Essential and Unprotected
The FRONTLINE Dispatch
GBH
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2020
⏱️ 30 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
They’ve been keeping America fed throughout the pandemic — and they say they’ve had to choose between their health and their jobs. For the essential agriculture workers who pick and process the food we eat, many of them undocumented immigrants, COVID-19 is amplifying existing challenges. Journalists Daffodil Altan and Andrés Cediel discuss what their reporting for FRONTLINE shows about the virus’s toll on workers at farms and meatpacking plants, the lack of federally required COVID-19 protections for agriculture workers, and why workers who are undocumented have been fearful to speak out: “Even if you're called essential, you can still potentially be deported.”
For more, watch COVID’s Hidden Toll — the latest installment in FRONTLINE’s award-winning body of work exposing the hidden realities facing low-wage immigrant workers in the U.S. (Rape in the Fields, Rape on the Night Shift, Trafficked in America). The documentary is supported by Chasing the Dream.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Frontline Dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation, |
| 0:03.6 | committed to excellence in journalism, |
| 0:05.6 | and by the Frontline Journalism Fund, with major support from John and Joanne Hagler. |
| 0:10.9 | Support for Frontline Dispatch comes from the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Service. and When you hear the word cancer, their team is ready. |
| 0:23.0 | Learn more at mass general.org slash cancer. |
| 0:27.0 | I think the average American has no concept of how food reaches our table. |
| 0:32.0 | We don't know how, for example, meat is processed, how it's |
| 0:37.8 | raised, where it's grown. We have no idea where lettuce comes from. We have no idea how it's harvested. We don't know what it takes to produce that. |
| 0:48.6 | People think that this workforce is expendable. One gets sick, there's 10 more in line to do it. |
| 0:57.0 | As the coronavirus's upended life as we know it, the true impact of the outbreak on communities like America's largely immigrant |
| 1:05.2 | agricultural workforce is still being measured. I think one of the challenges |
| 1:09.9 | for essential workers is to have been deemed and called essential, but then to have not been given |
| 1:15.6 | kind of the essential protections that you need at work. |
| 1:19.0 | Journalist Daffodil Al-Tan and Andres Zadil have been reporting on the lives of undocumented people in the US for years, making |
| 1:27.4 | films such as Rape in the Fields and Trafficked in America. |
| 1:31.3 | For their new frontline documentary, COVID's hidden toll, they spent months investigating |
| 1:36.2 | how agricultural workers deemed essential to the nation's food supply are navigating the |
| 1:41.6 | pandemic. I am Rainy Aronson, executive producer of Frontline, and |
| 1:46.3 | this is the Frontline Dispatch. |
| 1:51.3 | The Frontline Dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation, committed to excellence in journalism, and by the WGBH Catalyst Fund. |
| 1:59.0 | Support for the Frontline Dispatch also comes from the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. Early detection is key to catching and treating many cancers. |
| 2:08.0 | You can learn more about the innovative programs at mass general.org.org. |
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