“My spirits fell when I saw that place,” said Bravo, a guest worker recruited from Michoacán, Mexico by a company that supplied farms with workers to pick strawberries for brands like Driscoll’s. “I couldn’t breathe.”
As the number of agricultural guest workers like Bravo has risen dramatically in California, the episode highlights how state regulators have struggled to ensure that farms are providing safe housing to their workers. While other state and federal agencies also play a role in protecting agricultural guest workers’ rights, the gaps in the housing department’s inspections cast doubt on whether a key part of the state’s oversight system is working.
As the number of H2A workers in California has nearly tripled in the last six years to 41,000 last year, the housing department has acknowledged the difficulty of keeping up.Since then department officials say increased state funding has allowed them to step up enforcement, creating a special unit to focus specifically on employee housing and inspecting every employer who applied for a worker housing permit in 2024.
Housing Department officials have also noted that poor housing conditions don’t just imperil farmworkers, but the entire food supply. “Overcrowding and unsanitary conditions can trigger communicable diseases, among them foodborne diseases such as Norovirus, E-coli, Listeria, Salmonella, and Hepatitis A,” department officials wrote in their 2020 budget request. “Such illnesses can contaminate food products, especially those designed to be consumed raw.
He and his Department of Labor colleagues are in charge of making sure farmers provide H2A workers a safe place to stay, transportation, meals or cooking facilities and a minimum wage, which they do through targeted investigations. But it’s the California Department of Housing and Community Development that inspects and approves housing for H2A workers and other employees.
Instead, a Rancho Nuevo manager used a video call to guide a state inspector through a single-family home on a Riverside County farm, according to department records obtained by CalMatters. Agency officials acknowledged at least three additional instances of virtual inspections at other farms in 2023, a violation of
Property Property Latest News, Property Property Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: CalMatters - 🏆 261. / 63 Read more »