almost everyone agrees it is better than a tent and so they live in that. (I love sleeping in a tent, but that is because it is a vacation I do once a year, most of my nights are spent in a house)
- londons_explore 7y agoStrawberry pickers typically work very close to one another with hundreds in the same area of a field at once, with lots of trucks as central points to put the fruit, etc. Workers also typically live on caravans near/on the fields in very cramped quarters to save commute time/cost. That could easily be changed to a more distributed method with per-worker wheelbarrows or backpacks, but presumably that would decrease throughput and increase costs.
- agjmills 7y agoPersonally, and I'd hope this is echoed by everyone: I'd rather have less strawberries, that are more expensive, than have strawberries picked by someone who died as a result of contracting COVID-19 in a field whilst they were picking strawberries to earn money to feed themselves/their family.
- endorphone 7y agoIt's impossible to make these sorts of judgments without an understanding of what the end goal is. What the off ramp of Coronavirus town is in best and worst cases. e.g. If a vaccine is realistically a year off (which is realistic, though we clutch onto every bit of preliminary news when in reality most are failures), in the relatively near term we will start to all have to take more risks, and the majority of us will go through COVID-19.
- joejerryronnie 7y agoEverybody says this, and then proceeds to buy the cheapest, most convenient products possible.
- cma 7y agoMaybe they are advocating companies pay the liability, raising the price and incentivizing safer practices. Without some kind of labeling laws saying how many estimated to die per strawberry, you’d have to do a research project on every brand.
- 7y ago
- kitotik 7y agoThis is one of the more dismissive and ignorant comments I’ve ever seen in HN. Do you have some subject matter expertise or was this just intuition?
- ericsoderstrom 7y agoI think OP's comment was more highlighting how dumb the article title is.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoSocial distancing is important in all sorts of jobs. What about this one makes that impossible? Looked in the window at your local McD's lately? Is it any different? (If that comment was some sort of outlier, must not be reading much on HN.)
- op03 7y agoAgree. Fast food workers are more likely to come in contact with super spreaders in the network than farm workers. Would be interesting to see Italian, Spanish, French data on infections by profession. I'd guess its going to be biased to travelers(travel related professions), travel sector(airports, hotels, stations etc), health workers, seniors/patients already in hospital for something else, and families of all of the above.
- simonsarris 7y agoI would think out of every job in a supply chain field workers would be some of the best protected by default. Not (often) working in air-recircuculated environments, many already wear face masks and gloves, less crowded than warehouses, working in the sun and often more humid environments. The big issues I think would be sick pay (mentioned), or migrating workers who travel very far, including across borders.
- cbhl 7y ago[ Edit: I changed my mind about this comment. ]
- ceejayoz 7y agoIt's kinda hilarious that you blame "conservation" instead of the farms housing people in abysmal conditions (or not paying them enough for decent housing if they live off-site).
- dfsegoat 7y agoI don't see a single mask or glove in the pics in this article (which documents a day in the life of a picker): https://www.latimes.com/local/great-reads/la-me-strawberry-pick-20130503-dto-htmlstory.html https://www.latimes.com/local/great-reads/la-me-strawberry-p...
- macspoofing 7y agoI think one major challenge right now is that nobody can get masks and gloves. Frontline health workers can barely (if even that) manage with the supply at hand. I think this is the major reason for 'flattening the curve', i.e. to make sure our supply chain ramps up to provide necessities like masks, gloves, ventilators, disinfectants etc. In a hypothetical world where there are no shortages of these items (+ publically and easily available test kits), the economy wouldn't need to have halted to a near stop, and we could weather the pandemic much easier. Hopefully, we can learn from this.
- xenocyon 7y ago
- T3RMINATED 7y agoStrawberries are not essential!
- ng12 7y agoI'm not sure about strawberries but aren't farmworkers in general essential workers? Our food supply and delivery chain is what allows others to stay at home.
- BrentOzar 7y ago> I'm not sure about strawberries but aren't farmworkers in general essential workers? Yes, but that doesn't mean they're immune from the coronavirus risk. The whole point is that they face the coronavirus risk because they're continuing to work.
- ng12 7y agoBut some people are going to have to be exposed. Farmworker's exposure helps us flatten the curve.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y agoSure. Except if reports are to be believed coronavirus carrying foods could survive the trip from farm to table and infect people nationwide rapidly.
- ng12 7y agoIf so that'll happen no matter what. Packaged food will be handled by multiple people before it gets into the consumer's hands.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y agoForce farms to implement social distancing. Just use a drone. Immediate shut down for noncompliance. Owner goes to jail, farm and equipment get seized nationalized and sold back to the public. Illegals get deported, legals get unemployment. It takes everyone making sacrifices to stop the spread. Especially the landowners and leaders.
- 7y ago
- mythrwy 7y agoWell, not yet. Joystick and a little remote device (or something) and maybe one day we will do stuff like this without fully solving machine learning vision type problems. Please be quiet kids! I'm picking strawberries. Actually, Bobby, come over here. Do you want to play a game while I take a nap?
- zenpaul 7y agoPlanet Money did a good podcast on this topic recently. I learned that it's hard to follow CDC guidelines when you're sleeping 20 in a garage and there's only enough water to shower every few days. https://www.npr.org/2020/03/25/821593542/episode-984-food-and-farmworkers https://www.npr.org/2020/03/25/821593542/episode-984-food-an...
- abeppu 7y agoIt's kinda crazy that we can produce all these water-intensive crops in the central valley, and producers are draining aquifers for basically the cost of drilling and pumping ... but workers can't afford to shower regularly or wash their hands often. Somehow I don't think the farms that own the wells and the workers are paying at comparable rates.
- irrational 7y agoOff-topic, but how did zoom become the Kleenex of video-conferencing apps? I’ve been doing a lot of video-conferencing, but haven’t used zoom. Is it the best one, or is there some other explanation?
- Karunamon 7y agoBetter performance and UI than the others. I work in an environment where I use just about every major video conferencing tool available when working with customers. We use Zoom internally, some customers are on Webex, still others use Hangouts. Webex has been having difficulties ever since the mass exodus to work-from-home. Audio quality especially has been inconsistent over the last few weeks. Hangouts is pretty good from a quality standpoint, but I (and others, apparently) find their UI confusing. I've never been asked yet to use Jitsi or any of the other also-rans.
- GordonS 7y agoI use webex multiple times, every day of the week, and audio, video and scree sharing. Maybe it depends on your timezone, but I honestly haven't noticed any issues at all with webex. One of my colleagues was complaining about it the other day - I asked if he was connected to the company VPN, and sure enough, he was. Once he disconnected, he said webex was back to normal again. Like many others, our company has had to quickly buy a lot more VPN licenses, and is finding out it doesn't have the bandwidth to service everyone using the VPN.
- ben7799 7y agoInteresting. I've been using Webex, Zoom, and Slack calls. Webex has been having some issues but has done better the last few days. Zoom has been OK, but with some audio cutouts yesterday. The one Hangout I was on the video and audio quality was horrible. Teams seemed to use tons of video bandwidth, looked good, sounded good, but seemed to use excessive network bandwidth. It's video quality actually seemed excessive for a lot of use cases.
- nemonemo 7y agoIt has good usability, and not much trouble in video conferencing. No nonsense. Plus it has a catchy name: Compare "Google Meet" or "Microsoft teams" vs "Zoom".
- wscott 7y agoSorry, I am going to be the insensitive sleazeball here. The point of staying at home is not that if you get this disease you are going to die. The issue is that if we ALL get it then a larger proportion of people are going to die because we don't have enough hospitals. We had to choose some people as being important enough that they are allowed to be out and about and use some of that valuable limited healthcare resources while the rest of us try really hard not to get sick and risk going to the hospital. If this goes south, you may wish that you were one of the people who got the disease early. Farm labor has always gotten the short end of the stick and this is an added burden. I would vote to give them extra income during this period if that was being considered. But the fact is that they are part of the food chain in this country and so are considered "essential" people to continue doing their jobs.
- groby_b 7y ago"during this period"? They're as essential to our survival even if we're not in a pandemic. It's maybe time we recognized that and stopped exploiting labor just because it's unskilled. If we paid them by the value they actually create. I'd really urge you to reconsider your stance, and be there to help them advocate for fair pay even when this is over.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoHow would the value they create or "fair pay" be measured?
- groby_b 7y ago"fair pay" -> well, let's start with "treated like human beings, not chattel", "afforded basic hygiene & health measures", "kept safe in a crisis". From there, we get to "would you die without them? If yes, maybe they're underpaid. Maybe $18K a year just isn't fair pay under any circumstances, not if we can't force people via a "well, you could always die" clause. As for the value they create - you have food available to you. How valuable is that to you? Would you like it if farm workers applied the "well, you could always die or do it yourself" clause? Because at some point, that becomes an option.
- mensetmanusman 7y agoRemember, flattening the curve doesn’t necessarily mean that fewer people in total get sick, the area under the curve might be the same, esp. if it becomes like the common cold in terms of evading our immune system. We are just trying to buy time to ramp up production of materials that can reduce the burden on the medical system.
- earthshot 7y agoThe case fatality rate changes quite dramatically when hospitals are overloaded. Additionally, the fatality rate of _other_ causes increases when hospitals are overloaded. Flatting the curve saves lives even if the total number of infected people remains the same.
- mensetmanusman 7y agoThe issue I see now is that some areas are locking down when there is no curve to be flattened. This is likely causing more harm than not, because hospitals are sitting empty waiting for when people will inevitably get sick.
- bluGill 7y agoWith the 14 day incubation period there is no way to know if they are locked down needleessly or not.
- earthshot 7y agoThere's a national (and international) shortage of nearly all covid-adjacent medical supplies and you think it's a problem that we're not using more of those medical supplies right this very moment? You... you're calling that _harmful_? Cool.
- Mikeb85 7y agoYou can't pick strawberries over zoom, but it's pretty easy to distance yourself from others on a farm. And let's face it, if you have the physical fortitude for farm work, you aren't at risk from coronavirus.
- creaghpatr 7y ago*you aren't risk for dying of coronavirus, but still at risk for spreading it.
- Mikeb85 7y agoNo my statement stands. If you spread it, by definition others are at risk, not you. You can't just make up new language semantics.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- munk-a 7y ago> you aren't at risk from coronavirus We don't have sufficient information to determine this definitively - some of the folks that have "recovered" have had serious respiratory complications. Also, just because the farm worker is alright is their mother fine too? What about the rest of their family? Are they going to be treated in a wonderful modern hospital or is a doctor going to send them home to be cared for by their family? If they don't have insurance any medical costs they take own will come completely out of their own pocket.
- Mikeb85 7y agoThere's nearly a million cases worldwide. There's enough data. The death rate between 19 and 39 years of age is 0.2%. The death rate from 40-49% is 0.4%. And that's the death rate only taking into account confirmed cases (by contrast, seasonal flu death rates are used by estimating total infections). I know in Canada lots of people with all the symptoms aren't getting tested. Also, the more testing is done in various countries, the lower the death rate. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
- british_india 7y agoWhy don't farm workers just keep a safe distance from each other? There are acres of space.
- jelliclesfarm 7y agoI have been farming for 8 years and asking for Meaningful Ag automation for 5. Applied twice to YC. Simply put there is no $$ to replace manual labour. All Agtech is a sham. They are pimps for data collected from farms and fields that get fed to Wall Street and input and pesticide and tractor companies that use it to sell more stuff to farmers. It doesn’t save farmers money. It doesn’t bring them meaningful Agtech or being Agbots and Farmbot to replace farm labour. The only agtech worth investing is Agtech that harvests data. That’s why probably all the Agtech and Agbot startups have investments from Ag input companies. It’s a dirty little secret that anyone can find out with a little bit of digging around... Agtech has betrayed Ag.
- jelliclesfarm 7y agoLook at those photos. Those citrus trees are canopied trees. You can let an Agbot roam in that orchard. It won’t even pick up signals. There is no systems approach. If you can’t harvest data, no Agbots. I understand the importance of data with tech. But if the end result is data, then it is the product. It doesn’t enable Ag.