Leaking roofs, rain-soaked bedding, ankle-deep flood waters. Camp stoves for cooking and mattresses in shacks jacked up off the ground by wooden pallets.
Such were the tiny, meager dwellings some of Half Moon Bay’s mushroom farmworkers called home.
Long before mass shootings killed their friends and co-workers this week and tore their lives apart, workers at two farms in this coastal California city endured living conditions that a county official, referring to one of the farms, decried as “deplorable.” It took a tragic episode of mass violence to shine a national spotlight on the issue this week, but experts say such conditions are hardly an isolated case. Those we depend on to grow our food are living in overcrowded, unsanitary and unsafe situations all over the state.
