Whenever you look at the products that end up on your table, especially those you buy from big companies, you rarely think about the process that got them there. So you can always count on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver to reveal some harsh truths about things you’ve never thought about and make you realize that you can be a lot angrier at capitalism. This week, the show explored the frightening reality of farm workers and how their core job is not treated as such.
AND John Oiver not flippantly using the term “essential”: in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, farm work was chosen as one of the engines that couldn’t stop spinning as staple food had to be delivered to Americans’ supermarkets and homes. . Given the importance of agricultural workers and their work, one would think that they would be compensated accordingly by the agricultural industry. But you know if it happened it wouldn’t be Last week tonight episode about it.
Last week tonight Removes layers of painful exploitation of agricultural workers
The show showed that while farming is one of the most important jobs when it comes to the food industry, Americans aren’t really interested in those positions. This is why about 70% of agricultural workers are foreign-born, and a whopping 59% of them are undocumented workers. The situation gets worse, with children as young as 12 being allowed to work 10-14 hours a day harvesting and enduring extreme heat, dangerous equipment and unsafe air quality with pesticides being sprayed on crops while workers work around the clock. No wonder the Americans don’t want to get close to the crop fields. Or asparagus plantations, which thanks to this episode we now know how they look and how ugly they are.
Not surprisingly, the dreadful living conditions of agricultural workers are being alleviated by legislators who are hardly trying to find ways to guarantee better working and living conditions for foreign workers. There is approximately one field inspector for every 90,000 farm workers, which largely allows crop owners to do whatever they want, including ignoring allegations of harassment, keeping workers on low wages and threatening them with deportation, and placing them in situations that amount to modern-day slavery.
Farm Simulator 23: Terrifying Edition
This is what prompted Last week tonight command to fake launch a new version of a popular video game Farm Simulator. In the 2023 version of LWT, you can hire farm workers, choose their underdeveloped country of origin, choose what age they will be (from 12 to 60, no benefits need to be paid), and you can overwork them as much as you need. . You’ll also be able to yell racial slurs for extra points in each stage, and create worker housing that can range from a haunted house to just a cardboard box on the floor with an umbrella for cool shade.
You can watch the full main segment (and game trailer) below:
Source: Collider
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