As the coronavirus sweeps through the United States, the country’s 2.5 million farmworkers are continuing to go to work every day, often facing crowded and unsanitary conditions without personal protective equipment, for poverty wages. We speak with Gerardo Reyes Chávez, a farmworker leader with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, who describes the conditions farmworkers in Florida are facing and how they are calling on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to protect farmworkers during the COVID-19 crisis, and with Mónica Ramírez, president and founder of Justice for Migrant Women and co-founder of the National Farmworkers Women’s Alliance.
As workers, we have been asking the local government, the state government, to take action and prepare for the spread of COVID-19 in our community. And we have met with just deaf ears. People here, in terms of government, are not responding in any positive way with us, anything that is going to help us be ready for this.
The cases of COVID-19 started to spread several days ago. More than a week ago, there was announced that there were some cases here in our community. And right now they said that there’s 13 cases as of yesterday. This is something that we are highly doubtful, just because, you know, all of these cases happened in a context in which there were no tests
— source democracynow.org | Apr 14, 2020