Farmworkers and COVID-19: Community-Based Partnerships to Address Health and Safety

As COVID-19 spread rapidly throughout the United States, among the population's most disproportionately affected were those on the front lines of the food system. The majority of the estimated 2 million farmworkers in the United States, who have worked through the pandemic as "essential" workers to ensure the functioning of US food systems, are Latino/a, immigrants, and those with low incomes; nearly half lack authorization to work in the United States.1 Despite their essential status, farmworkers were left vulnerable to COVID-19 because of the lack of workplace protections overlayed with numerous occupational and social factors.2 Amid the pandemic, however, new partnerships and community initiatives between farm employers and clinicians, advocates, and public health authorities serving farmworkers made unprecedented efforts to support the health and safety of farmworkers and their families in the absence of sufficient government response.3Farmworkers and their families are frequently subject to overlapping and amplifying occupational risks and adverse social and structural determinants of health, which in turn affect their underlying health and increase their risk of COVID-19. Farmworkers lack many of the basic occupational protections afforded to other workers, which may favor the employer but intensifies cycles of poverty and poor health among farmworkers. Farmworkers have been historically excluded from basic labor laws, such as the right to organize, minimum wage, and paid sick leave, although these rights vary by state. Without these protections, farmworkers who are ill may feel forced to work because of the fear of lost wages and the lack of a workplace safety net.