Got guilt?

Dairy workers grub for minimum wage in sickening manure pits -- so American consumers can have cheap milk and cheese.

By Rebecca Clarren

Aug 27, 2004 | Lazing cows dot the rolling hills of the picturesque Willamette River valley, and the air smells sweet of grass and manure. But this sunny image masks a grim reality for dairy workers like Arturo Ramirez. For six years, Ramirez's duties included maintaining a pump that sprayed liquid dung onto the fields as fertilizer. To get to the pump, he had to walk waist deep in manure across a pit as long as a swimming pool. Wading through manure isn't like walking through water: The sludge is heavy, the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide rises off the slick surface, and if you're unlucky, you can slip and drown.

Ramirez didn't die in the manure pit -- a fate met by three workers in California -- but as he waded through the waste of 380 cows, it slid into his knee-high boots. Because it's impossible to completely scrub away the bacteria from manure, Ramirez passed a skin infection on to his wife and her two daughters. "I felt like a slave; it was like my boss had a whip," says Ramirez, 27, who relocated to this lush rural valley from the desert of central Mexico.

Arturo Ramirez is not his real name, and he has a new job at a different dairy, but he worries he'd be fired if his boss discovers he has talked to a reporter. Ramirez can't afford to be out of work. When his father died 12 years ago, he crossed the border through the Arizona desert to find work to help support his mother and four younger brothers and sisters. Without the $400 he sends home every month, his family would barely survive.

It's not an easy sacrifice: Ramirez works 12 to 16 hours a day, six days a week, for minimum wage and no overtime pay. Until this past February, when Oregon passed a new law, dairy workers were afforded no lunch or rest breaks. In more than 40 states no such law exists, leaving many employees no choice but to eat lunch while working. Ramirez, like other dairy workers, is regularly kicked by cows and is exposed to toxic gases in the manure, such as hydrogen sulfide, that may cause permanent neurological damage.

"I worry every day that I will break my hand or get hurt, but I never say anything for fear I'll lose my job," says Ramirez, who uses a fake Social Security number. "No American would do this job. This is a shit job, for shit money." Yet Ramirez, like most other dairy workers, has few other employment options besides agriculture. Since the vast majority are non-English-speaking immigrants, and none are unionized, relatively few complain to state or federal agencies for fear of losing their jobs or being deported, according to legal aid organizations in Oregon and California and the United Farm Workers of America. Even if they were speaking up about working conditions, fighting for protection would still be an uphill battle.

The workers, who on average make between $5.15 and $7.06 per hour, can't compete with the wealth and political power of their employers. In 2002 the dairy industry gave more than $5 million to state and federal campaigns. "Dairymen have a good ear when it comes to approaching the legislature," says George Gilman, an Oregon state representative and recently retired dairy owner. "The industry is really well represented in legislators around the United States. There's enough people that understand the challenges of our industry."

Next Page: "Conditions amount to near slavery, but dairy workers tend to get ignored"

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