What You Need to Know If You’re Hurt While Working on a Wisconsin Dairy Farm

ProPublica / by by Maryam Jameel and Melissa Sanchez / Jun 3, 2024 at 5:24 AM

by Maryam Jameel and Melissa Sanchez, Illustrations by Edel Rodriguez, special to ProPublica

Lea o escuche la versión en español.

This guide will be released in Spanish in several formats to make this information more widely accessible. If you want to receive printed booklets that you or your organization can share with dairy workers in Wisconsin, or if you want to be notified when we post related videos on TikTok and YouTube, sign up here.

We are reporters at ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news organization. Over the past two years, we have reported on the lives of dairy workers in Wisconsin and the dangers they face on the job.

Dairy workers are excluded from many state and federal legal protections that help other workers. As a result, if they are injured on the job, they often face obstacles to getting medical care or the time needed to recover.

Few of the workers we’ve interviewed understood their rights after an injury. This guide is our attempt to explain your options, as limited as they are. We also want to answer questions that many workers have asked based on situations they’ve found themselves in. It is based on conversations with workers, attorneys, health care providers, community advocates, interpreters, researchers and farmers. It covers what you can do before you get to a farm, how to navigate the workers’ compensation system, and your options if you get injured on a farm that doesn’t have workers’ compensation.
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The guide is especially focused on the workers’ compensation system because it is one of the few areas where injured dairy workers have a right to medical care. We know this system has limitations and isn’t available to everybody. However many workers have found it to be useful, particularly if they get help from an attorney.

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