"What a stay at home order means for migrant dairy workers"
Like farms across the United States, Vermont's farms have been deemed "essential businesses" as the COVID19 pandemic ravages the nation's health and economy. By extension, those working on these farms including the 1000 1200 Latinx immigrant farmworkers laboring in Vermont's dairy economy are classified as "essential workers." The cruel irony of immigrant farmworkers being seen as essential while simultaneously facing further repression and exploitation is perhaps most blatant in Trump's recent proposition (crafted by Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Agriculture Secretary Perdue) to lower the pay for an estimated 250,000 guest workers in the food system as a supposed solution to the economic consequences of the pandemic. Indeed, as many labor advocates have postulated, perhaps a better classifier for these essential workers in the food systems during these harrowing times is "sacrificial." In my 2019 book, Life on the Other Border, I described the forces political, economic, and social that have pushed Vermont's farmworkers deep into the state's shadow economy:
Agriculture and human values