Visa system forces care workers to stay silent on rape and abuse (TBIJ)
By Vicky Gayle, Emiliano Mellino, Hajar Meddah, and Charles Boutaud
They are among dozens of migrant care workers who have travelled to the UK to fill vacancies only to find themselves exploited and silenced. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), working with Citizens Advice, has gathered the testimonies of almost 175 people working for approximately 80 care providers via the health and care worker visa.‘These people are skilled professionals who keep our healthcare services running yet … the best we can sometimes do is help them access a food bank’
Their stories reveal that the people who make up a vital section of our social care workforce fear raising concerns about labour abuses – in large part because the existing visa system makes them dependent on their employer for their right to stay and work in the UK. And any complaint, even if upheld, can start a ticking clock leaving them with barely two months to avoid the risk of deportation
Lead-Tainted Applesauce Sailed Through Gaps in Food-Safety System (NYT)
BY Christina Jewett and Will Fitzgibbon
Hundreds of American children were poisoned last year. Records show how, time and again, the contamination went unnoticed.
The Food and Drug Administration, citing Ecuadorean investigators, said a spice grinder was likely responsible for the contamination and said the quick recall of three million applesauce pouches protected the food supply.
But hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The New York Times and the nonprofit health newsroom The Examination, along with interviews with government and company officials in multiple countries, show that in the weeks and months before the recall, the tainted applesauce sailed through a series of checkpoints in a food-safety system meant to protect American consumers.
South Korea Needs Foreign Workers, but Often Fails to Protect Them (NYT)
BY Choe Sang-Hun
Though a shrinking population makes imported labor vital, migrant workers routinely face predatory employers, inhumane conditions and other abuse.
“They would not have treated me like this if I were South Korean,” said Mr. Chandra, 38. “They treat migrant workers like disposable items.”
The work can be deadly — foreign workers were nearly three times more likely to die in work-related accidents compared with the national average, according to a recent study. Such findings have alarmed rights groups and foreign governments; in January the Philippines prohibited its citizens from taking seasonal jobs in South Korea.
But South Korea remains an attractive destination, with more than 300,000 low-skilled workers here on temporary work visas. (Those figures do not include the tens of thousands of ethnic Korean migrants from China and former Soviet republics, who typically face less discrimination.) About 430,000 additional people have overstayed their visas and are working illegally, according to government data.
There’s something icky about performative cleanliness (Vox)
BY REBECCA JENNINGS
TikTok is full of millennial gray, competitive hygiene, and bleach. It stinks!
But the American obsession with cleaning has never been about facts. It’s about feelings. What began as patriotic duty during the Civil War has curdled into a never-ending stream of unnecessary products advertised to us by weaponizing our insecurities. The pandemic only exacerbated the germaphobia baked into American culture: The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson coined the term “hygiene theater” to describe the ways in which people and businesses have prioritized less effective measures of preventing the spread of Covid, such as obsessively disinfecting surfaces or putting hand sanitizer at every table, at the expense of more effective ones, like proper ventilation, mask-wearing, and social distancing. “People are power scrubbing their way to a false sense of security,” he wrote. What makes us feel cleaner, in other words, doesn’t actually make us so.
The dairy industry really, really doesn’t want you to say “bird flu in cows” (Vox)
BY Marina Bolotnikova
How industrial meat and dairy trap us in an infectious disease cycle.
H5N1, or bird flu, has hit dairy farms — but the dairy industry doesn’t want us saying so.
The current, highly virulent strain of avian flu had already been ripping through chicken and turkey farms over the past two years. Since it jumped to US dairy cows for the first time last month, it’s infected more than 20 dairy herds across eight states, raising alarms among public health authorities about possible spread to humans and potential impacts on the food supply.
One Texas dairy worker contracted a mild case of bird flu from one of the impacted farms — the second such case ever recorded in the US (though one of hundreds worldwide over the past two decades, most of them fatal).
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