-
Benjamin Manuel Gonzales and other workers in the milking barn at the Cow Palace in the Yakima Valley. -
A worker at Veiga Dairy in Sunnyside, Washington, hoses down the concrete pad after milking. -
Arturo Sepulveda (left), an organizer for United Farm Workers of America, talks with former workers from Ruby Ridge Dairy. Sepulveda and his co-workers successfully unionized the Threemile Canyon Farms in Boardman, Oregon, one of only two unionized dairies in the West. -
dairytable.jpg -
Miguel Espiritu, Jose “Gordo” Miranda and Armando Herrera (pictured from left), were among the workers who say they left or were fired from Ruby Ridge Dairy in Pasco, Washington, after they tried to organize a union.
YAKIMA COUNTY, WASHINGTON
At first, there was neither pain nor fear, only an unfamiliar warmth flooding his chest. Then he remembered the cow and her kicking back leg. Then he realized how hard it was to see.
He woke up lying on the rubber mat on the dusty floor of the dairy where he works. It was 4:30 in the morning, and he had been at work since 5 the night before. The sweet and putrid smell of cow manure laced the air. As he waited half an hour for his boss to come take him to the hospital, he pressed a towel to his face, stared at the blood pooled on his white T-shirt. His head felt as though it might burst. He told himself that it was only a cut, but he had never felt pain like this before.
Later, he learned that his face was broken in three places. The doctors put a metal plate beneath his left eye. Now, four years later, he explains in Spanish through a translator that the plate is slipping. His eye burns, especially in the heat. He can’t see well without glasses.
He is afraid to tell his story without the shield of a different name, so let’s call him Gustavo. Like many of the immigrants who work in the West’s dairies, he lives here illegally. He thinks about how easy it would be for his bosses to fire him and replace him with one of the other immigrants who come here daily looking for work. He has three young children and a wife to support, as well as his parents and siblings back in Peru.
“It’s a job with lots of risks. If I had papers, man, there’s no way I’d be working in a dairy. But in this town, this is the best job I can get,” he says, sagging into his kitchen chair, exhausted after his 12-hour shift. When he smiles, a quick, almost apologetic smile, his left eye looks slightly lopsided. A jagged purple scar mars the base of his cheek. “Every worker I know says they’ve been kicked or stepped on by a cow. It’s common. But one day (the cows) might break your bones, or maybe even kill you.”
Milk may have a wholesome commercial image, but the dairies that produce most of the nation’s supply aren’t always healthy places to work. Dairy workers are injured at a much higher rate than other workers in the U.S.: Between 2004 and 2007, nearly seven of every 100 dairy workers were hurt annually on average, compared to 4.5 out of 100 for all private industries. Beyond using tractors and heavy farming equipment, dairy workers interact with large, unpredictable farm animals — work that ranks among the most hazardous of all occupations, according to a 2007 article in Epidemiology. Plus, they breathe air laced with bacteria and manure dust, putting them at risk for long-term respiratory disease.
Data culled by High Country News show that at least 18 people died in Western dairies between 2003 and 2009 (see sidebar for a state-by-state list, with links to original accident reports and investigations). They were killed in tractor accidents, suffocated by falling hay bales, crushed by charging cows and bulls and asphyxiated by gases from manure lagoons and corn silage. Others survived but lost limbs or received concussions and spent days in the hospital. However, it’s difficult to form an accurate picture of the dangers lurking in dairies because the data are incomplete. Due in part to lobbying by the powerful agricultural industry, the reporting requirements for employers are full of holes, and state and federal laws prevent safety agencies from investigating injuries and deaths in certain cases. Meanwhile, dairy workers themselves are often too afraid to speak up.
The majority of the West’s nearly 50,000 dairy workers are immigrants, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture sociologist William Kandel. Many of them are undocumented, monolingual Spanish speakers like Gustavo. Such workers are unlikely to report injuries or file claims with the state for money to recover medical bills and missed pay for fear of getting fired or deported. Though Gustavo himself filed a claim without incident, he knows five workers who went to the hospital with injuries, filed claims and were fired. One former coworker’s ankle was stomped on by a cow, and he still can’t walk despite several surgeries. Gustavo’s cousin was attacked by a bull, and despite the screws now holding his shoulder together, he can no longer milk cows or pick crops and is unemployed.
To make matters worse, federal labor laws that protect workers in other industries and give them a voice don’t cover dairy workers; state oversight and inspections can be as weak as skim milk. In the Yakima Valley, where Gustavo works, there are virtually no labor advocacy organizations. And with the dairy industry facing some of its hardest economic times in recent history, its workers may be more vulnerable than ever before.
“If you’re undocumented, you won’t complain. You won’t ask for extra water or a shade break or to not do a task you think is dangerous. These things lead to workplace injuries,” says Marc Schenker, director of the Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety in Davis, Calif., which is funded by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. “Their injuries aren’t inevitable; they’re the failure of our system to do the right thing. It’s not only an injustice but a tragedy.”
—-
Around 40 years ago, most American dairies were fairly small operations, according to a report co-authored by Jim MacDonald, a U.S. Department of Agriculture economist. They kept an average of 19 cows that ate grass from nearby pastures and were milked once or twice a day by family members or locals. These days, technological advancements such as more sophisticated automated milking systems have allowed dairies to vastly increase in size and to lower their costs per pound of milk produced. Consumers have been the primary beneficiaries of these advancements, as the changes have kept the cost of milk and dairy products low.
Nowhere in the country has it been easier for dairies to expand than in the West, with its relatively cheap rural land. As of 2007, the average Western dairy had 550 cows — about five times the national average. And around 80 dairies in the West each have at least 5,000 cows, according to MacDonald. To increase milk production and make it easier to get that many cows in and out of milking parlors two or three times a day, most Western dairies now keep the animals in huge pens or sprawling open-air sheds and feed them a high-protein diet of corn, soybeans, grain and alfalfa, much of it purchased instead of grown at the farm. California, not Wisconsin, is now the biggest milk producer in the country. And Idaho, New Mexico and Washington have drawn new dairies like manure draws flies; today, the three are also among the nation’s top 10 states for milk production. Nowadays, with 39 percent of the country’s 9.1 million milking cows, the West produces 41 percent of America’s milk, which is then processed to make various kinds of milk, cheese and other dairy products. And immigrants, who are willing to work for less money than locals, now make up a large proportion of the staff.
All 14 of the employees where Gustavo works are immigrants; Gustavo says only three of them are documented. The dairy’s 750 cows sleep and eat outside on hard dirt in six outdoor corrals that stretch the length of seven city blocks. Their large brown-and-white bodies bump against the metal bars, creating an eerie and arrhythmic melody.
Before his injury, Gustavo and a coworker would open one of the corrals and whack the cows on their backs to funnel them into the concrete milking parlor. Once inside, Gustavo would douse each cow’s udders with disinfectant iodine and fit rubber hoses onto its teats, connecting them to the air-sucking milking machine. After 10 or 11 hours on his feet, Gustavo says he tended to feel less agile and less able to watch for the kicking back leg of a touchy cow. His face was often just six inches from the animal’s rear, and then as now there were no bars to protect the workers from the cows.
Now, Gustavo is afraid to milk, so he feeds and tends to the dairy’s calves. The pay is slightly better, but Gustavo says he still doesn’t get rest breaks. He eats lunch while working, removing a manure-laden glove to shove a taco into his mouth. When he feels tired, which is every day, he thinks about his three kids.
Like most dairy workers, Gustavo is salaried, which sounds good until you consider his schedule. Gustavo pulls his neatly folded pay stub from his wallet. He makes $1,175 every two weeks. He works 10- to 12-hour days, with one day off every five days, and receives no overtime pay. That pencils out to about $8 to $10 per hour, which is around the national average for dairy workers, according to industry reports. When Gustavo first arrived in the area 11 years ago, he and his boss discussed only pay, not hours, and he was too happy to have a job to ask any questions. But now he feels he’s at his boss’s mercy, and he is all too aware that long hours make a dangerous job even more dangerous.
This is all perfectly legal. Even though dairies have modernized, some of the key labor laws governing the industry remain unchanged, still geared to the days when dairies had few employees beyond family members.
Dairy workers, like all agricultural employees, are exempt from the provisions for overtime pay in the Fair Labor Standards Act. Though dairy operators are required to pay at least minimum wage, they are exempt from another federal law that requires employers to report hours on employee pay-stubs. That makes it tough to enforce the law or prove wage violations, says Oregon Law Center labor lawyer Mark Wilk, who over the past decade has represented several hundred Oregon dairy workers who didn’t make minimum wage.
As a final slash in the safety net of federal labor law, dairy workers, like all agricultural workers, are exempt from the National Labor Relations Act, which requires employers to negotiate with labor unions over salaries and work conditions and protects workers who try to form unions from being punished. Without this law — the Magna Carta of American labor — dairy workers cannot form a union unless their boss is willing to recognize it and they have little legal recourse if they get fired for trying to organize.
“Dairy folks are legally in the worst of all worlds. There really is no federal law at all to protect them,” says Wilk. “This is the last bastion of feudalism. The ugly reality of the world that my clients live in is shocking.”
—-
Furthermore, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the national agency responsible for workplace health, doesn’t regulate dairies and farms with 10 or fewer employees. For larger operations, federal OSHA requires employers to report and investigates only in the event of a fatality or if three or more employees are hospitalized due to the same accident. States either rely on the feds to regulate industries, or use their own agency, which gives them the option of developing more rigorous regulations and enforcing them with state money. However, the only states in the West that have adopted their own stricter standards are Washington, Oregon and California. (Arizona uses state money to investigate small farms, but only if someone dies.) Inspectors in these states can investigate dairies and farms of any size, and they require employers to contact them if any injury requires a worker to be hospitalized overnight.
Last year, federal and state labor inspectors in the West inspected 42 of the region’s approximately 4,150 dairies. While both federal OSHA and state agencies step up inspections for industries that are considered dangerous, no state in the West targets dairies because officials receive relatively few complaints from dairy workers.
That’s because complaining is too risky, says a dairy worker from Grandview, Wash., who spoke on condition of anonymity. Because inspectors conduct most of their interviews on site, workers fear retaliation or the loss of their jobs if they say anything. Often, their bosses are the ones who orchestrate the inspections.
“(The manager) would know when the inspectors were going to come, and they would tell us what to say,” the worker says in Spanish. “Everything needed to be perfect that day. They will threaten you. You want to keep your job, so you have to do this. For me, this job’s important because it’s all year long. You can make twice as much working in the dairy as in the fields.”
Other dangerous industries, such as meatpacking, logging and construction, have specific safety standards mandated by state or federal labor agencies. While dairies fall under the general agricultural safety regulations for tractors and heavy machinery, there are no specific standards for how workers should be protected while milking or moving cows. Dairy workers in Washington, Nevada, Oregon and California are entitled to lunch and rest breaks, but legal aid organizations in these states say the laws are rarely enforced. The state of Washington has not fined any dairies for failing to provide rest breaks, at least not in recent history, according to Rich Ervin, the Washington Department of Labor and Industry’s program manager for Employment Standards. “We’re not in there to make money for the state coffers,” he says. “We’re not in there to beat up growers.”
Former Washington labor inspector Martin Yanez believes the agency has simply failed to enforce the law as it should be enforced. And that, he says, is dangerous.
“If you work those long hours without breaks, even to eat, you are at a point of becoming not only exhausted but exposed to injuries and accidents,” says Yanez.
When Yanez worked for Labor and Industries, he would visit dairies at the 5 a.m. shift change. Instead of questioning workers under the watchful eyes of dairy owners, he stood in the road, talking to workers as they arrived and left. But once he began fining dairymen for not giving workers breaks, he says he came under pressure from his bosses to stop. Partly because of this, he left the agency.
In the 11 years since Yanez left, the agency has stepped up its efforts to protect workers, says Elaine Fischer, the agency’s spokeswoman. The agency’s Web site and publications are bilingual, and in places like central Washington, where the Yakima Valley is located, 34 of its 146 staffers speak Spanish. In 1998, farmworker advocates and Mexican unions accused the state of violating NAFTA and gaining an unfair trade advantage by not extending federal labor laws to farmworkers and not enforcing safety laws to protect apple pickers from pesticides. In response, eight years ago the agency launched a long-term education campaign. These days, staffers visit community events in the Yakima Valley and talk to workers about their rights. Last year, the agency did 19 dairy inspections, far more than any other Western state. Even so, says Fischer, the agency’s reach is limited.
“If you’re getting paid and if the employer has an accident-prevention plan and there’s restrooms and water, there’s not a lot we can do,” she says. “Sometimes the reality is that the jobs are difficult. People can get injured at work even when there is no safety violation found.”
The debate over how well state and federal laws and agencies protect dairy workers no longer matters to Katie and Frank Diaz.
On Dec. 30, 2008, Miguel Diaz, their father, was trampled by a bull as he herded cows away from their pens to be milked at the Tony Veiga Dairy in Sunnyside, Wash. The only witness to the accident was Diaz himself.
After the bull pinned him against a fence and gored his chest, Diaz dragged his tall, thin body to the milking barn. When his coworker, JoseLuis Rodriguez, first saw him, he thought he was joking around, pretending to be injured, according to the Labor and Industries investigation report. Then Rodriguez saw the blood spilling from Diaz’s mouth, and the cut on the left side of his eye and face. Diaz gasped for air and was having trouble talking. His boss drove him to the emergency room and left, thinking Diaz would be OK. But within 30 minutes, Diaz’s injuries — including broken ribs and a lacerated lung — had sent him into cardiac arrest. The hospital staff failed to resuscitate him. He was 31.
Labor and Industries considered the event a freak accident and did not cite or fine the dairy owner, Tony Veiga, president of the Washington State Dairy Federation. The sheriff’s office did not investigate. And the local newspaper did not report the death, aside from a small notice several days later that failed to mention the name of the place where Diaz worked.
Diaz’s partner, Consuelo, and his sister, Anna, both hold the dairy liable for letting the bull escape from its pen, for not providing more safety instruction and for not calling for an ambulance to sprint him to the hospital. Diaz had been hurt before in the dairy, when he was caught between two cows that pushed him against a railing. That accident sent him to the hospital with a spinal injury.
—-
Consuelo talks about Miguel’s exhaustion from the 12-hour night shifts, how thin he had become, how he mourned the death of a good friend and co-worker who suffocated at the dairy two years ago when a stack of hay bales fell on him. As she speaks, she holds a picture of Miguel with their two kids. Their 6-year-old son Frank has Miguel’s warm, serious eyes. Miguel, who was originally from Michoacan, Mexico, moved to the Yakima Valley with his parents and seven sisters in 1988. He was supposed to receive his papers to become a citizen any day, Consuelo says, and as soon as he did, they planned to get married. Miguel thought his boss was a good man, but he wanted to find a better job once he was legal.
“It gets harder every day. I miss him,” says Anna Diaz, Miguel’s sister. “My parents wanted to give us a better life. They thought it would be better for us here. He had the whole world ahead of him, but he didn’t make it that far.”
It’s hard to determine responsibility for such tragedies; the work itself is inherently dangerous. Miguel Diaz’s boss, Tony Veiga, says he is careful at his dairy, holding the state-required monthly safety and training meetings in both English and Spanish. He has an accident-prevention program, also required by law, that instructs workers how to use chemicals safely, how to administer first aid and how to report unsafe conditions. And after 31 years in business without serious incident, he’s mystified by the two recent deaths on his farm.
“I don’t know why they happened on this place, as careful as we are, but things do happen in life,” says Veiga. “None of us are risk-free. We take risks every day when we go drive down the road or get in a plane. Employers do their part, and employees have to do their part as well.”
Inside the concrete milking parlor at the George DeRuyter & Sons Dairy in Outlook, Wash., men with almond-colored skin scramble between the rows of cows, hooking and unhooking udders to milking machinery. Outside, glacier-encrusted Mount Adams rises far to the west, and strains of mariachi music float on the midmorning air from a nearby radio. In the narrow hallway that connects these worlds, third-generation Yakima County dairyman Dan DeRuyter fills a soda machine with Pepsi for his employees, shouting above the grinding motor of the mechanical milking machine.
“I take a huge interest in my guys. If they get hurt, it bothers me,” says DeRuyter, whose Dad, George, started this dairy in 1986 with 1,000 cows. Today, they milk 4,600. To protect his 40 workers from getting kicked, he has them milk the cows from the rear through metal crossbars. Taking care of workers makes good business sense, DeRuyter explains: “If you have too many injuries, your (insurance) rates will go up, which is the last thing we need right now.” (Dairies can pay as much as 25 percent more in industrial insurance premiums the year following an accident.)
In the past year, a number of forces have affected the price dairymen receive for their milk, causing it to drop from $19 per 100 pounds last June to less than $9 this summer. The European Union voted to subsidize continental dairy products, and Australia and New Zealand emerged from a several-year drought to flood the market with milk just as the general economy plummeted and foreign demand decreased. The cost of production, particularly of feed, has remained high, so most dairies in the West are losing about $100 per cow per month, according to MacDonald, the USDA economist. In the past year alone, the DeRuyters have borrowed over a million dollars from the bank.
“It’s like getting kicked in the teeth every single day,” says DeRuyter, leaning against the wall. “You wake up in the middle of the night wondering how you’re going to pay this off. I’m not sure we can handle these prices for another year.”
He’s heard grim stories about his peers in California — the farm foreclosures that have happened this summer, and the two suicides that followed. In June alone, 60 dairies in Idaho, Washington, New Mexico and California “retired,” turning 44,000 dairy cows into hamburger, according to the National Milk Producers Federation. The Western United Dairymen estimates that 10 percent of California’s dairies, big and small alike, will close within the year. Nationwide, it could be more like 15 percent, according to Peter Hoekstra of Genske, Mulder & Co., an accounting firm that handles 450 dairies nationwide. “There isn’t a dairy in this office that is showing a profit,” says Hoekstra. “These are good people, family farms, not corporations. Some of them have been in business for generations and they’re just going to go away.”
—-
These hard economic times will almost certainly impact dairy workers. Even as dairy operators worry about insurance premiums escalating, they also have to hustle to stay afloat. That means maximizing production while minimizing costs. Dairymen in Yakima County report that they’ve cut back employees without selling cows, which means their remaining employees will have to work even harder. The state has yet to calculate workers’ compensation claims for the past year (and it doesn’t separate dairies from other agricultural industries), so there’s no hard data, but injury reports could increase, says Corwyn Fischer, the Washington State Farm Bureau’s safety director. “People are trying to prove to their employer that they’re a good worker,” he says. “They’ll think, ‘I need to stay on,’ and they work harder and they get injured.”
And dairy workers remain at a disadvantage even if their bosses care about them and pay them well. “It’s not so much about working conditions as it’s about power and what voice workers have in the workplace,” says Erik Nicholson, regional director of the United Farm Workers union. Beyond the weighty factors of poverty and questionable citizenship, dairy workers’ inability to unionize under the protection of federal law leaves them at their bosses’ mercy. The only two dairies in the West that have unionized are in Oregon, where the farmworkers’ union was able to rally the public to put pressure on Tillamook Cheese, which purchased milk from the dairies. But such efforts are hampered by the union’s lack of resources: It has only four employees for both Oregon and Washington and none in Idaho or New Mexico.
That doesn’t mean the organization has stopped trying.
On a golden June evening in Kennewick, 25 miles east of Yakima County, workers from Ruby Ridge Dairy, a 2,000-cow operation in nearby Pasco, gathered around a metal picnic table at a local park. As they piled corn tortillas with green salsa and grilled steak, the men listened to Arturo Sepulveda, a union organizer and fellow immigrant. Intense and compact, Sepulveda spoke about how he and his co-workers successfully fought to unionize the 16,000-cow Threemile Canyon Farms in Oregon, just across the Columbia River. Unionization ensured workers at Threemile paid rest breaks, a pension plan, protection against being unjustly fired and “more dignity,” he said. The Ruby Ridge workers passed around a pen and cards and cast votes on forming their own union.
The workers explained in Spanish that they want the union to help them get what is legally theirs but never delivered: lunch breaks, a chance to drink water or go to the bathroom. They don’t expect overtime pay or Christmas vacation. As their children ran through sprinklers in the grass, the men shared stories about the conditions at Ruby Ridge, about the stink and the injuries and the long hours.
“A union would be better for the people. The work in the dairy is good, but there’s no law in there. The only law is the supervisor,” said Jose “Gordo” Miranda. “I’d like to be respected like a worker, right now I’m like a slave. If I get treated bad, I have to take whatever they give me because I have my family to support.”
By mid-July, an overwhelming majority of Ruby Ridge’s 40 employees had signed cards in favor of union representation, according to the farmworkers union. Nicholson and Sepulveda had met with the dairy’s owners and suggested bringing in a neutral third-party to help negotiate unionization. The dairy wasn’t interested. Dick Bengen, Ruby Ridge co-owner, says that unionization would cripple his business. If the workers went on strike and refused to milk, he explains, his cows’ mammary systems would be ruined within 48 hours. And anyway, he says, his workers don’t want a union, based on a vote he had at the dairy. He blames the United Farm Workers for spurring his employees to work less efficiently and less diligently, in order to create a confrontation.
The dairy has fired four people in recent weeks, including Miranda. Bengen says the dismissals have nothing to do with union activity; Nicholson calls them retaliation. In mid-August, 14 Ruby Ridge workers, including those recently fired, sued the dairy. They claim that it didn’t pay full wages or provide lunch and rest breaks, and that it unfairly dismissed union supporters. But because the National Labor Relations Act doesn’t cover dairies, the fired workers must depend on fairly weak case law, admits Nicholson.
As for Gustavo, when he came to Washington 11 years ago, he never thought about things like unions, or worried about his health. He thought he would become the family hero, helping his parents pay for utilities and his siblings attend school. Now, everything has changed.
He needs a doctor to readjust the metal plate under his eye, but finding someone to do the surgery has been difficult. He works all day, and he’s afraid that if he takes time off for an appointment, his boss will jump at the chance to fire him.
“I’m not sure what to do. Tengo un sueno, I have a dream, to watch my children grow and study here in America, but if I lose my eyesight then I won’t even be able to work,” his says, his voice flat, as his 4-year-old son stands at the doorway, watching. Lately, Gustavo has been thinking about returning to Peru, but his wife, who is originally from Mexico, doesn’t want to leave. They fight about it a lot. “Es muy dificil. But I think it’s better to leave and be happy and poor rather than to have money and be depressed.”
For additional information please see:
“Low costs drive production to large dairy farms,” (2007 USDA report)
Dairies rely heavily on foreign labor (2009 National Milk Producers Federation study)
“Got workers? Dairy farms run low on labor,” Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2009
“Government help not enough for most dairy farmers,” Salt Lake Tribune, Aug. 4, 2009
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The dark side of dairies.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
