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US Department of Agriculture announced that workers on farms and in meatpacking plants who toiled through the pandemic stand to get $600 bonuses from the federal government. The USDA is putting $700 million toward a fund for food workers, in recognition of the personal costs many experienced during the pandemic. Food industry workers fell ill with COVID-19 at higher rates than other workers; many had to stay home without pay or use their own money for personal protective equipment like masks and gloves. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said, “They’ve often taken a significant personal risk to make sure the rest of us can feed our families”. The executive president of the United Farm Workers Foundation, Diana Tellefson Torres said, “Farmworkers faced the impossible choice of risking their lives to sustain their own families”.

Torres added, “Our call center fielded calls from farmworkers’ families who were in the hospital. Many of their employers did not provide them with paid leave when they were ill”. The officials said that around 1 million workers could be eligible for grants, assuming 10% of the funds are used to run the program. Workers will not need legal status to qualify. The money will be distributed through state agencies and tribal governments or nonprofits. The USDA plans to go through a formal request for applications process for such groups to be awarded this money. The agency is looking for groups with a record of working with hard-to-reach people, such as migrant workers, and that can reach the most people. Food system workers were hit disproportionately by COVID-19 early in the pandemic.

A study of working-age adults in California published in June found that the food and agriculture sector had the highest rates of death from COVID-19. Another study published in the journal Food Policy in April concluded that the presence of a beef or pork processing facility more than doubled a US county’s per capita coronavirus infection rates. The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting has indicated that more than 260 meatpacking workers have died of COVID-19 and at least 50,000 have fallen ill. The USDA funds are technically a reimbursement for workers who had to pay illness-related costs out of pocket. He said, “This is not a situation where they’ll have to prove they’ve expended resources. This is a reflection of the fact that in the pandemic they were at personal risk”.