Inspectors are supposed to visit all farmworker housing to ensure its safety, but some used FaceTime

When Antonio Bravo stepped into the Salinas hotel in May 2020, he first noticed a foul smell. Then he saw the bare metal cot with no mattress that his employer had given him to sleep on after working long days in the fields.

“My spirits fell when I saw that place,” said Bravo, a guest worker recruited from Michoacán, Mexico by a company that supplied farms with workers to pick strawberries for brands like Driscoll’s. “I couldn’t breathe.”

There, at the aging downtown hotel, he and his roommates say they often waited in line until midnight to use one of only two-and-a-half bathrooms the company provided for dozens of workers. Rats and cockroaches roamed the rooms, they said, and they took turns sleeping in the one comfortable bed in their room.

When the workers asked a supervisor to eradicate the bedbugs in their room, they say he told them to buy their own insecticide. One of Bravo’s roommates, Francisco Magaña, said he took to rubbing himself with alcohol at night to keep the bugs away.

Through an attorney, Bravo, Magaña and one other worker complained about these conditions to state regulators, who visited the hotel in the summer of 2020 but said in inspection records they found no violations of state law. The workers say conditions on their floor didn’t change.

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