James Wyche is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. After growing up in Texas, I can confidently say that I know heat. Long weekends dedicated to baseball tournaments under the high summer sun routinely exhausted my energy. Before leaving to play, my mom always would remind me “to REMEMBER…
This is a repost of a previous blog post from February 2023, written by Liz Turner, a previous law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. America’s farmworkers are a uniquely vulnerable group of workers. Farm labor is exempted from many federal protections, including the right to organize under the National Labor…
Eric Surgarman is a law student at Lewis & Clark Law School and a guest contributor to this blog. Over 1 billion pounds of pesticides (you read that right, 1,000,000,000 pounds) are applied annually in the United States alone, and with agriculture being responsible for approximately 85-90% of pesticide use, the millions of farmworkers who supply the nation’s food bear the…
Hazel Spires is a law student at the University of Oregon School of Law and a guest contributor to this blog. Agriculture is a cornerstone of the American economy, relying heavily on a diverse workforce of around 2.4 million people. However, a significant language gap among farmworkers poses a serious challenge in ensuring their safety and well-being. Language access in the…
Robert Velazquez is a law student at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and is a guest contributor to this blog. For many people the thought of performing back breaking manual labor in triple digit heat seems unfathomable, but for farmworkers harvesting America’s produce, it’s another day at the office. Farmworkers who spend most of their…
Robert Velazquez is a law student at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and is a guest contributor to this blog. American agriculture is deeply reliant on foreign labor to meet market demands. Since the mid-20th century, the domestic supply of agricultural workers has continually shrunk causing farm employers to rely on temporary foreign workers on…
Liz Turner is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. On February 28th of this year, the USDA Equity Commission released an Interim Report, recommending steps the USDA should take to remedy existing disparities in its policies and programs and reconfigure the agency culture and systems that have perpetuated those…
Naima Drecker-Waxman is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. At the beginning of the month, the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, & Forestry held its first Farm Bill hearing of the 118th Congress. The hearing covered the trade and horticulture titles of the Farm Bill. Three experts testified: Alexis…
Liz Turner is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. America’s farmworkers are a uniquely vulnerable group of workers. Farm labor is exempted from many federal protections, including the right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), many workplace safety regulations under the Occupational Safety and Health Act…
Luca Greco is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. Due to racist exclusions at the time of their passage, the many New Deal labor and employment protections that cover nearly every industry have long excluded farmworkers from their essential protections. Given that the agricultural workforce is now predominately comprised…