Doomposting - Blog Posts

the Guardian

US farms are forcing workers to buy inedible, expensive meals: ‘It makes you feel enslaved’

Employers hiring migrant workers through a federal program must provide food or cooking facilities. But many of those picking our fresh food

On an August afternoon, Pablo stared down at a foam plate sloshing with flavorless pinto beans and a particularly bad version of huevos a la Mexicana. The simple, usually delicious scramble of eggs, tomatoes, onions and jalapeños is difficult to mess up. But if anyone can find a way to make it unpalatable, it’s the cook at his labor camp. Soupy eggs are the last thing the 42-year-old from western Mexico wants to eat. But after a 12-hour day harvesting tobacco in the brutal and sometimes deadly summer heat, he must eat – and this was far from the worst meal he’s been given. A few weeks ago, fellow farm workers got sick due to raw and moldy food they were forced to purchase. On days like this, Pablo can’t decide which is worse: that he’s forced to pay $80 a week for this slop, or that everything about what he eats, when he eats and how much he eats is tightly controlled by his employer. Pablo, who is using a pseudonym due to fear of retaliation, is one of more than 35,000 migrant workers in North Carolina this year as part of the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker Program, a guest visa program overseen by the US Department of Labor (DoL). The program enables American employers to hire foreign workers to perform seasonal agricultural work. Employers in the program frequently exploit their migrant employees, and the structure of the program makes easy work of it. Visas are tied to a single employer who must also provide housing, transportation and access to food, creating a crushing power imbalance between American employers and migrant H-2A workers.

The OP demonstrates something I've been noticing: our society treats homeless people as casteless unpersons.

Without even realizing it, we automatically categorize anyone who seems to be living on the street as an undesirable thing, best neither seen nor heard, and taboo to interact with.

Increasingly, this is how government and law enforcement are treating them.

Until we change our society's attitude towards homelessness, until a person's living arrangements are no longer seen as a reflection of their character or nature, the only change we can accomplish will be palliative.

"AnechoicMedia" deserves a good blog-lashing from @cavegirlpoems.