Abstract
U.S. dairy farmers increasingly hire immigrant workers for the bottom-rung jobs of milking cows, feeding calves, and scraping manure. These immigrant dairy workers join the ranks of more than a million hired farmworkers who work in some of the most dangerous conditions in the United States. The agriculture, fishing, and forestry sector consistently ranks highest in rates of fatalities, injuries, and illnesses, especially for immigrant workers.1 Yet, despite their numbers, the harmful working conditions and labor insecurity they face, and the fact that their agricultural context means that they experience certain conditions that urban workers do not, scholarship on precarious employment rarely addresses the plight of farmworkers. Rather, the “new” precariat typically refers exclusively to urban workers in the temporary staffing industry or the emerging “gig economy.” The omission of farmworkers from analyses of precarious employment is striking, considering that farmworkers are the prototypical precariat. When looking at today’s growing “new” precariat, we see that workers across multiple sectors are, in fact, increasingly treated like farmworkers—underpaid, contingent, and disposable.The restructuring of the agri-food economy has exacerbated precarious work within the industry, resulting in new and intensified demands for low-wage, non-union, exploitable labor in rural places.2 This has fueled the emergence of new immigrant destinations across the United States and an expanding rural precariat. In the dairy industry, intensified precarity has dire consequences for workers’ well-being and health, as do legal status, geographic isolation, and an under-regulated industry. Yet workers and their allies have also begun to make strides in exposing—and addressing—these problems.