Got Milk?

First tomatoes, now milk. The low cost of various products at the grocery store is often driven by underpaid and overworked migrant labor and not by some magical gains in U.S. efficiency.

From The Atlantic...

At about 4:00 in the afternoon of December 22, José Obeth Santiz Cruz, a 20-year-old youth from the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico, died after becoming caught in a manure-removal conveyer inside the barn of the Vermont farm where he worked. Because he lacked documentation, it took more than a week for officials to determine who he really was, how old he was, and where he came from.

Vermont likes to promote itself as a verdant, wholesome state with picturesque black and white Holsteins grazing on hillside pastures. But the postcard image hides an ugly truth. Santiz Cruz was one of 1,500 to 2,000 immigrant workers, most lacking legal papers, who toil invisibly behind the scenes in the Vermont's beleaguered dairy industry, working 80-hour weeks and living in total isolation, often sleeping in the very barns with the cows they tend.

Santiz Cruz had 80 extended family members and friends working on nearby Vermont farms but they feared gathering to hold a memorial service for the youth because of the possibility of prosecution and deportation. It was left to a handful of workers' rights advocates to hold a quiet candlelight vigil in his honor.