by: Emily Southard

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed many fault lines in our global agriculture system. Despite a long history of critiques by scholars and activists, one glaring example is the simultaneous dependence on migrant workers and migration in agriculture and the manner in which these workers are treated as disposable. While agriculture-related migration is universal, as a US resident currently living in the agricultural (and my home) state of Iowa, I will focus on the plight of migrant workers here. They are the ‘backbone’ of our agriculture system, yet arguably the most vulnerable of all US workers—constrained by the legalization of their humanity; mistreated, overworked, and undervalued; and most notably in the time of Covid-19, treated as expendable.

As is obvious, the pandemic has profoundly affected mobility. Recent months have demonstrated how migration processes and migrant laborers have been and will continue to be severely affected. For many working in the US industrial agriculture system, the reality is a compulsory ‘life as normal’ due to their work being essential, even as Covid-19 ravages their workplaces, communities, and homes. Even before Covid-19, the mobility of these workers has been consistently restricted due to legal status, language, poverty, and rurality (Keller, 2019). Today their mobility is further restricted as international borders have closed, making travel to home communities difficult if not impossible. Moreover, mobility for undocumented migrants is riskier than ever, as detention in unhygienic and densely packed ICE facilities which have experienced Covid-19 outbreaks (Reznick, 2020) could mean loss of life, long-term health consequences, and trauma, not to mention the forestalling of migrant work’s economic benefits to their families.

While effects on mobility are universal, Covid-19’s risk to workers in fields and factories depend on the nature of their work, legal status, geographic location, and local response. Workers who do field work may be able to socially distance, yet there remain challenges while traveling to work or living in densely packed group quarters, a common migrant housing situation (Radel et al., 2010; Xinghui & Jaipragas, 2020). Workers in industrialized or factory-style workplaces such as milking facilities, mushroom houses, and meat-packing plants face the most risk due to close proximity of work. This risk has been compounded as workers, unable to endure lost income, have continued to clock in even when exhibiting symptoms of Covid-19. As documented by The New York Times “One worker [at a Tyson Plant in Waterloo, Iowa] who died had taken Tylenol before entering the plant to lower her temperature enough to pass the screening, afraid that missing work would mean forgoing a bonus…” (Swanson et al., 2020). Plants such as this one shut down for mere days to attempt to implement safety protocols, which were rudimentary at best and ineffective at worst. Thus, an estimated 1600 workers in four plants in Iowa alone have become infected, with dozens of hospitalizations reported and an unknown number of deaths (Leys, 2020). However, these numbers are undoubtedly an undercount. It was revealed that the state of Iowa initially reported 444 cases at the Tyson plant in Waterloo, but county officials later updated that figure to 1031 positive cases out of 1300 total employees (Foley, 2020; Swanson et al., 2020). Moreover, testing and healthcare may be inaccessible due to language barriers or fears of detainment based on legal status (Kluge et al., 2020), suggesting further undercounting.

As with most things, much of this situation is gendered. Most obvious is the recorded gender differences in mortality from Covid-19, wherein men are particularly vulnerable to death from the virus (Wenham et al., 2020). This is notable as USDA data reports that 75 percent of hired farm laborers are men (USDA Economic Research Service, 2020). While this data does not provide a gendered breakdown of migrant farm laborers specifically, it does report that 72 percent of these hired farmworkers are foreign-born (USDA Economic Research Service, 2020). Moreover, studies have demonstrated that migration to the US for this kind of work is men-dominated (Keller, 2019; Preibisch & Encalada Grez, 2010), though with growing numbers of women (Paciulan & Preibisch, 2013; Preibisch & Encalada Grez, 2010). The paradigm of lone man migrant-worker has emotional and psychological effects for both migrant, alone and at-risk in a foreign community, and for his family back home. Numerous studies have demonstrated that women ‘left-behind’ by spousal migration face great emotional strain, even without the compounding effect of a pandemic (Adhikari & Hobley, 2015; Daoud & Karama, 2012). Unique gendered

implications for women migrant agricultural workers can also be assumed, as previous research has demonstrated emotional stress for mothers who migrate and are unable to fulfill caretaking duties in their home countries (Paciulan & Preibisch, 2013), an emotional toll that is decidedly exacerbated during the pandemic. An additional consideration for settled families is school-closures, and the increased caretaking duties that puts on women especially. A personal source working with these communities described how the pandemic has caused a shortage of childcare options, forcing many mothers to choose between losing their livelihoods or leaving children at home unattended. Lastly, constrained economic situations and the stress of the pandemic could worsen household tensions and gender-based violence, as has been seen in previous crises and natural disasters (Enarson et al., 2007).

This brief post only begins to cover some of the numerous non-gendered and gendered effects that Covid-19 is having on migrants in agriculture. But even this geographically constrained snapshot surfaces some of the depth and breadth of exploitation related to migration in agriculture essential to the modern agro-food system. This exploitation and disregard for migrant’s lives is certainly not limited to the farms, fields, and meat-packing plants of the US, but rather has become part-and-parcel to the race-to-the-bottom of neoliberal capitalism. Covid-19 has just provided an unfortunate opportunity for these effects to be particularly revealed and for the way that gender interacts in these circumstances to be analyzed.

Sources:

Adhikari, J., & Hobley, M. (2015). “Everyone is leaving. Who Will Sow Our Fields?” The Livelihood Effects on Women of Male Migration from Khotang and Udaypur Districts, Nepal, to the Gulf Countries and Malaysia. Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 35(1), 11–23.

Daoud, S. A., & Karama, T. T. O. (2012). Impacts of male out-migration on the livelihoods of left behind wives: A case study of Bau locality, Blue Nile State. The Afhad Journal, 29(1), 38–50.

Enarson, E., Fothergill, A., & Peek, L. (2007). Gender and Disaster: Foundations and Directions. In Handbook of Disaster Research (pp. 130–146). Springer New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-32353-4_8

Foley, R. J. (2020, July 22). Outbreak at Iowa pork plant was larger than state reported. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/outbreak-at-iowa-pork-plant-was-larger-than-state-reported/2020/07/22/5a47c9fe-cc32-11ea-99b0-8426e26d203b_story.html

Keller, J. C. (2019). Milking in the Shadows: Migrants and Mobility in America’s Dairyland. Rutgers University Press.

Kluge, H. H. P., Jakab, Z., Bartovic, J., D’Anna, V., & Severoni, S. (2020). Refugee and migrant health in the COVID-19 response. The Lancet. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30791-1

Leys, T. (2020, May 5). Coronavirus infects more than 1,600 workers at four Iowa meatpacking plants. The Des Moines Register. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/health/2020/05/05/coronavirus-infects-thousands-iowa-meatpacking-plant-workers-covid-19-waterloo-perry/5170796002/

Paciulan, M., & Preibisch, K. (2013). Navigating the Productive/Reproductive Split: Latin American Transnational Mothers and Fathers in Canada’s Temporary Migration Programs. Transnational Social Review, 3(2), 173–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/21931674.2013.10820763

Preibisch, K. L., & Encalada Grez, E. (2010). The Other Side of Otro Lado: Mexican Migrant Women and Labor Flexibility in Canadian Agriculture. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 35(21), 289–316. https://doi.org/10.1177/001452460011101203

Radel, C., Schmook, B., & Mccandless, S. (2010). Environment, transnational labor migration, and gender: case studies from southern Yucatan Mexico and Vermont, USA. Population and Environment, 32, 177–197. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-010-0124-y

Reznick, A. (2020, July 1). “You Can Either Be A Survivor Or Die” COVID-19 Cases Surge in ICE Detention. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/871625210/you-can-either-be-a-survivor-or-die-covid-19-cases-surge-in-ice-detention

Swanson, A., Yaffe-Bellany, D., & Corkery, M. (2020, May 10). Pork Chops vs. People: Battling Coronavirus in an Iowa Meat Plant. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/business/economy/coronavirus-tyson-plant-iowa.html

USDA Economic Research Service. (2020). Farm Labor. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/#demographic

Wenham, C., Smith, J., & Morgan, R. (2020). COVID-19: the gendered impacts of the outbreak. The Lancet, 395(10227), 846–848. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30526-2

Xinghui, K., & Jaipragas, B. (2020). Coronavirus: Singapore migrant worker dormitories still hot topic as Covid-19 cases rise. This Week in Asia. https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/3079675/coronavirus-singapore-migrant-worker-dormitories-stil

Photo sources: Header Image by Preston Keres, In text photo by Alice Welch, In text photo by Lance Cheung

Emily M. L. Southard is a PhD student in Rural Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University, with plans to pursue a dual degree in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is currently working on finishing up her MS degree in Rural Sociology and International Agriculture and Development, also at Penn State. Her research interests are broadly focused on gender, agriculture, the peasantry, and migration. Specific topics she’s passionate about include the ideology of women’s empowerment, gendered division of labor and time poverty, gendered effects of climate change in agriculture, and the interplay between migration related to agriculture and gender.