(NEW YORK) — On hot days, some over 100 degrees, workers spend hours harvesting fruits and vegetables for very little money — produce that ends up on kitchen tables of people across the country.

Tens of thousands of these workers have experienced heat-related injuries and hundreds more have died from heat, all while earning an average of $25,000 to $29,999 per year in one of the most hazardous jobs in the country, the Economic Policy Institute found.

The workers, a majority of whom are Latino and undocumented, are in a constant battle for fair and safe labor practices.

However, the labor rights movement transcends industries, though it may look quite different for others.

And in local and federal government agencies, interns have been at the center of a debate about unpaid labor.

It wasn’t until recently that some government offices have begun paying their interns, which has created a new pathway for people from lower-income households to support themselves while gaining entry-level experience in policy and politics.

Pay Our Interns, created and spearheaded by two Latinos, fueled this change through their advocacy on Capitol Hill.

Latinos have been a major force in the labor rights movement for decades, with icons such as Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, and Emma Tenayuca as the leaders of the fight.

Farm workers harness collective organizing power

On Aug. 3, farm workers began a 24-day, 335-mile “March for the Governor’s Signature” to urge California Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign a farm a farm workers rights bill.

The bill would make it easier for workers to vote for a union,, without intimidation from supervisors, foreman and labor contractors. Farm workers say that voting, as it is now, discourages participation in union efforts.

“Currently, the only way that they do it is in person, at the premises of the employer, where the supervisors are looking over their shoulders, where they hire security, where, in many cases, immigration has been called and farm workers have been deported,” said Teresa Romero, the president of the labor union United Farm Workers.

However, Newsom has expressed concerns about the bill.

“We cannot support an untested mail-in election process that lacks critical provisions to protect the integrity of the election,” Newsom spokesperson Erin Mellon told CalMatters.

Farmworkers face challenging workplace conditions, including low pay, unsafe conditions, and very few if any protections against abuse or misconduct.

Romero, who leads the organization, says many undocumented workers pay taxes, but can’t collect social security and can’t retire. Some are left working long hours for years past the average retiring age.

“They work and feed us all,” Romero said.

She continued, “They move from crop to crop, moving their children from city to city to be able to support their family. And if we knew that, all of us would be willing to pay a little more for our food, just so these people have the respect, dignity, and the pay that they deserve.”

Without them, she says, we wouldn’t have food on our tables.

Romero urges people to be conscious of where they buy their food, how workers are represented and how they’re protected. She said the fight for fair working practices shouldn’t stop and end with farm workers themselves. She said their labor fight is a collective fight.

“This is not just manual labor,” she said. “These are professionals who know exactly what to do when to do with different crops.”

Fighting for fair labor conditions in the office

“Our society got too comfortable with unpaid labor,” says Carlos Mark Vera, a co-founder of Pay Our Interns.

He and Guillermo Creamer Jr. created the group to put an end to unpaid labor primarily in the public service space. Before 2017, Pay Our Interns found that only 10 percent of congressional interns were paid.

The organization has since worked with Congress to allocate $48 million for lawmakers to pay their interns.

“Since then that fund has actually been growing each year, which is unheard of, you know, usually programs don’t increase that quickly,” said Vera. “Now that we have Congress invested in this, and they’re very supportive of this, we’ve leveraged that for other ones. So this past year, we secured funding for White House interns, State Department interns for the first time in history.”

Unpaid internships push low-income or financially strained students out of the running to gain experience.

Unpaid internships often force students to choose between finding a job that pays their bills or paying for an internship out of their own funds – since Vera says that internship expenses like traveling or supplies often come from the intern’s wallet.

This primarily affects Black and brown students, and makes it harder for some students to enter certain fields if only unpaid internships are available.

“How do you grow wealth in this country? A lot of times, it’s just entering through professional pathways. But when there’s a price to participating in these opportunities … We know that many Black and brown families cannot afford to do that,” said Creamer.

They say they were raised in a culture where people had to “pay their dues” through unpaid labor. However, they say the culture is shifting and people are learning that their work should be valued at all levels.

Vera’s own sister, a sophomore in college, was interviewing for an internship when she asked if it was paid – and the employer said it wasn’t.

She explained that her brother had an organization dedicated to eradicating unpaid labor, and declined the opportunity.

“They call the next day, and they’re like, ‘Okay, how about $18 an hour?'” Vera said, applauding his sister for advocating for herself.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Federal Reserve escalated its fight against inflation this week, instituting a major rate increase and saying more will likely follow. The moves will cause a jump in the number of unemployed Americans by the end of next year, the central bank said.

The Fed has put forward a series of aggressive interest rate hikes in recent months as it tries to slash price increases by slowing the economy and choking off demand. But the approach risks tipping the United States into a recession and causing widespread joblessness.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday acknowledged that rate hikes would cause pain for the U.S. economy, as growth slows and unemployment rises. He added, however, that “a failure to restore price stability would mean far greater pain later on.”

The job losses forecasted by the Fed this week would by the end of 2023 raise the unemployment rate from its current level of 3.7% to 4.4%. That outcome would add an estimated 1.2 million unemployed people, according to Omair Sharif, the founder of research firm Inflation Insights.

Those job losses will disproportionately fall on some of the most vulnerable workers, including minorities and less-educated employees, according to economists and studies of past downturns.

Here are the groups of workers who would most likely lose their jobs if unemployment rises:

Black and Hispanic workers

Black workers would be among the first to lose their jobs if unemployment spikes, since they’re disproportionately concentrated in industries sensitive to economic downturns. Racial discrimination often influences choices made by companies about which workers to fire, economists said.

“The Fed’s actions really do mean some disparate impact for Black workers in the American economy,” Michelle Holder, a labor economist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told ABC News.

The vulnerability of Black workers in a downturn manifested during the most recent recession, in spring 2020, when the pandemic caused higher unemployment for Black workers at every education level when compared with their white counterparts, a RAND Corporation study found.

Overall, the unemployment rate for Black workers in the early period of the pandemic peaked at 16.8%, while the unemployment rate for white workers reached only 14.1%.

Between the late 1980s and mid-2000s, government employment data shows “considerable evidence” that Black workers are among the first ones fired as the economy weakens, according to an economic study published in 2010 in Demography, an academic journal.

“To be blunt, discrimination still occurs in the American labor market,” Holder said.

A similar dynamic of disproportionate job losses impacts Hispanic workers, the economists said.

William Spriggs, the chief economist at the AFL-CIO labor union and a professor of economics at Howard University, said Hispanic workers would suffer acutely in a downturn brought about by interest rate hikes, since they’re disproportionately represented in the construction industry.

When the Fed raises rates, it often leads to a spike in mortgage rates, causing prospective homebuyers to put off their purchases and builders to delay further construction. U.S. 30-year fixed-rate mortgages jumped to 6.29% on Thursday, the highest level in 14 years, according to Freddie Mac’s mortgage market survey.

As of last year, Hispanic workers made up nearly a third of all construction workers, according to a National Association of Home Builders analysis of government data published in June.

“We’ve already seen construction work is slowing,” Spriggs told ABC News. “Those construction workers get hit first.”

Less-educated workers

Another group that would stand among the first to end up jobless amid a downturn is less-educated workers.

Two years ago, during the pandemic-induced recession, less-educated workers suffered far more acute job losses than their better-educated peers, according to a study published in 2021 by the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

In general, when the economy weakens, poorly educated workers endure a more negative effect on employment than their better-educated counterparts, according to a study published by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve in 2010.

In the Great Recession, the employment rate for workers with just a high school diploma fell 5.6%, while the employment rate for workers with a college degree fell less than 1%, the study found.

“Workers who tend to fare better when the economy contracts are better-educated workers,” said Holder.

Young workers

Data from the two most recent recessions, in 2020 and 2007, indicates that young workers suffer disproportionately when the economy contracts.

During the pandemic-induced recession, young workers became jobless at a much higher rate than older workers, according to a study released by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in 2020.

From spring 2019 to spring 2020, the overall unemployment rate among workers ages 16 to 24 rose from 8.4% to 24.4%, while unemployment for workers ages 25 and older rose from 2.8% to 11.3%, the study found.

A similar outcome followed the Great Recession. Between 2007 and 2010, workers between the ages of 16 and 24 suffered a more dramatic drop in employment than any other age group, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of government data that focused on the ratio of employed workers in a given demographic compared to its representation in the population as a whole.

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