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The embodied precarity of year-round agricultural work: health and safety risks among Latino/a immigrant dairy farmworkers in New York

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Abstract

This paper analyzes how industrial agricultural production and an exclusionary immigration regime produce an embodied form of precarity among an undocumented immigrant labor force in the New York dairy industry, a much-celebrated engine of rural economic growth. In this industry, immigrant workers settle for years at a time, forming ethnic enclaves from which employers source workers for low-wage, exhausting, dangerous, year-round jobs. While much of the literature on migrant worker precarity has focused on temporary, insecure, flexible, and informal workers, this paper adds to this literature by analyzing how the permanence and regularity of dairy farming shape the embodied dimensions of worker precarity. The analysis shows how ‘everyday deportability’ (De Genova in Migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life. Annu Rev Anthropol 31(1):419–447, 2002), a weak regulatory structure, and the particularities of the production process combine to shape severe forms of physical risk to immigrant working bodies in the dairy industry. Findings are based on a qualitative study with current and former Latino/a dairy farmworkers between 2011 and 2015. This paper contributes to theorizing worker precarity in agricultural workplaces under the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the global agri-food system.

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Notes

  1. All names have been changed to protect participant confidentiality.

  2. According to a Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine handout, “Different Milking Routines”, obtained on May 2, 2014.

  3. The author contributed to the Fox et a.l (2017) report and interviews with 15 of the participants in that study of 88 farmworkers are included in the same 66-person sample for the present paper.

  4. 51 workers were asked during interviews about their weekly hours. One part-time worker (raising a small child) worked only 12.5 h per week was excluded from the calculation.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Philip McMichael, Wendy Wolford, Shannon Gleeson, and Michael Jones-Correa for support and feedback through the dissertation project that led to the publication of this manuscript. Three anonymous reviewers provided excellent feedback that helped to improve this paper. I am also grateful for the opportunity to present my work and receive helpful feedback from faculty members and students in the Department of Economics and the Global Political Economy Program at the University of Manitoba. Thanks also to the innumerable people who provided support that made this research possible, including Mary Jo Dudley, Carly Fox, Rebecca Fuentes, and Tom Maloney. Thank you above all to the farmworkers who trusted me enough to talk about difficult issues and share their precious time with me.

Funding

This research project was supported by the National Science Foundation, Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, Division of Social and Economic Sciences, Sociology Program under grant number 1333367; the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Alumni Association, Academic Enrichment Program; the Institute for Social Studies Theme Project on Immigration, Cornell; the Department of Development Sociology, Cornell, and USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Multistate Research Project #PEN04623 (Accession #1013257) titled, “Social, Economic and Environmental Causes and Consequences of Demographic Change in Rural America.”

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  1. Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education, Penn State University, 110-B Armsby Building, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Kathleen Sexsmith

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Sexsmith, K. The embodied precarity of year-round agricultural work: health and safety risks among Latino/a immigrant dairy farmworkers in New York. Agric Hum Values 39, 357–370 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10252-8

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