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Photo by Heather Gill on Unsplash
On a hazy day in November, Hardeep Singh received a text message from the COVID-19 testing system at Foster Farms poultry company saying that his mother had tested positive for the coronavirus.
He got the alert because his mother, a 63-year-old line worker at one of the company’s meat-packing plants in California’s San Joaquin Valley, doesn’t speak English and doesn’t own a smartphone.
Singh couldn’t reach her as she continued to handle chicken parts alongside her co-workers. Her supervisors didn’t tell her, either. In fact, they assigned her more shifts for the week.
Singh broke the news to her that evening, and convinced her not to return to work, where she might spread the infection to others. But he couldn’t reach anyone at the company for another five days, to ask whether she qualified for paid time off while she isolated.
Singh’s mother ended up being among the more than 400 employees at the plant who were diagnosed with COVID-19 last year, and one of about 90,000 cases linked to food-production facilities and farm...