Email addressFarmworkers harvest strawberries in Santa Maria on May 28, 2024. The area has become a major destination for agricultural guest workers, some of whom live in overcrowded housing. Photo by Julie Leopo-Bermudez for CalMattersThe number of agricultural guest workers has risen dramatically in California. But state regulators have struggled to ensure that farms are providing safe housing to their workers.
When the workers asked a supervisor to eradicate the bedbugs in their room, they say he told them to buy their own insecticide. One of Bravo’s roommates, Francisco Magaña, said he took to rubbing himself with alcohol at night to keep the bugs away. And, in at least a handful of recent cases, inspectors awarded permits to employer-provided housing without ever visiting the site, CalMatters found.
H2A workers do everything from harvesting wine grapes in Santa Barbara to splitting beehives in Sutter Creek. Under federal and state law, their employers must provide them safe and clean housing. California law tasks the housing department with inspecting employee housing annually, including H2A housing. The department also investigates when workers or community members file complaints.
Ignacio Ornelas Rodriguez, a Stanford historian who has studied the history of migrant farm workers in California, said without better enforcement, farmworkers will continue to live in appalling conditions. He said the state also risks more tragedies like last year’s shooting of eight workers on two mushroom farms in Half Moon Bay, where workers were living in uninsulated sheds before a disgruntled coworker opened fire.
“The laws on the books are not the laws in the fields,” said United Farm Workers President Teresa Romero. “No matter how bad the conditions are, the worker can’t quit and go to the farm down the road.” Francisco Ocampo was working as assistant district director for the U.S.
Last fall, a federal court ordered Rancho Nuevo Harvesting to pay more than $1 million in back wages and penalties after Ocampo and his team found that the company had housed workers in facilities that didn’t meet federal standards, fed them spoiled food, and failed to provide required transportation,
Even as Ocampo and his colleagues were investigating Rancho Nuevo, records show, state regulators approved a permit for farmworker housing at one of the company’s other facilities – without ever stepping foot inside it.