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Food workers’ health and hygiene are common pathways to foodborne disease outbreaks. Improving food system jobs is important to food safety because working conditions impact workers’ health, hygiene, and safe food handling. Stakeholders from key industries have advanced working conditions as an issue of public safety in the United States. Yet, for the food industry, stakeholder engagement with this topic is seemingly limited. To understand this lack of action, we interviewed key informants from organizations recognized for their agenda-setting role on food-worker issues. Findings suggest that participants recognize the work standards/ food safety connection, yet perceived barriers limit adoption of a food safety frame, including more pressing priorities (e.g., occupational safety); poor fit with organizational strategies and mission; and questionable utility, including potential negative consequences. Using these findings, we consider how public health advocates may connect food working conditions to food and public safety and elevate it to the public policy agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite difficult working conditions, farmworkers in the United States are excluded from many federal-level labor protections. The exclusion of farmworkers from standards that apply to most other workers is referred to as agricultural exceptionalism. This exclusion was born out of the successful efforts of southern agricultural interests to exempt black sharecroppers from the New Deal package of social reforms. Farmworkers continue to belong to particularly vulnerable social and economic groups. U.S. states can establish their own labor protections that go beyond federal laws and regulations. Though agricultural exceptionalism is understood at the federal level, little is known about agricultural exceptionalism in state labor standards. This study is a comprehensive 50- state legal and regulatory mapping of minimum wage, overtime, and rest and meal period standards as they apply to farmworkers. To analyze the extent of agricultural exceptionalism in the states, we performed a search of iteratively defined search terms in WestLawNext. Two researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the role of food workers to ensure food safety under the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) recommended rules to administer the U.S. 2011 Food safety Modernization Act, the socio-structural factors influencing hygienic behaviour and sources of worker based food contamination.

Food workers' health and hygiene are common pathways to foodborne disease outbreaks. Improving food system jobs is important to food safety because working conditions impact workers' health, hygiene, and safe food handling. Stakeholders from key industries have advanced working conditions as an issue of public safety in the United States. Yet, for the food industry, stakeholder engagement with this topic is seemingly limited. To understand this lack of action, we interviewed key informants from organizations recognized for their agenda-setting role on food-worker issues. Findings suggest that participants recognize the work standards/food safety connection, yet perceived barriers limit adoption of a food safety frame, including more pressing priorities (e.g., occupational safety); poor fit with organizational strategies and mission; and questionable utility, including potential negative consequences. Using these findings, we consider how public health advocates may connect food working conditions to food and public safety and elevate it to the public policy agenda.