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A Lindy’s worker carries crabs and corn onto a loading dock April 21, 2021, in the company’s Woolford location. The company on Chesapeake Bay hires local and migrant workers to process live crabs, crab meat and oysters. (Carmen Molina Acosta/University of Maryland via AP)
FISHING CREEK For thousands of miles and over two days in April, 59 workers from Mexico traveled together on a bus despite the pandemic to their legal, seasonal jobs as crabmeat pickers and seafood processors in Maryland’s rural islands.
Lindy’s Seafood Inc., the wholesale crab and oyster company in Maryland that hired the workers, paid for their cross-country trip. The company put them to work the day after they arrived without quarantining or waiting for COVID-19 test results. Those safeguards are not required under state or federal law.
AP, University of Maryland
In this image for the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, a Lindy s worker carries crabs and corn onto a loading dock April 21, 2021, in the company s Woolford, Md., location. The company on Chesapeake Bay hires local and migrant workers to process live crabs, crab meat and oysters.
Despite the pandemic, more than 12,000 workers received U.S. approval in the last fiscal year to leave their homes in Mexico for jobs in American seafood processing plants. Yet the federal government did not establish COVID-safety rules for their bus travel or require virus testing.