We must do more to protect our farmworkers!

“I feel tired,” she said, seated at her mobile home’s kitchen table after a day’s work. “I feel like stopping, but how can I?”

“At 72, Ms. Sanchez is the oldest on her crew working in California’s Coachella Valley. She is among tens of thousands of undocumented farm workers who have spent decades working in the United States — doing the kind of sweaty, backbreaking work that powers much of the country’s farming industry — but are ineligible for Social Security, Medicare, or the other forms of retirement relief that would allow them to stop working.

In interviews over the past year, in California, Oregon, Georgia and Florida, many workers said they had no plan for retirement and no idea how they would live if they were to stop working.

In nearly every case, they had paid income taxes and filed tax returns. Some expressed concern about being able to afford health care as they age; decades of exposure to pesticides, extreme heat and grueling physical labor had taken a toll on some workers.”

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