by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel

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For most workers in Wisconsin who get hurt on the job, the state’s workers’ compensation system is there to cover medical expenses and pay a portion of their wages while they heal.

“One of the bedrock principles of worker’s compensation is universal coverage,” the state’s Department of Workforce Development, which oversees the workers’ compensation system, says on its website. “That means that virtually every employee is covered.”

But the law is different for farms, and many immigrant dairy workers — the backbone of one of the state’s most celebrated yet dangerous industries — don’t get this protection. Wisconsin exempts all kinds of farms with fewer than six employees not related to the owners from the requirement to have workers’ compensation coverage.

No state or federal agency appears to track how many of Wisconsin’s 5,700 or so dairy farms fall into that category — or how many workers go without coverage. Neither does the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, one of the state’s most powerful lobbying groups.

But the number of those farms is likely in the thousands since many employ only one or two workers. According to one national study, more than 23,000 agricultural workers in Wisconsin were exempt from workers’ compensation coverage in 2020; that’s a larger number of excluded agricultural workers than in almost every other state in the country.

The workers’ compensation exemption comes on top of limits on the federal government’s enforcement of occupational health and safety laws on these same small farms, which effectively leaves employers to police themselves.

It’s not just workers on small farms who go unprotected. Many injured workers on large farms said they are too afraid of retaliation from their employers to pursue claims. The problem is exacerbated by immigration status: Most immigrants who work on Wisconsin dairy farms are in the United States illegally and fear getting fired or deported.

“Workers’ compensation really doesn’t work for anyone, not even the workers it’s supposed to work for. It really doesn’t,” said Lola Loustaunau, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers who is studying access to workers’ compensation for immigrant workers in high-risk industries. “That gets increasingly worse the more precarious workers are.”

ProPublica reported this week on how immigrant dairy workers are frequently hurt on the job and often go without medical care. When their injuries are so severe that they can no longer work like they used to, they can get fired and thrown out of the housing many employers provide. Many are left with few legal options.

“The farm owner didn’t want to help me with anything,” said a 47-year-old man who was unable to work for several months this year after the muscles and tendons in his shoulder were ripped from the bones when a cow slammed him against a wall.........

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