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More than two dozen farmworkers from around Half Moon Bay gathered Tuesday night to learn about ways to stay safe from electrical hazards, as well as about recently expanded health care opportunities.
HALF MOON BAY, Calif. – More than two dozen farmworkers from around Half Moon Bay gathered Tuesday night for a community event that highlighted ways to stay safe around electric wires and other electrical hazards. Speakers also provided information about the recently expanded Medi-Cal system. Of California .
Organized by Ethnic Media Services and Peninsula 360 Press, the event aimed to address the need for greater and better access to critical safety information and care for the farmworker community.
Mayor Joaquín Jiménez, Half Moon Bay's first Latino mayor and a long-time advocate for the city's farmworkers, opened the event and highlighted the many challenges they face.
Describing the conditions they work in as a form of "modern slavery," Jimenez said farmworkers are too often at the mercy of employers on whom they depend for everything from wages to housing, food and medical care.
Greater access to information in their own language is a key piece to help improve conditions, he said.
Most of the farmworkers in Half Moon Bay, a small coastal community about 40 miles south of San Francisco, are from Mexico or Central America and speak Spanish as their primary language. There is also a small group of Chinese agricultural workers whose presence went almost completely unnoticed until a violent shooting last year that claimed the lives of seven people, five of them Chinese.
Tuesday's event was an opportunity