"Essential" but Expendable: Farmworkers During the COVID-19 Pandemic-The Michigan Farmworker Project

For "essential" blue-collar workers, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated health, social, and economic inequities by race, ethnicity, and immigration status-particularly for Black and Latinx populations.1 Inequities in COVID-19 infections, illness, and death result from historical and current racist and anti-immigrant policies and practices that affect access to health, social, and economic benefits for minoritized communities. On March 16, 2020, President Trump issued an updated "Coronavirus Guidance for America," stating that the essential agricultural workforce has "a special responsibility to maintain [its] normal work schedule" (https://bit.ly/2Ew3Q1W).3 The "normal" for farmworkers often involves labor exploitation and a precarious working environment. Yet, limited attention has been directed to understanding how these factors hamper efforts to protect this population and prevent the spread of COVID-19. The agricultural sector workforce is predominantly composed of US and foreign-born Latinx workers, with an estimated half who are undocumented (https:// bit.ly/2G00PHX). Overall, farmworkers face a cluster of vulnerability factors (e.g., poverty, lack of educational opportunities, language barriers, lack of rights afforded to citizens) that make them more susceptible to occupational risks and labor exploitation and trafficking. Farmworkers have been historically excluded from social and labor protections, despite working in one of the most dangerous and lowest-paying occupations in the country. In our qualitative community-engaged research-the Michigan Farmworker Project-we conducted 55 in-depth interviews (34 with female and male farmworkers and 21 with stakeholders). Our results highlight how the precarity of farmworkers' working and living conditions can be exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. We report findings and recommend protective policies. Supporting quotations are presented in the Appendix (available as a supplement to the online version ofthis article at http://www.ajph.org).