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Environment Sep 18, 2020
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Hazardous smoke from wildfires across the West is presenting the latest danger for the men and women who pick America’s fruit and vegetable crops in a year when record heat and the coronavirus pandemic have already put their lives at risk. On Thursday, while air quality improved in the San Francisco Bay Area, throughout much of California’s Central Valley it remained classified as “unhealthy” or worse. Under those conditions, residents are advised to stay indoors — but farmworkers don’t have that option. “To be out in the fields, it’s like you can’t breathe,” Herman Hernandez, director of the California Farmworker Foundation, told NPR . The United Farm Workers, the nation’s largest farmworkers’ union, has been highlighting the poor working conditions caused by wildfires like the Basin Complex Fire, which has burned more than 162,000 acres near Big Sur, Calif. The state requires employers to provide particle respirators or face masks when the air quality index reaches the “unhealthy” level of 151 parts per million, but thanks in part to the coronavirus pandemic, personal protective equipment is in short supply and many farmworkers have been going without it. Farm workers in the Salinas Valley CA continue to work in the […]
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