Essential and Unprotected

FRONTLINE: Film Audio Track | PBS

FRONTLINE

Pbs, Tv & Film, Wgbh, Documentaries, Frontline

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 22 July 2020

⏱️ 29 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	I think the average American has no concept of how food reaches our table.
0:06.3	We don't know how, for example, meat is processed, how it's raised, where it's grown.
0:13.3	We have no idea where lettuce comes from.
0:16.1	We have no idea how it's harvested.
0:18.6	We don't know what it takes to produce that.
0:22.2	People think that this workforce is expendable.
0:27.6	When it gets sick, there's 10 more in line to do it.
0:30.7	As the coronavirus has upended life as we know it, the true impact of the outbreak on
0:35.7	communities like America's largely immigrant agricultural workforce is still being measured.
0:42.0	I think one of the challenges for essential workers is to have been deemed and called essential,
0:47.0	but then to have not been given the essential protections that you need at work.
0:52.4	Journalist David L. Altan and Andres Siddhal have been reporting on the lives of undocumented
0:58.1	people in the U.S. for years, making films such as Rape in the Fields and Traffic in America.
1:04.4	For their new frontline documentary, COVID's hidden toll, they spent months investigating
1:09.4	how agricultural workers deemed essential to the nation's food supply are navigating
1:14.6	the pandemic.
1:16.4	I am Rainy Aronson, Executive Producer of Frontline, and this is the Frontline Dispatch.
1:23.2	The Frontline Dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation, committed to excellence
1:28.4	in journalism, and by the WGBH Catalyst Fund.
1:33.0	Support for the Frontline Dispatch also comes from the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer
1:36.8	Center.
1:38.2	Early detection is key to catching and treating many cancers.
	...

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