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View ProfilesPublished May 31, 2023 at 10:00 a.m.
Migrant farmhands are here to stay.
Over the past 25 years, workers from Mexico and Central America have become the backbone of Vermont's dairy industry — as much a part of the rural landscape as the cows they milk. While most are in the United States illegally, they've provided a reliable workforce for farmers who need more hired hands but can't find them locally.
As many as 1,000 migrants work in the state's milking parlors and dairy barns, doing sometimes dangerous jobs for long hours and low pay, without labor protections that workers in other industries take for granted. Many don't earn overtime pay or even minimum wage. If they're hurt on the job, safety inspectors often don't investigate. Their lives are shaped every day by the risk of deportation. They live where few people look like them or speak their language.
As their numbers have grown, their presence has become more widely acknowledged. "You would have to be living under a rock at this point if you didn't know the dairy economy in Vermont was being sustained by [migrant] farmworkers," said Teresa Mares, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont who has studied their experiences. Migrant workers are staying on dairy farms for longer and putting down roots. They've organized to push for change and developed blueprints for less exploitative working conditions.
Yet their precarious labor arrangement remains largely unchanged. That reality undermines Vermont's feel-good image of family farming at a time when consumers are becoming more conscious of how food gets to their tables.
Migrants started milking cows in Vermont in the early 2000s, as low milk prices pressured small Vermont dairy farmers to increase the size of their herds. The year-round nature of dairy work appealed to migrants who had previously picked fruits or vegetables in other states.
UVM associate professor of community development and applied economics Dan Baker occasionally surveys Vermont dairy farmers that hire nonfamily employees to understand the labor force. Of the farms he surveyed in 2010, 56 percent reported hiring some Latino workers; the figure jumped to 94 percent in 2018. That year, Latinos made up more than half of the full-time hired hands on the farms surveyed.
Delia, a 25-year-old Mexican woman, has been milking cows on a Swanton dairy farm for four years. She found the job through her sister, who has worked there even longer. Like most migrant dairy workers, she lives in housing provided to her on the farm. Delia and her two young children, including a newborn, stay in a humid, moldy basement and share a bathroom and kitchen with six other people, she said.
Delia has stopped working while she cares for her newborn. When she resumes, her shifts will start at 4 a.m. and end whenever the work is done, no sooner than 2 p.m. "In that time, you don't have a food break," she said by phone through a translator. "You just have to find little moments of downtime to grab a bite as best you can." Delia, who declined to give her last name, said she earns $11 an hour.
The work's not all bad, she said, but she doesn't dare to speak up about problems, even when her safety is at stake.
"There are a lot of times when you get kicked by a cow, but you don't want to say anything, because it's not like there's going to be anybody who can come and cover your shift," she said. "You don't want to lose that day's pay or have them fire you."
U.S. labor laws explicitly exclude agricultural workers from minimum wage, overtime pay and collective bargaining rights. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which enforces workplace safety standards, generally does not investigate injuries on small farms — even when workers are maimed or killed. As a result, the vast majority of dairy farms operate outside OSHA enforcement, a recent analysis by the food news website Civil Eats found, even though dairy work is hazardous.
Some states have inspected small farms themselves; Vermont does not. Doing so would take more state money and manpower, Dirk Anderson, director of workers' compensation and safety for the Vermont Department of Labor said: "This would be a policy conversation requiring input from the legislature and the administration."
The enforcement arm of the Department of Labor's wage and hour division, which can respond to complaints of wage theft or missing meal breaks like those Delia described, is staffed by three people. No one in that division nor the state OSHA office is fluent in Spanish, officials acknowledged, though the state does have access to translation services over the telephone. Through that process, it has taken many months for farmworkers just to recover several hundred dollars of wrongly withheld wages, according to Will Lambek, an organizer with Burlington-based advocacy group Migrant Justice. So, by and large, migrant farmworkers don't file complaints.
"The state has just proven incapable of enforcing [farmworkers' rights]," Lambek said.
An investigation by the New York Times, published in February, implicated the Vermont dairy industry in a nationwide scandal in which unaccompanied migrant children have been released from federal custody only to perform grueling work for U.S. companies in violation of child labor laws. The story asserted that child laborers were processing milk used in Ben & Jerry's ice cream. It quoted a 19-year-old Middlebury farmworker named Paco Calvo, who described working 12-hour shifts milking cows since he arrived at age 14.
Following the story's publication, Calvo released a statement through Migrant Justice clarifying that he came to the country with his father "in search of a better life with more opportunities" and worked on dairy farms alongside him. The conditions at his first farm in Addison County were "terrible," he said. Then he moved in 2018 to a farm that was participating in a worker-developed program called Milk With Dignity, where he put in only four-hour shifts. "The treatment here is more respectful because the program can intervene if there's any abuse or if they violate my rights," he said.
Child labor laws are particularly lax in agriculture; children younger than 16 can milk cows under certain circumstances. The state Department of Labor hasn't received any complaints of illegal child labor on dairy farms in the past 10 years, general counsel Robert Depper said. Migrant Justice "occasionally" hears about teens ages 14 or 15 working long hours, according to Lambek.
UVM's Baker said his surveys haven't pointed to widespread mistreatment or exploitation of migrant workers, though 20 to 30 percent of them reported serious housing quality issues.
"While not every worker feels they are treated well, the majority do," he said.
Separate surveys administered by Migrant Justice, however, give a different sense of workers' experiences. A 2021 paper published by UVM associate professor Bindu Panikkar, who studies environmental health, analyzed the Migrant Justice data and concluded that migrant farmworkers in Vermont receive inadequate training and insufficient safety equipment, which lead to avoidable injuries and health problems.
"The pandemic is a wake-up call to start doing things differently, to address the inequities within the workspaces of these essential jobs," Panikkar wrote.
Migrant farmworkers face barriers to obtaining health care, though providers are slowly getting better at accommodating them, said Naomi Wolcott-MacCausland, the migrant health coordinator for UVM Extension. Translation services have improved, at least in exam rooms, and some hospitals now consider household members who live in Mexico when calculating whether patients qualify for financial assistance. Dental and mental health care remain especially tough to find and afford, she said.
As farmworkers stay in Vermont for longer periods of time, their health care needs have become more serious, noted Julia Doucet, an outreach nurse at the Open Door Clinic, a free health care provider in Addison County that primarily serves migrants. Dairy workers tend to spend most of their time on the farm, and many adopt diets of processed foods and sugary drinks.
"It's troubling to see young, healthy guys who come here ... then five years later are considered obese because of, primarily, lifestyle," she said.
Other programs seek to improve aspects of migrant farmworkers' lives, including a new Champlain Housing Trust-administered fund that provides $30,000 forgivable loans for repairs to farmworker housing.
Farmworkers themselves, however, have been doggedly pursuing broader reforms. Their advocacy organization, Migrant Justice, formed in the wake of the 2009 death of José Obeth Santiz Cruz, a 20-year-old from Chiapas, Mexico, who was killed when he was pulled into a mechanized gutter scraper on a Vermont farm.
The group has successfully lobbied for driving privileges for undocumented residents and for statewide policies that limit the cooperation of state and local authorities with federal immigration agents.
For nearly a decade, Migrant Justice has pushed to improve working conditions on dairy farms by pressuring companies that buy Vermont milk. Its Milk With Dignity campaign is built on a set of enforceable workplace standards called a code of conduct. Companies can commit to buying milk from farms that adhere to the code — and to paying those farmers a premium price.
The approach, modeled on one that Florida vegetable pickers created, acknowledges that farmers themselves are largely at the mercy of broader market forces. "What I find really compelling," Mares, the UVM anthropologist said, "is that it looks to those who hold the most power in our food system — which is typically large-scale corporate buyers — as the entities that actually need to pay for those improvements."
In 2017, Ben & Jerry's became the first — and, so far, only — company to sign on to Milk With Dignity. By 2021, there were 41 farms employing 209 nonfamily workers enrolled in the program as a result of Ben & Jerry's participation, according to the Milk With Dignity Standards Council's latest annual report. Workers have called the Standards Council's confidential hotline hundreds of times to report farm problems. The Harvard Business Review recently cited this as a rare example of an employee call line that "really works" and can resolve complaints quickly.
Since 2019, workers have pressured Hannaford, a regional grocery store chain based in Maine that sells milk under its name brand, to join Milk With Dignity. They've marched near Hannaford headquarters and staged multistate organizing tours throughout the Northeast, though the company has never met with the activists.
At a recent stop at the Richmond Free Library, Migrant Justice organizers showed attendees a video testimonial from a farmworker named Jesús Zúñiga, who lost a toe while operating a malfunctioning skid steer.
"I want you all to know that not everything is good on these farms," Zúñiga said in the video, as he leaned on crutches.
Rubinay, a 26-year-old Mexican migrant who works on an Addison County farm, said through a translator that Milk With Dignity improved his wages and schedule and eased his fear of speaking up on the farm. He declined to provide his last name.
Rubinay alternates between 13-hour and seven-hour workdays, including a dinner break, and gets paid vacations and sick time. He said he earns $13.75 per hour and lives with his wife and another couple in employer housing near the farm.
"I talk with friends on another farm who tell me, 'What I wouldn't give to work on a farm like yours,'" he said.
The Whitcombs, who run a seven-generation dairy farm in Williston, wanted to remain a family business. "We were committed to not hiring anyone who is in the country illegally," Mary Whitcomb recently recalled. They were hesitant to employ people whose language they couldn't speak and who would be living in isolation on the farm.
But they needed help, so they looked into robotic milkers.
Eleven years ago, North Williston Cattle became one of the earliest Vermont farms to install robots to milk cows without the aid of human hands. They have four machines, made by a company named Lely, that can automatically milk 240 Holsteins each day.
Inside the Whitcombs' barn, four small pens are connected to box-style machines that lure the cows in with treats. As the bovine munches, a laser locates its teats to hook up the pumps. During the four minutes it takes to milk the cow, the machine records more than 100 data points about the animal, including its body temperature and the viscosity of its milk. The robot sanitizes itself before the next cow wanders in. "They do this 24-7," Whitcomb said. If something goes awry, the robot calls the farmers to alert them.
The Whitcombs are something of an exception. Automation technology has made strides and garnered a lot of buzz, but it has yet to sweep across Vermont dairy farms and isn't likely to replace migrant labor anytime soon. Just 28 farms use a total of 87 robotic milkers in the state, according to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets.
Whitney Hull, a dairy herd management educator with UVM Extension, said there are several reasons. Robots require a large up-front investment — about $1 million, in the Whitcombs' case — can be expensive to maintain and come with a learning curve. Often, the investment doesn't pencil out.
Plus, Hull noted, "on a large farm, you're going to have hired help, regardless of whether you have robots or not." The jobs that remain may be less attractive to workers, especially migrants, who tend to want lots of hours. The Whitcombs were able to eliminate two and a half positions and convert a mobile home on the farm into a long-term rental. They still employ part-time workers, including high school students, who they say are not easy to find.
The original print version of this article was headlined "Got Milkers? | Migrant workers hold up Vermont's dairy industry — and are fighting for better working conditions"
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