Bacterial infection risk in work environments has been extensively reported for healthcare workers, while this risk is rarely researched in other occupations. This study aimed to identify occupational environments in Taiwan’s agricultural and healthcare industries with elevated bacterial infection risks by comparing risks for general bacterial infections and pneumonia. Using labour and health insurance claim data from 3.3 million workers (January 2004–December 2020), a retrospective cohort was constructed to estimate occupational infection risks with Cox regression and the Anderson-Gill extension. Significantly elevated hazard ratios were found for workers in vegetable growing, crop cultivation service, mushroom growing, flower growing, and fruit growing, ranging from 1.13 to 1.39 for general bacterial infections and 1.68 to 3.06 for pneumonia infections. In afforestation and the inland fishing industry, pneumonia risk was significantly elevated with, respectively, 1.87 and 1.21. In the healthcare section, especially workers in residential care services and residential care services for elderly stand out regarding their pneumonia risk, with significant hazard ratios of 3.49 and 1.75. The methods used in this study were proven to be effective in identification of occupation environments at risk and can be used in other settings. These findings call for prioritization of bacterial infection prevention by occupation.

Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) attempt to integrate the social determinants of health into health care delivery to eliminate health inequities. Yet, MLPs have not fully adapted to identify and address structural racism, one of the root causes of health inequities. This article provides a health justice perspective on the role of MLPs to challenge legal regimes to address structural racism and reimagine systems rooted in joy, safety, and collective liberation.

The new federal Pregnant Workers Fairness Act advances important protections for pregnant workers, but leaves behind agricultural workers, who are overrepresented in hazardous occupational environments. This article highlights the connection between workplace pregnancy discrimination and health inequities. It concludes with a discussion of immigrant-led advocacy efforts to eliminate health inequities and advance health justice.

The purpose of this paper is to determine trends in the wages and living standards of male agricultural labourers in Central Chile during the agrarian expansion, c. 1870-1930. We found that nominal wages increased eightfold; this is relevant because wage labour became the main rural labour regime in this period. Nominal wages rose steadily from the early 1870s until 1910, and with significant fluctuations thereafter, before plummeting with the Great Depression. Real wages also increased, but only slightly. Furthermore, during certain short periods, agricultural labourers' real wages were similar to or higher than those of low-skilled urban workers. However, the persistent gap between agricultural and non-agricultural wages was one of the causal factors of the outmigration of rural workers.

The analysis proposed here defends the necessity to operate a shift in the terms that seem to dominate, at present, the thinking on new forms of slavery or servitude, in order to fully integrate gender relations as production and exploitation social relationships. In this regard, based on two field studies performed with domestic and agricultural workers subjected to the Canadian immigration programs, we must try to see how the work relations amalgamated under the concepts of “modern slavery” and “unfree labour” give rise not only to a working class that is excluded from the canonical wage-earning class, but also and simultaneously to a racialized, intrinsically sexual workforce: “non-nationals” who are also male workers and female workers whose bodies are put to work, exploited and branded differently.

How do farmers explain their engagement with commodity production and the market? This article describes the universe of cotton production and exchange in a Turkish village. Building on the scholarship concerning the anthropology of markets, I offer an account of the power relations concerning exchange in the countryside whereby a cluster of agents interact in multiple ways. Describing the microcosm of cotton production and exchange as it is perceived by farmers in the largest cotton-producing village of the Söke Plain in western Turkey, the essay documents how farmers mobilize resources, interact with agricultural workers, find credit, and finally sell their product. Farmers see the market and their fields as interconnected geographies of struggle between various actors. In contrast to the cotton field where they perceive themselves as active and formative agents in the rural political economic universe, cotton growers understand the market as a location of encounter dominated by traders and controlled by various mercantile tools that weaken their agency. The market is neither only a place where the price is set, nor merely a location of commodity exchange. It is a power field where farmers encounter the “production” of price as relatively passive agents of trade.